Musical stairways to creativity heavens: a chain-reaction theory about the benefits of background music in literary translation

Abstract

Research in the psychology of music has shown that music-listening can foster psychological transportation. Whether played alone or as a complement of other artistic products such as films or narratives, music allows listeners to travel mentally to fictional realities. This phenomenon occurs due to the potential of music to trigger cognitive and affective reactions in listeners such as visual stimulation and emotional engagement. Simultaneously, recent studies in translation process research (TPR) have revealed how translation performance can benefit from both visualization and emotional involvement, making the difference in the resulting target text. Therefore, this paper proposes a theory based on a chain-reaction model, according to which background music would eventually lead to an increase of translation creativity through the filter of psychological transportation. Practical implications of our model would entail using instrumental background music to foster motivation in translation environments, which could possibly lead to higher-quality and more creative target texts.