When beliefs translate

Abstract This study investigates how congruence between ideologically charged sentences and translation students’ political orientations influences cognitive processing during translation. Using reaction times (RTs) as an index of processing effort, we examined the effects of ideological alignment, emotional arousal, personality traits, and working memory capacity on translation performance. In our predominantly progressive sample, progressive sentences elicited faster responses overall, whereas progressive participants were generally slower than conservative participants, regardless of sentence ideology. The interaction between sentence ideology and participants’ ideology did not reach conventional significance, but the descriptive pattern was compatible with a facilitation effect, with progressive participants responding faster when processing ideologically congruent content. Emotional arousal further modulated processing speed in combination with ideological variables. For progressive sentences, medium arousal produced the fastest responses, whereas for conservative sentences it was associated with the slowest RTs: low and high arousal levels tended to slow down responses to progressive sentences but speed up responses to conservative sentences. In addition, a marginally non-significant interaction with participants’ ideology ( p = .051) suggested that high arousal may facilitate responses for progressive participants while tending to slow down conservative participants. Higher working memory capacity significantly predicted faster RTs. Regarding personality traits, Openness to Experience showed a small but statistically significant positive association with RTs, with higher Openness linked to slightly longer response times, which may reflect a more reflective or creative approach to translation choices. Overall, these findings highlight the relevance of ideological congruence and emotional arousal in translation processing and support interdisciplinary approaches that integrate cognitive individual differences into translation research.