Translation Anxiety Among Junior High School EFL Learners: A Qualitative Exploration of Affective Barriers When Translating English Expository Texts

Abstract

Anxiety in efl learning has been discussed for decades, yet its role as a specific barrier within translation tasks at the junior high school level has received disproportionately little scrutiny. At this stage, students are already exposed to texts that demand cognitive abilities as a standard part of their curriculum. This study takes that gap seriously, focusing on how anxiety surfaces and functions when eighth-grade indonesian efl students are asked to translate english expository texts, alongside identifying the affective forces that shape those experiences. A qualitative case study design was employed. Semi-structured interviews, direct classroom observation, and a supportive atmosphere for students to enhance their english were the three concurrent sources of data. This research used an inductive theme approach rather than a pre-established coding scheme, enabling patterns and categories to naturally arise from what participants said, wrote, and did. The findings resist easy summarization. Anxiety did not appear as a single, stable state. Students exhibited discomfort when confronting lexical ambiguity, a nagging internal pressure to locate semantically exact equivalents, and a sense of linguistic insufficiency that persisted well into the task, not just at the beginning. Expository texts proved especially destabilizing. Their argumentative density is part of the reason, but more precisely, it is the layered structural logic of such texts that forces students to work across two cognitive operations at once: grasping what the source text argues and reconstructing that argument within an entirely different linguistic system. That is not a small ask. Describing it as simply “challenging” underestimates the difficulties some students experienced during the observation sessions. Pressure did not originate from the text alone. Fear of being negatively judged, whether by the teacher assigning a grade or by peers overhearing a wrong answer, generated a distinct strand of anxiety that operated independently from the cognitive load of the translation itself. Time constraints tightened everything further. In multiple observed instances, students who appeared to understand the text well still defaulted to mechanical, word-for-word strategies, not out of ignorance, but because the conditions of the classroom simply did not permit slower, more deliberate meaning-making. That distinction matters. This study does not resolve every question about affective experience in translation-integrated language learning, and it does not pretend to. What it does establish is that treating translation tasks as purely linguistic exercises misrepresents what actually happens in the room. Learner engagement is shaped by the psychological architecture of these tasks who assesses them, under what time constraints, and with what degree of emotional safety, in ways that cannot be addressed by language assistance alone.