What kind of person is an interpreter?

I've been finally doing some serious work for my PhD research and have come across a great thesis by one of our former professors on the methodological aspects of interpreting studies across Europe. Interesting reading with some great exercises, which I believe are really useful and necessary during interpreter training. Doing plain and simple interpreting exercises is fine and dandy, of course, but it is various activities on the side or running in parallel that can really enrich the whole interpreting training sessions.

But I didn't want to talk about these exercises just yet. As the title of the posts suggests, I wanted to write something on the personality of interpreters. I remember reading a post by Aida about things that interpreters have in common, and interpreters' personality was also discussed during the first #IntJC chat. Well, in this thesis, the author writes that psychological studies have shown (and she quotes various authors of such analyses, I won't do that, after all I'm not aiming at producing a proper academic paper here) that an interpreter is:

an independent, versatile, creative, commonsensical, confident, calm, fearless, relaxed, talkative, fast, efficient, resourceful, professional, perseverant, intelligent person in good health, who knows how to express him or herself, loves variety and is able to focus and manage stress in an efficient way, has developed a sense of responsibility and strives to achieve a good professional reputation, is emotionally stable and curious, has an interest in lifelong learning.

What do you think? Is this a general description that could fit any other profession or is it really just interpreters? Is there something missing? 


PS: And just after posting this, I discovered the new issue of Interpreter's Launch Pad  which among other interesting stuff presents also an Interpreting Skills Map. Love it!