The German physiologist Wilhelm Wundt, who later founded experimental psychology, arguably developed the first modern scientific conception of emotion. In the first edition of Vorlesungen über die Menschen- und Thierseele (Lectures on human and animal psychology), which was published in 1863, Wundt tried to establish that emotions were essential parts of rational thought. In fact, he considered them unconscious steps of decision-making that were implied in all processes of conscious thought. His early work deserves attention not only because it is the attempt to conceptualize cognition and emotion strictly from a neural point of view but also because it represents the very foundation of the debate about the nature of emotion that revolved around William James' theory of emotion during the 1890s. However, this aspect of his work is little known because scholars who have analyzed Wundt's work focused on his late career. Furthermore, historical analysis interpreted Wundt's work within a philosophical framework, rather than placing it in the context of German medical and physiological research in which it belongs. In addition, Wundt's early works are hardly available to an English speaking audience because they were never translated.

William James is the name that comes to mind when asked about scientific explanations of emotion in the nineteenth century. However, strictly speaking James's theory of emotion does not explain emotions and never did. Indeed, James contemporaries pointed this out already more than a hundred years ago. Why could "James' theory" nevertheless become a landmark that psychologists, neuroscientists, and historians alike refer to today? The strong focus on James and Anglo-American sources in historiography has overshadowed all other answers given to the question of emotion at the time of James. For that reason, the article returns to the primary sources and places James's work back into the context of nineteenth century brain research in which it developed.

The interdisciplinary field of emotion studies ignores the historical perspective on translation problems. In today's scientific publications, which are predominantly written in English, the term "emotion" is used as if it were synonymous in all languages, times, and contexts. Although the semantic fields of emotion terms are not identical in English, French, and German, these three languages informed the study of emotion in 19th-century psychology, at the time when the scientific concept of emotion was formed. Furthermore, the French émotion and the English emotion have become homonyms, sentiment and sentiment are not used in the same way, and Affekt also poses a problem. Translation problems have masked the epistemological problems that German and French psychologists in the 19th century were studying when they addressed the question of "emotion" for contemporary Anglophone psychologists and historians of emotion. Problems of translation occur on many levels. Here I am particularly concerned with two aspects, one is the historical authors' reading of each other and writing about the same topic in a different language (applying their respective backgrounds to their readings); and, the second is contemporary scientists and historians' reading of historical and contemporary texts on emotion, applying the current connotation of emotion.That translation or cross-linguistic differences represent a problem or a challenge for emotion studies has been addressed by linguists, such as Wierzbicka (Imprisoned in English, 2014), by Mandler (Mind and Emotion, 1975), for psychology, and by Cassin (Vocabulaire européen des philosophies: dictionnaire des intraduisibles, 2004), for philosophy. The German terms Gefühl and Empfindung are part of the collection of terms which philosophers in earlier times transcribed in the original language without translating them. In this article, I adopt the same strategy in order to call attention to the non-Anglophone connotations that informed the scientific concept of "emotion" at its inception. The problem is particularly relevant at a moment when all scientific work has to be published in English in order to count. Montgomery (2013) points out that "Most Anglophone researchers are monolingual and cite only papers in English" (p. 105). While for him English is beneficial to science because now scientists are finally able to "communicate directly with each other," linguists stress what is lost through the Anglocentrism that dominates humanist scholarship. Wierzbicka (2014) holds that "every language equips its speakers with a particular set of cognitive tools for seeing and interpreting the world" (p. 3). The Anglocentric frame creates a conceptual cage Forgotten Origins, Occluded Meanings: Translation of Emotion Terms Claudia WassmannInstitute for Culture and Society, University of Navarra, Spain AbstractThe interdisciplinary field of emotion studies disregarded historical perspectives on translation and left out a substantial body of scientific research on feelings and emotions that was n...

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