Forgotten Origins, Occluded Meanings: Translation of Emotion Terms

Abstract

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...

William James on Passion and Emotion: Influence of Théodule Ribot

“…When substitution seems prima facie impossible without significant loss or change of meaning in the particular phrase and context under study, this is taken as an indication that the terms and their associated meanings and concepts are not logically equivalent, and hence most likely represent different and distinct theoretical categories. This kind of "thought experiment" methodology, which is very common (though often implicit) among historians and philosophers interested in the history of affective terms and concepts (Dixon, 2003;Essary, 2017;Wassmann, 2017), obviously has its limitations and attention to nuance is pivotal. Nonetheless, as the analysis that follows will hopefully demonstrate, it can yield interesting and suggestive philosophical and theoretical results.…”

“…In the present discussion, we sidestep these questions in order to focus on wider "topographical" considerations designed to motivate the general kind of distinction between "passion" and "émotion" that Ribot had in mind. The nuances of translating German affective terms and concepts into English are discussed in detail in Wassmann (2017) and Wierzbicka (1999Wierzbicka ( , 2014; see also Frevert, 2014, pp. 16-31, for a wider discussion of the changing historical nature of these concepts).…”

Lost in Back-Translation: Emotion Preservation in Neural Machine Translation

“…Affect, Sentiment, and Emotion in Translation. Preserving affect in text is an issue for translation and other cross-linguistic studies (Wierzbicka, 2013;Wassmann, 2017;Hubscher-Davidson, 2017). On the one hand, there are linguistic constraints on translation, like the absence of terms for certain states (e.g., Sehnsucht is German for "a longing for some absent thing") or colexification phenomena (i.e., naming related emotions with the same word, like grief and regret in Persian) which vary from language to language (Jackson et al, 2019).…”

Labels, Rationality, and the Chemistry of the Mind: Moors in Historical Context

“…"The emotions," on the other hand, appeared as a discrete psychological category only in the mid-19th century, aiming to bring together states including love, hatred, joy, sadness, fear, anger, and so on, under a unifying theoretical umbrella. Moors could draw upon research in both linguistics and history for further support for the idea that the categorization of experiences using the language of "emotion" is a feature of post-1850 English-language psychology (both vernacular and scientific), which does not map directly onto the categories of other times, languages, and cultures (Frevert et al, 2014;Wassmann, 2016;Wierzbicka, 1999Wierzbicka, , 2010.…”