Translating emotions

Abstract

This paper is a corpus-based study of how translation affects the portrayal of emotion concepts. It aims to establish whether there are differences between translated texts and original texts in a given language as to how emotions are expressed and whether emotion conceptualization in the translated texts is closer to that of the source or the target language. To do so, the study focuses on one emotion in a specific language combination: the conceptual domain of anger in German and Spanish. In a first step, analysis of two large reference corpora provides a contrastive description of the concept anger as represented by prototypical emotion lexemes in both languages (Wut, Zorn and Ärger in German and ira, rabia, enojo in Spanish). Then, the parallel corpus COVALT is used to study three aspects of the expression of anger in Spanish translated texts: conceptual metaphor, physical effects and consequences of the emotion. Analysis of the use of conceptual metaphor shows that both source and target language preferences are present in the target texts. A more marked deviation from target language conventions can be observed in the translation of expressions referring to the physical effects or consequences of anger.