Translation and emotion - what is lost and what survives the labour of crossing cultural borders? This is the toil of every translator and their ultimate initiation. This article is a little bit different from what you’re used to reading (if you’re watching this space) in that we set out to explain how we do what we do, taking a deep dive into translation psychology and emotional intelligence. If you’re afraid of Virginia Woolf, you may skip this one (shsh, your secret’s safe with us).

A translator’s primary skill is to have a thorough understanding of grammar, culture, and, more importantly, linguistic intuition. They need to know the rules of the languages they translate between and the habits of their speakers. More often than not, even the most skilled translators experience confusion and frustration when they find themselves in front of a more nuanced or colourful piece of writing.

Marrying two different language structures is a creator’s work. Each language’s singularity is in its framework of well-defined rules. It is precisely in this singularity that the difficulty of translation lies.

For example, a simple English sentence would look like this: Simon drinks milk. “Simon” is the subject, “drinks” is the predicate, and “milk” is the direct object, closing the logical sequence of the sentence. But not all languages are structured equal. Farsi follows a different word order of subject + object + verb/predicate. In Arabic, for example, subject pronouns are engulfed by the verb predicate. So, the simple English sentence with a pronoun subject “He drinks milk”, in Arabic, would read something like هو يشرب الحليب (hu yashrab alhalib).

Consequently, translators must constantly add, remove, or rewrite sentences into the target language to communicate effectively to the target audience. That’s the easy part, though. The beautiful translation engineering comes into its own when dealing with verb aspects, tenses, and moods. From this perspective, perhaps French is one of the “moodiest” of Romance languages (no offence, hence the inverted commas). 

Famous for a very colourful and tricky tense known as le passé simple - which every non-native French student has grappled with - the language of Voltaire and Saint-Exupéry has thrown many translators into an impasse. How do you translate it?

In his 1983 study “The disappearance of the French passé simple: A morphological and sociolinguistic study” , Edward R. Van Vliet suggests that the French simple perfect tense (passé simple), a past tense, in essence, is dead. His argument is just as simple. 

The passé simple has gradually faded in spoken language, blending with the simple past in meaning. However, it is still used in written language, particularly in literary works. Here are a few excerpts from Saint-Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince, using both verb aspects that Van Vliet utilises to support his argument:

Translation: The fox became silent and gazed for a long time at the little prince .... The next day the little prince returned .... “It would have been better to come back at the same time,” said the fox ....

Another Romance language that, just like French, preserves the “old-fashioned” simple perfect tense is Romanian. Its meaning is still the same as in French. But there’s a catch. The Romanian simple perfect gained an additional nuance that of “recent past”. When used locally in spoken language, it only refers to actions or events happening in the span of 24 hours (you’d have to be a local to know this). If the events or actions related took place in a more distant past (i.e., two days ago, a week ago, etc.), the compound perfect is used. Here is an example of the conjugation of the verb “to do” in the simple perfect tense.

More importantly, in Romanian, unlike in French or English, the subject pronoun is dropped, and the predicative verb form implies its meaning. A narrative tense in its own right, the simple perfect sometimes alternates with the compound perfect (the Romanian equivalent of the English present perfect or past tense, depending on the context, we’ll not bore you with all the gory details), indicating the writer’s emotional involvement. Usually, the simple perfect is the tense of “dear” and “fun” reflection, whereas the compound perfect is more “factual” and “formal”.

Where are we going with this? While any translation of the French or Romanian simple perfect tense by the English simple past would work fine at a semantic level, something gives, and that’s emotion, local colour, which well, it takes a little more brain-wrenching to achieve through translation.

The witty and the gritty: emotional translation So, how do you translate emotion? J.C. Jackson, J. Watts, T.H. Henry et al. say you can’t. Their study “Emotion semantics show both cultural variation and universal structure” analyses 2,474 languages to establish the similarity in the various linguistic networks of 24 emotion-related terms across cultures.

Jackson et al. argue that languages of the same family are more likely to use closely related words to describe an emotion concept, such as “fear” or “surprise”, “love”, etc., a phenomenon referred to as “colexification”.

Emotion terms are also perceived differently across cultures, depending on their positive or negative valence. For example, concepts such as “love”, “like”, and “want” are closely linked in Indo-European languages. Conversely, in Austronesian languages such as Hawaiian and Javanese, the concept of “love” is strongly connected to “pity” instead of “desire” or “like”.

With so many discrepancies across languages, psychologies and, alas, concepts, translating emotion may seem impossible. Well, it’s not, and Dr Séverine Hubscher-Davidson vets it.

In her book “Translation and emotion: A psychological perspective”, she demonstrates that differences in translation of the same content occur due to the varied experiences that different translators have with it.

Aiming to “shed light on the role of emotions in translation”, the author surveyed 155 professional translators and determined that the decisive factors of these variations are (buckle up!) emotion perception, emotion regulation, and emotion expression, or, in short, emotional intelligence.

Other factors such as age, job satisfaction, personality, literary translation, etc., also contributed to translation variance.

Although it does not give a holy grail solution to expressing emotion through translation, the study taps into pristine areas of translation studies and psychology, which Dr Hubscher-Davidson concludes is the backbone of literary translation.

Standards do not apply to emotion. There’s no right or wrong, no one way to feel, judge, or tell a story. So, language is not a barrier to emotion, then? No. Translation is a creative act, and the translated story will never be identical to the original; it’s that story written anew for a different audience relating to different values and perceiving emotion differently.

Further reading

Edward R. Van Vliet (1983) ‘The disappearance of the French passésimple: A morphological and sociolinguistic study’, Word, 34:2, 89-113, DOI: 10.1080/00437956.1983.11435739

Joshua C. Jackson, Joseph Watts, Teague R. Henry et al. (2019) ‘Emotion semantics show both cultural variation and universal structure’, Science, volume 366, issue 6472, pp. 1517-1522, DOI: 10.1126/science.aaw8160

Dr Séverine Hubscher-Davidson (2019) ‘Translation and emotion: A psychological perspective’, New York and London, Routledge, 2018, p. 236, ISBN 9781138855335 / 9781315720388

RomanianPod101.com Blog (2020) ‘ A Quick and Easy Guide to Romanian Verb Conjugation’

Smartling ‘Common Challenges of Translation’