The NCCR Language & Culture research focus team are pleased to announce an interdisciplinary workshop ‘Emotions in Translation: Lost or Found?’ 

The workshop will include:

-A round-table discussion with the workshop presenters, the invited translation and interpretation professionals from the United Nations Office in Geneva and the School of Translation and Interpretation at the University of Geneva.

- 7 workshop presentations researchers from sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, semantics, anthropology, classical languages research,  and literary criticism.

Our speakers are:

Jean-Marc DEWAELE (University of London)

Douglas CAIRNS (University of Edinburgh)

Clau SOLÈR (University of Geneva)

Damien NELIS (University of Geneva)

Terence McNAMMEE (University of Geneva)

Alain MONNIER (University of Geneva)

Anna OGARKOVA / Cristina SORIANO / Caroline LEHR (CISA, University of Geneva)

Please find attached the program and the announcement of the event. The abstracts of the talks are below.

ABSTRACTS

Jean-Marc DEWAELE: ‘Code-switching to bypass the foreign language bottleneck in the communication of strong emotions’

The present study investigates the effect of emotional conversation topics and interlocutor on self-reported frequency of code-switching (CS) among 1453 multilinguals who filled out a web based questionnaire with closed and open questions (Dewaele & Pavlenko, 2001-2003), and among 20 multilinguals who were interviewed about their CS practices in emotional communication. A statistical analysis of the quantitative data revealed that self-reported CS is reported to be much more frequent when talking about more emotional topics with familiar interlocutors compared to neutral topics being discussed with unknown interlocutors.  An analysis of the feedback on the open questions in the web questionnaire and the interview data confirmed the findings of the quantitative analysis while adding rich detail about the multiple reasons behind CS, as well as the direction of the CS. While Grosjean’s Complementarity Principle can explain some of the variation, we suggest that strong emotional arousal can force the speaker into bilingual language mode with more CS (Grosjean, 2001, 2008) even when speaking with a monolingual interlocutor.

Douglas CAIRNS: ‘Translating and Interpreting Ancient Emotion’

That x is difficult or impossible to translate is one of the clichés of classical scholarship (and no doubt of other academic disciplines whose evidence exists in a language different from that of the investigator). But this is a claim that is belied by the relative ease with which scholars and translators do in fact translate the terms in question. Translation is an everyday activity, a legitimate scholarly practice, and an essential tool of cross-cultural analysis. When we say that x is untranslatable, we typically mean that there is no single word in our language which can do justice to the full range of its denotation, connotation, and usage in the original language. This, however, is a problem not of translation, but of definition, one that we face also in our own languages. What we need, then, both in our own language and for the other languages and cultures that we seek to understand, is a theory of how the various senses and applications of a multivalent concept are related. In interpreting other cultures, we need to use our sense of the multivocity of our own concepts to remind us of the possibility of multivocity in other languages. We need to accept that conceptual terms do indeed develop distinct senses, but also to make the imaginative leap which might allow us to grasp something of the underlying unity that makesx a meaningful single concept for its native users. Thus we move from translating, which involves a grasp of the particular sense of a term in context, to understanding of a concept as a general aspect of culture and thought. These issues will be explored via a discussion of some Greek and Latin terms from the complex of values centred on honour and shame.

Clau SOLÈR : ‘Le conflit émotionnel: conséquences du bilinguisme déséquilibré rhétoroman-allemand’

Les différences linguistiques, fonctionnelles, identificatoires et acquisitionnelles entre l’allemand/alémanique et le romanche aux Grisons s’avèrent conflictuelles au niveau communicatif, référentiel, conceptionnel et émotionnel. Outre ces facteurs stables, le changement fonctionnel, l’aménagement politique et social et l’actualisation linguistique changent et déstabilisent l’émotivité innée et/ou acquise d’une langue soumise et influencée en permanence par le partenaire fort du bilinguisme. Notre cas du bilinguisme presque diametral réunit pourtant les aspects identificatoires et émotifs typiques pour chacune de deux langues impliquées dans une traduction à l’intérieur d’un seul individu, où elles forment ainsi une symbiose mentale soumise à des mélanges et interférences. Ce procédé permet ainsi à percevoir et analyser des étappes du codage et décodage peu stables à cause d’une référence unique et amorphe. A l’aide d’exemples concrets nous voulons analyser et expliquer quelques déficits causés d’une langue minorisée comme c’est le romanche par rapport à l’allemand.

Damien NELIS: ‘Epic emotions: from Homer to Vergil’

In recent years epic texts have become a special focus for Classicists interested in the study of the emotions. In this paper I want to look at the particular case of two highly important texts for research of this kind, Homer's Iliad and Vergil's Aeneid. Given that the emotions play central roles in both poems and that the latter contains much detailed imitation of the former, I will look at the various ways in which Vergil translates Homer's language of the emotions into Latin.

Terence McNAMMEE: ‘Emotion found in translation: the case of “Ossian”’

“Ossian”, James MacPherson’s supposed translation of a Scots Gaelic folk epic, was early suspected of being a forgery, notably by Samuel Johnson.  This did not prevent it becoming hugely popular not only in England andScotland but in re-translation in France, Germany, Italy and elsewhere. “Ossian” is not entirely a forgery, as it is based on the Gaelic epic tradition about the poet-hero Oisín.  This material has little of the emotion that enchanted MacPherson’s contemporaries. Yet there is some truth in MacPherson’s mourning for the passing of a race of warriors, given the exile of the native aristocracy from Ireland and the repression in Highland Scotlandfollowing 1745.  ‘Ossian’ was a staple of the age of sentiment (Empfindsamkeit) in 18^th-century Europe. As translation and re-translation, ‘Ossian’ raises questions of the carry-over of emotion in translated literature.  The emotion of original texts has often been lost in translation, but in the case of “Ossian” it was found – in fact, invented for the aesthetic edification of the age.

Alain MONNIER: ‘La salutation larmoyante, Jean de Léry et ses traductions du tupinamba’

Jean de Léry, envoyé en 1557 par Jean Calvin au Brésil pour se joindre à une petite colonie française, y rencontre les cannibales Tupinamba. Evitant la grillade, il est accueilli par le rire puis par la ‘salutation larmoyante’ des Sauvages, un rite qu’il décrira comme d’autres chroniqueurs de l’époque, mais qu’il traduira aussi linguistiquement dans un « Colloque » entre un Tupinamba et lui-même. Ce ‘rite de passage’ doit être considéré dans ses rapports avec le rite cannibale et avec le rite funéraire, mais aussi comme une expression des sentiments de Jean de Léry dans ce contexte inhabituel pour lui. Le seul portrait de lui que nous ayons le représente en effet en train d’accomplir la ‘salutation larmoyante’.

Anna OGARKOVA / Cristina SORIANO / Caroline LEHR: ‘The mapping method in establishing (translation) equivalence: a case-study of conflict emotions in 5 European languages’

Across various disciplines including lexicology, psycho-linguistics, psychology, and anthropology, a number of distinct methods have emerged to try to establish (translation) equivalence between the various concepts that words in the various languages point to.  Our presentation reports the initial results of a study that adopts a reference-based methodology, relying on the use of evocative stimuli (scenarios of emotion-eliciting situations) for the elicitation of emotion labels in 5 different lingual populations (Germanic languages: English, German; Romance languages:  French, Spanish; Slavic languages: Russian). We assess both similarities and divergences of the results with respect to dictionary translation, and discuss the data in the light of the cultural specificity of emotion labeling and representation in discourse.