Bilingual emotions
The untranslatable self
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/sols.v5i1.1Keywords:
bilingualism, cultural construction of emotions, discursive psychology, social constructionismAbstract
This paper is part of a broader work on the cultural construction of emotions as examined through a qualitative study with Greek/English bilingual/bicultural informants. The paper argues that there are emotions which are specific to certain languages and cultures and focuses on one example of untranslatable emotions: the Greek stenahoria (loosely translated as ‘discomfort/sadness/suffocation’) and the English frustration. The paper asserts that although a respective linguistic translation may not exist for these terms, they may, in fact, be the cultural translations of each other as shown by the descriptions given by bilinguals and their use in various cultural contexts. The use of bilingual informants in this research overcomes some of the methodological problems of previous work on the cultural and linguistic comparison of emotion terms. The author argues that bilinguals, as people who cross physical, linguistic, and cultural boundaries, offer an optimal cross-cultural comparison of emotion terms because they subjectively experience two languages and two cultures.
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