Translating emotions
A corpus-based study of the conceptualization of ANGER in German-Spanish translation
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.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Theoretical and methodological background
- 2.1The linguistic expression of anger in German and Spanish
- 2.2Contrastive studies
- 2.3Emotions in translation studies
- 3.Methodology of the corpus-based study
- 3.1Step 1: A contrastive description of the conceptualization of ANGER in German and Spanish
- 3.2Step 2: The expression of ANGER in Spanish original and translated texts
- 4.Results
- 4.1Metaphorical conceptualization of ANGER
- 4.1.1Main differences between German and Spanish
- 4.1.2The metaphorical conceptualization of ANGER in German-Spanish translation
- 4.2Physical effects
- 4.2.1Main differences between German and Spanish
- 4.2.2Physical effects of anger in German-Spanish translation
- 4.3Consequences of the emotion
- 4.3.1Main differences between German and Spanish
- 4.3.2Consequences of anger in German-Spanish translation
- 5.Conclusions
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
-
References
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