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Converging paradigms in contrastive and translation studies: Crosslinguistic corpus perspectives
Edited by Silvia Bernardini and Adriano Ferraresi
[Languages in Contrast 23:2] 2023
► pp. 199–225

Translating emotions

A corpus-based study of the conceptualization of ANGER in German-Spanish translation

ORCID logo | Universitat Jaume I , Spain

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.

Keywords: anger, emotion conceptualization, literary translation, German/Spanish
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
Published online: 2 October 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lic.00027.ost
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