February 16, 2023

The paradox of comprehending emotions during inter-cultural communication pt. 2

The paradox of comprehending emotions during inter-cultural communication pt. 2

The paradox: we may understand just enough about emotions (cf. pt. 1) in another culture to do more harm than good.

For the sake of simplicity, all failures in the translation of emotion can be broken into two categories:

1. When the emotion specified (denoted) fails to translate.
2. When the connotations of the emotion fail to translate.

Issues with denoting emotion in translation

First, as mentioned last week, the emotion denoted through the semantic prosody of words may not translate across cultures. For example, even the most common words of speaking, when paired with their most common adverbs, have different emotional nuances in Slovene and English (Jurko 2021). Slovene adverb + verb pairs have a negative semantic prosody twice as often their English counterparts, leading to noticeable, and unavoidable, skewing between the two languages.

Second, complex emotions, such as affection, pride, guilt, and shame, are difficult to translate well using vocal cues (Laukka et al. 2013). The nuances required for such emotions present a significant challenge for oral translations.

Third, cultures rarely share the same complex emotions. Take, for example, the differences between the English concept of love, the Koine Greek concept of agape, and the Biblical Hebrew concept of hesed (Nettelhorst 2014).

Issues with connoting emotion in translation

Because the bulk of an emotion’s meaning occurs in its social implications (cf. Boiger and Mesquita 2012), which sporadically survive translation, failing to denote the correct emotion in translation merely tops the iceberg of translation difficulties. The majority of difficulties occur when the social and moral connotations of the emotion do not translate.

Moral evaluations of emotions differ across cultures

First, moral evaluations of emotions differ across cultures because the cultural display rules that govern emotions arise from the particular mixture of values and customs each culture has.

Early in his career, Wayne Dye noted that what constitutes a “sin” often differs across cultures (2009; originally published in 1974). Included in possible “sins” are displays of emotions like anger. In fact, emotions often fall into the moral codes of societies because emotions spring from our deepest values. Dye’s statement on the variable “sinfulness” of displaying specific emotions was later confirmed by researchers who discovered that societies tend to differ in what emotions are appropriate based on the power structures of their societies. In cultures with strong hierarchies, these rules may relate to any marker of power: age, gender, social class or caste, education level, family of origin, etc. (Hutchison and Gerstein 2017, 24).

Moral evaluations differ across cultures because the rules vary across cultures regarding who can feel what, and when, and even how they may express those feelings. These rules have been called “feeling rules” and “cultural display rules” by researchers (Mermelstein 2020; Hutchinson and Gerstein 2017). Cultural display rules (CDRs) are formed through the intersection of identity markers peculiar to each person. These identity markers can include their ethnicity, family of origin, age, biological sex, level of education, and wealth (cf. Smith et al. 2017). For example, a study of individuals from Russia, the U.S., Japan, and Korea showed that CDRs governing the appropriateness of expressing different emotions, such as anger, happiness, and surprise, differed widely among the groups (Hutchison and Gerstein 2017, 24). As a result, someone from another culture may correctly identify that a person is angry but place an inappropriate moral judgment on the expression of their anger. In other words, they might decide that the person sounded so angry that they must be incredibly angry when, in the person’s own culture, they were expressing themselves rather mildly.

The individualism-collectivism continuum can also be used to plot some differences between societies. A collectivist views emotions in terms of others, whereas an individualist sees them in terms of the inner state of the individual experiencing them (Hutchison and Gerstein 2017, 23).

Each genre has unique rules around emotions

Second, the potential for miscommunication introduced by differences in cultural display rules proliferates when translators attempt to account for differences inherent to communicating emotions in particular genres. Genres add to this complexity because:

1. Each genre has its own rules for what emotions are normally expressed (Inselmann 2016).
2. Genres differ in how they portray and discuss those emotions (Gemünden 2016; Stearns 2020).

Genre expectations influence the appearance of emotions in Scripture.

• Polite, and even affectionate, greetings were a standard part of Greco-Roman letters during the first century. As a result, researchers cannot measure the authenticity of positive emotions and polite greetings that occur at the beginning of each epistle (Anke 2016).
• Hebrew narratives categorically exclude language regarding the interior lives of individuals (i.e. their emotions) from their prose, only placing interior language in poetry (Linafeld 2016). When compared with the prose accounts of the same events, Miriam’s song in Exodus, Deborah’s song in Judges, Hannah’s song at the beginning of 1-2 Samuel, and David’s song at the end of 1-2 Samuel illustrate this point well.

Genres also have rules for how they portray and discuss emotions.

• In the apocryphal work Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, the narrative portion of the writing focuses on characters affected by emotions, whereas the exhortation focuses on dissuading people from falling “into the trap of disastrous emotions” (Gemünden 2016, 534).
• Gemunden’s findings correspond to what historians have already noted about literature in which communicators give instructions to others. In such “prescriptive literature,” authors often reduce emotions to a simple representation (sometimes a strawman), then give instructions regarding how to handle those emotions for the sake of establishing social norms (Stearns 2020).

Conclusion

As discussed in my last email, we can understand a fair bit of the emotions that people from other cultures are communicating. This can, and often does, give audience members the false impression that they understand more than they actually do of what the speaker means. Moreover, even translations of what people say cannot fully bridge the gap because the majority of an emotion’s meaning lies within its cultural context. Feeling rules and genre constraints are vital to interpreting someone’s emotions accurately, and also lie outside the translator’s ability to convey through the text. In short, people need culturally savvy commentary on communication to understand its emotional dynamics. Thus, we have the paradox of comprehending emotions during intercultural communication: we may understand just enough about emotions in the other culture to do more harm than good.

TL;DR

If the email was too long to read, here are the main points: - Some aspects of communicating emotions are close to universal; others are highly contextual. - The universal aspects can lure us into believing we understand more than we do. - Cultures do not share the same concepts for emotions, nor do emotions have the same moral implications in similar circumstances. - Thus, to really understand emotions, outsiders need both a semantic translation of the emotion and a culturally savvy commentary of its context.

Challenge for You

Use a concordance to chase all the instances of an emotion word in Hebrew or Greek - see how it may be used in different contexts than the English translation!

References

1. Boiger, Michael, and Batja Mesquita. 2012. “The Construction of Emotion in Interactions, Relationships, and Cultures.” Emotion Review 4 (3): 221–29. https://doi.org/10.1177/1754073912439765.
2. Dye, Wayne. 2009. Discovering the Holy Spirit’s Work in a Community. In Perspectives on the World Christian Movement. 4th Edition by Steve Hawthorne. Pasadena: William Carey Library.
3. Gemünden, Petra von. 2016. “Emotions and Literary Genres in the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs and the New Testament: A Contribution to Form History and Historical Psychology.” Biblical Interpretation 24 (4–5): 514–35. https://doi.org/10.1163/15685152-02445Ρ05.
4. Hutchison, Ashley, and Larry Gerstein. 2017. “Emotion Recognition, Emotion Expression, and Cultural Display Rules: Implications for Counseling.” Journal of Asia Pacific Counseling 7 (1): 19–35. https://doi.org/10.18401/2017.7.1.3.
5. Inselmann, Anke. 2016. “Emotions and Passions in the New Testament: Methodological Issues.” Biblical Interpretation 24 (4–5): 536–54. https://doi.org/10.1163/15685152-02445Ρ06.
6. Jurko, Primož. 2021. “Semantic Prosody in Translation: Slovene and English ADV-V Combinations.” ELOPE: English Language Overseas Perspectives and Enquiries 18 (1): 187–209. https://doi.org/10.4312/elope.18.1.187-209.
7. Laukka, Petri, Hillary Anger Elfenbein, Nela Söder, Henrik Nordström, Jean Althoff, Wanda Chui, Frederick K. Iraki, Thomas Rockstuhl, and Nutankumar S. Thingujam. 2013. “Cross-Cultural Decoding of Positive and Negative Non-Linguistic Emotion Vocalizations.” Frontiers in Psychology 4 (July): 353. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00353.
8. Linafelt, Tod. 2016. “Poetry and Biblical Narrative.” In The Oxford Handbook of Biblical Narrative, edited by Danna Nolan Fewell, 84–92. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
9. Smith, Jacqueline S., Marianne LaFrance, and John F. Dovidio. 2017. “Categorising Intersectional Targets: An ‘Either/and’ Approach to Race- and Gender-Emotion Congruity.” Cognition & Emotion 31 (1): 83–97. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699931.2015.1081875.
10. Mermelstein, Ari. 2021. Power and Emotion in Ancient Judaism: Community and Identity in Formation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108917612.
11. Nettelhorst, R. P. 2014 “Love.” In Lexham Theological Wordbook, edited by Douglas Mangum, Derek R. Brown, Rachel Klippenstein, and Rebekah Hurst. Lexham Bible Reference Series. Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press.
12. Stearns, Peter. 2020. “Prescriptive Literature.” In Sources for the History of Emotions, 1st Edition, 53–65. Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY: Routledge.