1 Introduction

Spinoza defined emotion as “the affections of the body by which the body’s power of activity is increased or diminished, assisted or checked, together with the ideas of these affections” (2002, p. 278). Against Descartes’ idea that “the mind has absolute power over its actions” and “the mind can have absolute control over the emotions”, Spinoza set out to show that affection has the nature and power of “an action, otherwise a passion” (2002, p. 277). However, this idea that affections are constitutive of our lives, determining our relationships and our experience of the world, was developed more decisively only in the twentieth century through a transdisciplinary approach initiated in the social sciences known as the “affective turn” (Clough, 2007). The basic premise is that emotions and affect are part of our personal, professional, and social lives, determining our relationships and our world experience. In line with this shift, recent studies on translation place affect and emotion as the zeitgeist of our time (as noted by Koskinen, 2020 , p. 7). Approaches range from the impact of emotion on the translation and interpretation process to the impact on the reader ( e.g. , Lehr, 2021 ; Rojo, 2017 ) to the ability of the translator to perceive, express, and regulate emotion ( e.g. , Hubscher-Davidson, 2018 ).

In this context, and from a transdisciplinary theoretical-methodological perspective, this paper presents part of an ethnographic research based on the analysis of excerpts from the narratives of three Brazilian translators of sensitive audiovisual material subtitles, such as documentaries on the Holocaust, mass suicide, and the COVID-19 pandemic. ² This paper aims to investigate the types of emotional effects that translators experience when working with sensitive texts (Simms, 1997 ) and to understand how these professionals deal with emotions and the perceived impact on their professional and personal lives. We begin with some terminological questions to help understand the different uses and distinctions of emotion, affection, and feeling, and some thoughts on emotion and translation; then, we present an analysis of the translators’ narratives, followed by concluding comments.

2 Affection and Emotion in Translation Studies

The word affection is one of many translations of the Greek pathos , like emotion, sentiment, feeling and sense. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary (Etymonline, 2023), in Old English (14th century), pathos denoted the state of being affected or influenced by something external and was mainly referred to as a passive state until the 17th century. ³ Over time, pathos acquired traces of intensity but also of tenderness, affection, sympathy, and other networks of meaning. From pathos also comes e-movere , which means to move and is associated with a personal response to a particular stimulus or event. In the Dictionary of Untranslatables (edited by Cassin, 2014 ), the Greek word pathos is presented next to the Latin word perturbatio , with English, French, German, Greek, Italian, and Latin translations:

Giulia Sissa, the author of the dictionary entry, explains that the term “feeling” in European languages carries dual connotations. On the one hand, it may denote movement, instability, and turbulence ( pathos ), while on the other hand, it may signify passivity and susceptibility to external causes ( perturbatio ). According to her:

Also, in this dictionary, Jean-Pierre Cléro explains the word “feeling” as untranslatable and presents a network of words that can be related in Portuguese (as well as in French, Italian, and English) as passion, emotion, sensation, affection, sense, common sense, consciousness, among others. The words convey distinct attitudes towards the definition of affectivity rather than delineating specific territories of the sensation, feeling, or sense. According to Cléro, “[t]he untranslatability of”feeling” in French reveals the peculiarities of a philosophy of affectivity or, at the least, a way of philosophizing, in English” (Cléro, 2014 , p. 339).

The debate over the choice of one term or the other is not only historical but can also be seen in the contemporary discussion of the terminology “affective turn”. Paul Hoggett and Simon Thompson (2012, p. 2) argue that the expression is very misleading, as affect involves a less conscious feeling, while emotion relates to a more conscious one in terms of meaning and expression. The authors titled their book Politics and the Emotions: The Affective Turn in Contemporary Political Studies , revealing from the beginning that the concepts are intertwined. The conceptualization of emotion and affect is a controversial topic that varies within the same field, as evidenced by neurologists Antonio Damasio ( 2012 ) and Lisa Feldman Barrett ( 2017 ). In translation studies, for example, some researchers adopt the term emotion (Hubscher-Davidson, 2018 ), and others prefer affect (Koskinen, 2020 ).

Although etymological studies show that these words belong to the same semantic group, with time and usage they have acquired specific meanings according to the areas in which they are used, showing, as Jacques Derrida says about translation, ⁴ that “the same word is already attached to very different connotations, inflections, and emotional or affective values” (Derrida, 1988 , p. 1), and “like all other words, acquires its value only from its inscription in a chain of possible substitutions, in what is too blithely called a ‘context’” (Derrida, 1988 , p. 5). The selection of a specific term in translation often implicates the emotional or affective values of the translator. Nevertheless, there is typically an avoidance of acknowledging the impact of emotion, possibly because of the reason/emotion dichotomy, in which the latter is understood to be harmful.

In the conference What emotion! What emotion? , Didi-Huberman ( 2021 ) reminds us that the expression of emotion has often been considered ridiculous or pathetic, and that reason, the rational, the logical, has long been given priority. This is evident in the purely philological approach at the beginning of translation studies that persisted until the cultural turn (Snell-Hornby, 2006 ). However, as Lehr emphasizes,

While not addressing the emotional impact on the translator, including emotion in translation studies is significant because it emphasizes that translation is much more than transferring meaning from one language to another. ⁵

Another scholar who has also devoted himself to a broader approach to translation is Douglas Robinson, who has emphasized the importance of emotion in the translator’s work since his book The Translator’s Turn (1991). Robinson ( 2003 , p. 73) emphasizes that “[e]motion is absolutely essential to reason” and that in China, for example, feeling is not separated from thinking because “feeling is thinking”: “[w]e feel that this word or construction or usage is better than that, more appropriate than that, more accurate than that, more equivalent to its counterpart in an original text than that” (Robinson, 2003 , p. 77). The author continues to argue, decades after those initial statements, that

It is possible to observe the use of several words that belong to the semantic field of pathos: emotion, feeling, feel, affective. Although there is much discussion about the definition and the scope of each of these terms, the effects that are perceived from specific translational experiences are much more significant here. As Sara Ahmed notes in The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2014), searching for a definition of emotion is much less important than knowing how emotions circulate and their social effects. Examining the stories of emotions that circulate in individual and social discourses reveals how worlds are modeled on bodies and how bodies have been and are constructed as effects of emotions and collective stories. Ahmed ( 2014 ) emphasizes the socio-political nature of emotion, going beyond the understanding of the internal relations and external manifestations that occur within each person. Once again, the ability to affect and be affected by other bodies appears, as already mentioned; this is something that was advocated by Spinoza in the seventeenth century.

In line with the expanded concept of emotion defended by Ahmed ( 2014 ), three examples of translators’ narratives will be presented that refer to their perception of emotion in translating. The method used in this study for data collection was semi-structured online interviews that lasted about one hour for each person. The interview focused on the emotional experience of the translators, and it raised specific issues as to: (i) how the emotional impact was perceived on the body; (ii) what strategies the translators adopted to deal with their emotional involvement with the theme; (iii) and what strategies they used when they were aware that emotions could interfere with translation decisions.

3 Analysis of the Translator’s Ontological Narratives

Based on an ethnographic methodology, interviews were conducted with translators who volunteered after seeing an invitation through a post in two groups of translators on the social network Facebook. ⁶ The ethnographic approach allows us to understand standard practices and social realities from the perspective of translators who are part of a professional community, by including their ontological narratives (Baker, 2006 ), providing a discussion on existing conceptions of the role of the translator and possible challenges and changes. ⁷ With that in mind, volunteers were asked to complete an online questionnaire and participate in an interview through the Google Meet platform. All participants signed the informed consent form and were anonymized during the data processing phase, following the university’s ethical procedures. In this sense, relevant names or identifiers have been omitted to protect the identities of those participating in this study. The interviews were conducted in Portuguese, the native language of all participants, and were later transcribed and translated into English. The purpose of this section is to present the experiences of three women translators − two of whom work with subtitles and one with written texts, and all of them recognized as sensitive (Simms, 1997 ) ⁸ − and to discuss the impact of their actions on the translation process and the result.

3.1 Translator A: More than 25 Years of Experience Working with EN <> PT

The first example is from a translator with over twenty-five years of experience working with the English and Portuguese language pair. The story concerns the translation of a documentary about the Holocaust. The translator begins by saying that she avoids looking at the audiovisual material before translating because, according to her, “my emotion must appear in the translation”. In this particular case, the images led to choices that she now considers unusual:

She understands that the images were alarming, and to make them more bearable, she chose less powerful words. Based on Spinoza’s notion that emotions encompass all that affects and drives us, it becomes clear that the translator was deeply affected by the emotional impact of the images, which subsequently influenced her translation decisions.

We can understand that images convey an emotional gesture that leads the translator to look for ways to alleviate the pain that she is feeling and that she believes will be felt by the audience as well. In this way, the images can be seen as representations of collective pain, and the words chosen for the description of these images are linked to that pain and sadness, which is accompanied by the need to diminish the suffering of those who will watch the subtitled documentary. Therefore, the translator understands that the use of synonyms has the purpose of alleviating the profound disturbance she felt while watching the scenes. She also recalls feeling anxiety, insomnia, and nightmares during the translation process and immediately after the subtitling was completed. Such effects show what scholars of emotion state about the body.

In translation studies, Douglas Robinson ( 2003 ) proposed the idea of somatic experience, which draws from António Damasio’s concept of somatic markers (2012). This perspective considers translation a task encompassing subjective factors such as sounds, gestures, facial expressions, pauses, and bodily sensations. Robinson ( 2003 ) integrates Damasio’s somatic theory with Austin’s ( 1975 ) performative theory, suggesting translators must also perform themselves across languages and cultures.

When the translator says, “I think”, “I softened”, “I ended up trying harder”, “I translate it”, she is using not just constative but performative utterances that come in the form of testimony and are inseparable from the idea of performance. The question “Why did I translate it that way?” reveals an ambivalence between wanting to demonstrate the emotions aroused by the documentary and self-criticism for choosing less shocking words. Despite acknowledging the work-related stress and other unsettling emotions evoked by the audiovisual content, the question also highlights the continued stigmatization of emotions.

If affection is everything that affects and moves us, we understand that the translator was affected and that the emotion caused by the images echoed in her translation choices.

The images focus on “collective expressions of the emotions that run through the story” (Didi-Huberman, 2021 , p. 34) ¹⁰ − something of the order of a collective rather than an individual pain.

By investigating the history of the emotions that circulate in individual and social discourses, Sarah Ahmed ( 2014 ) argues that emotions do not reside in the subject or the object but are produced as an effect of circulation. In this case of translating, memory is also essential because the pain comes with the images and is intensified by remembering everything related to Nazism. According to the author,

Therefore, among the coping mechanisms (as studied by Perdikaki and Georgiou, 2022 ) ¹¹ , the action taken by the translator to deal with the painful experience was to refuse to translate anything related to Nazism after this.

3.2 Translator B: More than Ten Years of Experience Working with EN<>PT

The second case involves subtitling a four-part, 50-minute documentary about Jim Jones and Jonestown. The translator also works with English and Portuguese language pairs and has over ten years of experience. Like the previous example, she recalls experiencing emotions while translating, resulting in physical symptoms that negatively impacted her professional performance. She did not acknowledge any interference of emotions in the translation decisions. However, she emphasized the consequences of the process on her health: she had “a lot of headaches and body aches (due to concentration and tension), a lot of exhaustion, in addition to sadness and crying”. ¹²

The translator recalls doing extensive research to learn what had already been translated in Brazil and to understand the history of Jim Jones a little better since she had little knowledge of the subject. In the first two parts of the documentary, the focus was on his life from his childhood until he became a minister. The last two parts focused on charisma and the alleged psychic and healing powers, moving to Guyana, taking hundreds of his followers, and creating Jonestown. The translation happened in 2018, exactly 40 years after the tragedy of the mass suicide and murder in Jonestown. These episodes were very shocking, especially because of the images of over 900 people, many of them children and teenagers, drinking the poisoned drink and dying. In this regard, she recalled the decision not to translate the Kool-Aid (which was consecrated as “Drink the Kool-Aid”). However, she understands that for Brazilian audiences, the reference is only to the poisoned drink and not to the repercussions that came later with the expression used to describe blind obedience and loyalty. ¹³

The manipulation that appeared in the documentary exacerbated the discomfort already caused by the 2018 Brazilian electoral campaign, as the translator narrates:

The translator’s immobility due to pain was an obstacle to her performance, and because of that, she felt anxious about the time spent in translation. In this narrative, we observe the dominance of the concept of pathos as a passive force, or more precisely, the definition of the Latin word perturbatio , defined also as a “commotion” (Sissa, 2014 , p. 747). In that sense, it is necessary to deal with the tangible consequences of translation, which leads to what Didi-Huberman calls an impasse:

There is a marked sense of stagnation, as opposed to the previous translator’s observation of a lack of vocabulary or precision in word choice; what is crucial in both cases is the evocative power of images and narratives that document a collective pain. As Ahmed notes, experiencing pain involves the reconstitution of bodily space (a lot of headaches, body aches, and so forth) as a reorientation of the bodily relationship to what is attributed as the cause of the pain (Ahmed, 2014 , p. 24). In remembering this experience, the translator recalled that

While in the previous case the translator’s decision was not to accept work on the subject, in this case, the awareness that she was being affected by the translation and that this could have consequences for the result of her work led the translator to pay a proofreader before delivering the translation to the client. In both cases, there was a financial loss and emotional exhaustion.

The last example is an experience in which the translator had to deal with emotions while simultaneously witnessing the tragedy.

3.3 Translator C: More than 15 Years of Experience Working with EN <> PT

This narrative concerns the experience lived by a translator working in the field of the development of medicines and medical equipment. She was interviewed in January 2021, in the middle of the pandemic. She says that the chronology of the pandemic was reflected in her work, which ranged from case reports to letters of condolence from companies to families, from new health policies to training professionals in new standards of care, from patient counseling to new informed consent forms for clinical trials involving drugs to treat COVID-19. ¹⁸ According to the translator:

She lists the feelings this reality triggers − anticipation, pain, fear, and hope. The various translation demands resulting from the pandemic highlighted the impact of emotions on the translator’s work. ²⁰ As noted in the narrative, it generated great emotional and physical exhaustion in the face of changes that were not mild: remote work, isolation, social distancing, and a significant increase in mental illness.

Thus, considering that emotion is a significant part of every human experience, it will be understood that the translator’s feelings, memories, prejudices, and motivations will ultimately affect the translation. Lisa Barrett ( 2017 ) notes that although the emotion itself is mainly unconscious, the feeling associated with it is conscious and can be experienced and expressed in different ways according to cultural and social norms and traditions. In this sense, the translator can relate the experience of translating during the COVID-19 pandemic to pain and anxiety.

According to Barrett, “[p]ain is an experience that occurs not only from physical damage but also when your brain predicts damage is imminent” (Barrett, 2017 , p. 205). This prediction can affect how your body responds to unpleasant sensations − causing crying, headaches, stomachaches, and shortness of breath, as mentioned in previous examples. Feeling uncomfortable becomes both physically and mentally charged. In addition, Barrett ( 2017 , p. 218) points out that physical pain is inevitably intertwined with social reality. As in the previous cases, the translator felt several symptoms in her body:

The knowledge resulting from the academic training and exposure to the other’s pain resulting from the losses incurred in the pandemic generate fear of contagion and other emotions, such as anxiety, sadness, and anger. Emotions arise from the translator’s assessment of the situation in which she finds herself and from the feeling (sensation, sensitivity, perception) that appears in words and (re)actions, such as the crying that represents the involvement, the sociability of the emotion. To recall what Ahmed says in a different context (immigrants seeking asylum in Great Britain), “the ‘you’ implicitly evokes a ‘we’, a group of subjects who can identify themselves with the injured nation in this performance of personal injury” (Ahmed, 2014 , p. 2).

The emotions triggered by the pandemic situation not only moved us but also showed us what unites us − and in this sense, they must be seen as social and cultural practices (and not just a form of self-expression) because what the translator felt was also felt by the whole word − or part of it. Pain and suffering are often seen as individual, private, usually solitary experiences. In the case of COVID-19, from the very beginning, the pain was seen as something public that required a personal response and, even more so, a collective one. There is collective suffering on a global scale, with narratives of individual loss in the public domain − but the pains are also different because the conditions and resources are different − and involve a relationship of socio-economic power.

In the three examples, the translators question the influence of their feelings on the result of the translation, represented by “why did I translate it that way?”, “I paid for a proofreader” and “we do not bring that to the material we deliver”, as if it were possible to have control over this influence or the separation of reason and emotion, as mentioned earlier. If we remember what Didi-Huberman says (2021), expressing emotion is often seen as ridiculous or pathetic, and translators seem to think this should not be passed on to the client. There is an ambivalence between the impossibility of not being involved and the concern of not showing this involvement to the client. ²³ In addition, there is also the concern about the loss of productivity and the much longer time it takes to complete the translation.

Although the three narratives are ontological (Baker, 2006 ), they are representative of other translation experiences, especially with sensitive texts, and suggest that the study of affective and emotional aspects and their influence on the translation process and the lives of translators allows for discussions about personal and professional commitment, involvement in ethical decisions, and greater awareness of emotional and physical reactions resulting from translation.

4 Concluding Remarks

The “affective turn” is transformative because it addresses the intricate connections between the human body and individual but historically contextualized emotions, and because it incorporates social and cultural influences into discursive practices. It expands our understanding of emotions in teaching and learning and draws attention to the entanglement of affects and emotions with everyday life in new ways. In translation studies, this can be summarized in the following statement from the medical translator: “It’s not just about making the text readable; it’s about winning the heart of the person reading it. You have to captivate”. ²⁴

Koskinen ( 2020 , p. 48) recalls some expressions that also show the embodied affectivity of translation, such as “translatorial gut reactions (Robinson, 1991 ), tasting the different options and translating by ear ”. The author states, “[t]his discourse also signals the need to develop more analytical vocabulary and methods for analysing and describing affective elements in texts” (Koskinen, 2020 , p. 48).

Recent studies increasingly reveal the inextricable links between mind and body, cognition and sensitivity, the importance and impact of emotions on the translation process and the translated text. While it is impossible to control what a person feels or how they react in each situation, discussing the subject, especially in training courses, is critical to understanding that every translation is unique, and no translation is neutral. In addition, questioning the emotions raised by translation can aid in interpreting the texts to be translated and give meaning to the translation experience itself, as it allows for the exploration of complex interrelationships between social, cultural, and political forces with historically situated discursive practices.

Based on Paulo Freire, Koskinen ( 2020 ) proposes a critical education with the development of reflexivity, empowerment, and empathy so that the future translator can understand the effects that emotional impacts can have on translation, as well as deal with psycho-affective factors that interfere with the translation process (including anxiety, stress, motivation, frustration, and self-esteem). It is also essential to include techniques and activities designed to develop emotional awareness and improve emotion regulation in the workplace. Besides that, it is relevant to stress the need to integrate coping mechanisms for emotionally challenging situations (Perdikaki; Georgiou, 2022 ), destigmatize emotions in the workplace, and promote their acceptance as an integral part of the professional reality of a translator.

Contrary to a common misconception, translation is about more than just words and cannot be reduced to a linguistic process, as is usually the case with machine translation. In audiovisual translation, for example, the overall meaning is influenced by sound, perspective, lighting, movement, facial expressions, body language, and intonation. In addition, as noted in the first two examples, the composition of the visual image − both what is overtly revealed and what is implied or missing − becomes highly significant. The perception of the effects of emotions in sensitive texts can make us aware of our values and degree of conformity to particular social practices. In this sense, the role of the human translator is essential to discerning nuances and observing ethically the openness to the other or the expressions that the images would lead to formulate. As Robinson ( 2020 , p. 146) argues, “[a] useful way of thinking about translation and language is that translators don’t translate words; they translate what people do with words”.

In the narratives presented in this paper, there is, on the one hand, a recognition of the complexity of the translation process and the impact that the text has on the translator during and even after the translation process. On the other hand, there seems to be a fear of showing the client and even colleagues that the translator is inescapably involved in the translation, usually because some clients still have a positivist ideal of non-involvement, neutrality, and objectivity, which may give the impression that translation decisions are not political and not influenced by the translator’s views. In the case of subtitling, there is a mix between letting emotions shine through and worrying that those emotions will influence translation decisions.

According to Barrett ( 2017 ), emotions typically involve experiences that we are aware of and are correlated with motivation and the assessment of the importance of each situation to each person, which leads us to another word of pathos , empathy, mentioned above. Pain for the lives taken in Nazism, Jonestown, and the recent pandemic appears in the translation choices and the body, referring to the Spinozian definition at the beginning of this article.

Much research is underway, but expanding the studies beyond the empirical field and providing epistemological debates on an education that allows for an affective turn that focuses on translational knowledge is necessary. Recognizing that “affective or pathetic values” (as Derrida says) are constitutive of any translation process and permeate those who translate can help the translators understand their performance and guide them towards action and developing strategies to deal with possible emotional effects. Bringing the study of emotions into the field also involves coping with ethical discussions and the undeniable fact that the translator is always affected (by the text, by the other) and affects and co-moves (the text, the other). As one of the translators says: “You have to put yourself in the other person’s shoes”. ²⁵

It is essential to understand the political role of translation. Language, culture, and how people perceive each other and society are shaped by emotions such as empathy. Studying these emotions helps to understand the physical and emotional aspects of the process, since translating is a relationship between senses and sensibilities.

Acknoledgments

I would like to thank the translators for the interviews and Viviane Veras for reading the first version of this article.

References

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