Languages vary widely in the ways they express attitudes and feelings. Translation often enables us to perceive these differences more clearly.

The speakers of each linguistic community share a number of concrete emotional representations which are highly subjective and therefore not always easy to interpret and to reconstruct in another language. When the source text contains many distinct nuances in attitudes and feelings, translators are faced with special difficulties because, due to their intervention, the target text may express emotions which vary substantially from those expressed in the original text. This is true for the translation both of written texts (whether literary, legal, journalistic, popular science or other genres) and oral discourse (interpreting and audiovisual translation).

By studying how translators and interpreters deal with these difficulties, and what strategies they use to transfer the complex world of attitudes and feelings from one language to another, we may be able to draw general conclusions about translation understood as an encounter and negotiation between two different cultures and world-views.

This panel thus invites papers on all aspects of the translation of attitudes and feelings, including, but not restricted to:

• The translation of feelings such as anger, sadness, happiness, fear, etc. (for example, “Terror and torture in translations of G. Orwell’s 1984”)

• The translation of attitudes such as irony and sarcasm (for example, “Interpreting indignation / sarcasm expressed by means of gestures and voice inflection”)

• The translation of humour (for example “The role of culture in the interpretation of humour”)

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