Betrayed or Translated Anger? The Case of the Chinese Translation of the TV Series Gomorra and the Film Perfetti Sconosciuti (Perfect Strangers)

Abstract

While psychologists cannot agree on the structure of the emotional phenomenon, it is no less difficult to name “what we feel”, whether it is emotion, feeling, passion, sensation (Wierzbicka 1999). That is not a terminological difficulty but a philosophical one because the very idea of what can be defined emotion is culturally determined, and it can only be reflected in the naming of emotions. Nevertheless, when speaking of emotional lexis in philosophical terms, it is essential not to take for granted the existence of a one-to-one correspondence between the words of different languages. In this paper, we will devote particular attention to ANGER, one of the primary emotions included in the various classifications developed over the years, both in the West and in China (Bond 1987; Ekman 1999; Johnson-Laird and Oatley 1989; Plutchik 1980). It is in the field of psychology, rather than linguistics, that ANGER expressions have been identified and studied with reference to “emotional speech”, an integral part of the lexis which is understood as “all those aspects of speech that convey information to the receiver about the speaker's state” (Poggi and Magno Caldognetto 2004: 1). So far, however, few reflections have been developed when working with Italian and Chinese. This article, based mainly on a descriptive multidimensional model of the relationships between the emotional concepts developed by Plutchik (1980), aims to test an alternative way to examine Italian and Chinese emotional lexis by identifying a field of research in the comparison between two Italian audiovisual products and their Chinese translations. Specifically, the expressions of ANGER used in Gomorra – La Serie (2014‒2021) and in the film Perfetti sconosciuti (2016) and their Chinese translations will be analyzed.