Intersemiotic Perspectives on Emotions : Translating Across Signs, Bodies and Values

This edited volume explores emotion and its translations through the global world from a variety of different perspectives, as a personal, socio- cultural, ideological, ethical and political, even business investment in the latest phases of globalisation.

Emotions are powerful in engaging or disengaging individuals, communities, the masses, peoples and nations with distinct linguistic and cultural backgrounds for good, but also for evil. All depends on how emotions are interpreted, that is, translated in “words” or in “facts”, in any case in “signs”. Semiotic reflection on emotions and their interpretation/translation is thus of essential importance. An adequate understanding of emotional phenomena and their complexities calls for different views which together reveal and illustrate inconsistencies in our modern life.

The contributors argue that an investigation of types of emotional translation – linguistic and non- linguistic, audio-visual, theatrical, literary, racial, legal, architectural, political, and so forth – can contribute to a better understanding of emotions and how they are exploited to engender injustice, unfairness, absurdity in contemporary life. Nonetheless, emotions are also exploited and oriented – and this is the intent of our authors – to favour the development of sustainable multicultural societies and facilitate living together.

A major reference for students and scholars in translation, semiotics, language and cultural studies around the world.

Susan Petrilli is Professor of Philosophy and Theory of Languages, University of Bari Aldo Moro, Italy, Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Adelaide, SA and 7th Thomas Sebeok Fellow of the Semiotic Society of America. Her main research areas include philosophy of language, semiotics and translation theory. With Augusto Ponzio she has introduced Semioethics as an orientation in semiotics. Her books include: Sign Studies and Semioethics (2014); Victoria Welby and the Science of Signs (2015); The Global World and Its Manifold Faces (2016); Challenges to Living Together (2017), Signs, Language and Listening (2019); Significare, interpretare e intendere (2019); Senza ripari. Segni, differenze, estraneità (2021). Through her work as author, editor, and translator she has contributed to the dissemination of works, among others, by Victoria Welby, Charles C. Peirce, Mikhail M. Bakhtin, Charles Morris, Gérard Deledalle, Emmanuel Levinas, Adam Schaff, Thomas A. Sebeok, Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, Ferruccio Rossi- Landi, Giorgio Fano, Umberto Eco and Augusto Ponzio. Her numerous essays are published both as book chapters and in journals. These include: Semiotica; Traduction, Terminologie, Rédaction; Signata; Chinese Semiotic Studies; Language and Semiotic Studies; Signs & Media; International Journal for the Semiotics of Law; International Journal of Legal Discourse; Calumet; Signs and Society; and The American Journal of Semiotics. Most recently she has translated a collection of writings into Italian by Victoria Welby, Senso, significato, significatività 1879–1911 (2021), and edited Maestri di segni e costruttori di pace (2021), Brian Medlin: The Level-Headed Revolutionary. Essays, Stories and Poems (in collab.) (2021), and Exploring the Translatability of Emotions: Cross-Cultural and Transdisciplinary Encounters (with Meng Ji) (2022).

Meng Ji specialises in empirical translation studies, especially data-driven multilingual corpus analyses. She has published on environmental translation, healthcare translation, statistical translation stylistics/authorship attribution, and international multilingual education (statistical translation quality evaluation). She is the author/editor of research books with Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, Routledge, Palgrave, Springer, John Benjamins, Waseda University Press Tokyo, University of Montréal Press. She is the editor of The Oxford Handbook of Translation and Social Practices (with Sara Laviosa) (2020); Advances in Empirical Translation Studies (with Michael Oakes) (2019), and Exploring the Translatability of Emotions: Cross-Cultural and Transdisciplinary Encounters (with Susan Petrilli) (2022).