Studies in Linguistics and Literature — Mukherjee & Das (2018), "Emotion without a Word: An Analysis of Bengali Emotions and Their English Translation"
- Author: Shibashis Mukherjee (Indian Institute of Management Bangalore) & Anupam Das (Indian Institute of Management Kozhikode)
- Publication: Studies in Linguistics and Literature, Vol. 2, No. 4 (2018), pp. 250–268. Published by Scholink Inc. (open access). DOI: 10.22158/sll.v2n4p250
- Date: 2018 (received 25 July 2018; published 13 September 2018)
- URL: http://www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/sll/article/download/1586/1733 (PDF, fetched directly; also indexed on Semantic Scholar and mirrored, unreachable to this project, on ResearchGate and academia.edu — see Gaps)
- Type: primary/secondary — an original quantitative content-analysis study of published literary translations (primary data), situated inside a secondary literature review of cross-cultural emotion research and translation theory. Stance: academic/neutral, explicitly arguing against treating emotion words as having fixed cross-cultural equivalents.
- Accessed: 2026-09-06
Extract
- Core method: the authors searched the full online text of twelve Tagore short stories, two novels (Gora, Noukadubi), and two dramas (Notir Puja, Biday Obhishap) for every occurrence of the Bengali words obhiman and lajja, then compared how the same occurrence was rendered by native-English-speaking translators versus native-Bengali-speaking translators of the same passage. 36 instances of obhiman (59 counting multiple translators of the same passage) and 39 instances of lajja were collected and coded.
- The two-meanings claim, independently corroborated: quoting a 2010 Telegraph India article ("Bengali to English," Banerjee & Poulomi) at second hand: "The original meaning was pride, but the current usage — anger, or something close to it, at being upset with a loved one. This one word is one whole chapter in any relationship, be it between lovers or between parents and children or between siblings or friends." The same article quotes Bengali poet Sankha Ghosh: "Try to translate it. Abhiman is not anger or sorrow. It is a temporary expression of a feeling about a loved one that he or she is supposed to address. People speaking in other languages must also be feeling the sentiment. I wonder how they express it." Also cites Dutta (2005), Translation Today 2(1), as stating obhiman "has bewildered translators over the years."
- Quantitative result — the historical "pride" sense is real and independently attested in translation practice: out of 36 instances translated by native English speakers, 16 (44%) rendered obhiman as "pride." Bengali translators used "pride" in 16 of 59 cases (27%). With the exception of one translator (Drummond), English and Bengali translators of the same passage largely agreed when the word was rendered as "pride" — evidence, per the authors, that "the script of pride and the original meaning of obhiman are very similar."
- Quantitative result — the modern "hurt/sulk" sense has no stable English equivalent: for the 20 non-"pride" English-translator instances, twelve different words were each used only once (60% of non-pride cases); across a larger 37-instance sample, 62% of English-translator word choices were used only once, versus 19% for Bengali translators. Words used for the modern sense include wounded/injured/hurt pride, hurt, resentment, sulking, self-respect, grievance, offense, sensitive, indignant, petulance, and disappointment — with English and Bengali translators of the same passage frequently choosing different words from this list (e.g., one translator's "hurt" paired with another's "offended" for the identical original sentence). The paper's own conclusion: "no English word appears to have a script close to the current usage of obhiman."
- Interpretation offered: the authors propose obhiman underwent a real historical semantic drift — an original, translatable sense (pride) giving rise over time to a second, harder-to-translate sense (hurt/sulk directed at a loved one, with an implicit expectation of an apology) — comparing this to English's own temper → temperament split and the semantic narrowing of tantrum (both via Stearns & Stearns 1989). They also report the word has "the same/similar meaning" in Hindi, Oriya (Odia), and Marathi per secondhand literature citations (not independently verified by this paper itself).
- Theoretical framing: draws on Russell's (1991) "scripts" theory of emotion concepts (fuzzy-bounded event sequences, not points on a fixed grid) and skopos/functionalist translation theory (Vermeer 1998; Reiss & Vermeer) to argue that when no cross-cultural equivalent exists, translators must make a purposeful, non-equivalence-seeking choice rather than search for one "correct" rendering.
- Companion word, lajja: by contrast, both translator groups converge heavily on "shame" (56% English, 54% Bengali, with 90% same-passage agreement when either used it) — offered as a contrast case where a rough English equivalent does exist, sharpening the paper's claim that obhiman's modern sense is the harder case.
- Appendix 2 gives worked examples, including one rare case where both an English and a Bengali translator of the same Tagore passage independently chose the same word for obhiman ("grievance" / "aggrieved").
Gaps
- The 2010 Telegraph India "Bengali to English" article this paper quotes (Banerjee & Poulomi) is cited here only at second hand — the URL given in the paper's own references (telegraphindia.com, 2010) could not be fetched directly by this project this session (host unreachable); not yet added to this project's own source-blocklist notes as a repeat failure.
- The paper's own claim that Hindi, Odia, and Marathi share "the same/similar" concept is itself secondhand (citing Parish 1991, Menon & Shweder 1994, and Russell 1991) and is not, on its own terms, a study of those languages' own usage — see Bag & Dash (2024) for an independent primary study of the Odia case specifically, which reports a meaningfully different regional distribution (Hindi = pride only, per that paper's own informants) worth reconciling.
- All translated texts studied are Rabindranath Tagore's; the authors explicitly note Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay's works were excluded because they lack a comparable native-English-translator sample — so the finding is not yet tested against a second Bengali literary voice.