Have you ever wondered whether the meanings of concepts behind words are similar from one culture to another?  In other words, do “love” and its apparent equivalents in other languages mean the same thing in all languages?

You’d be pardoned, perhaps, for thinking “of course – what else could ‘love’ mean?”  Surprisingly, that’s not the case.  The meanings of many words that are considered the same – i.e., translations of one another – have evolved over time to have different shades of import.

This surprising finding comes from a recent Science article reporting on a study in which linguists studied some 100,000 words from nearly 2,500 languages in 24 ‘networks’ of emotional terms.

The research had two main findings.  The word groupings around the big emotional terms — think ‘anger’ or ‘fear’ — have quiet different sets of associated words from language to language.  But the differences vary in the same ways from language to language.  For example, the word ‘surprise’ is often linked with words connoting ‘fear’ in languages from the Pacific region, like Hawaiian, but in Southeast Asia, ‘surprise’ is more closely associated with ‘want’ and ‘hope’. Similarly, ‘anger’ is associated with ‘anxiety’ in English and other Indo-European languages, but in Vietnam, ‘anger’ is more often associated with ‘grief’ and ‘regret’.

But all the groupings from language to language tend to keep high-energy words together and distinct from low-energy words.  Similarly, all languages keep optimistic emotions together and distinct from more pessimistic emotions.  In other words, no language groups ‘love’ and ‘fear’ together.

This research raises some fascinating cultural and linguistic questions.  For example, are Southeast Asian cultures are more optimistic than the Hawaiians? And do these peoples experience surprise in emotionally distinct ways — meaning that they don’t actually experience the same emotion?

This research is a great reminder that when we plan as thought leaders and public speakers to take our ideas to other cultures around the world, the process is much more complicated than the normal thumbnail sketches of other cultures would suggest.

If the implications of the word for ‘anger’ are different from one part of the world to another, how do we imagine that we are communicating, even in translation? Is my anxiety the same as your grief?  Obviously not.  But what are we to do about that?

This thinking represents a great step forward from previous studies that found, for example, that the Inuit had 35 words for ‘snow’ or something like that.  For conveying ideas and attitudes, emotion-laden words are far more important than the difference between sleet and powdery snow.  And yet, we often don’t give much advanced thought to translating our concepts into other languages and cultures beyond just the basic equivalency of languages in dictionary definitions.

If I say I love some idea, and that phrase is translated into another language, then what has happened to the idea when my version of love is so different from the speakers of that other language?

Of course, we’ve known about the imprecision of translation for a long time, but mostly at the level of the fun snow words and words that are unique to one language or another, such as the German word schattenparker, which (apparently) means someone who invariably parks in the shade, but also carries the implication of someone who’s a bit of wimp.  This study points to a deeper problem, when the very concepts that we’re translating don’t carry quite the same import in one culture as another.

If, when I mention ‘anger’ I’m thinking about anxiety, and your translation has you thinking more about ‘grief’’, then we are not only not speaking the same language, but we’re also not talking about the same things.

As speakers and thought leaders, then, it’s important to do the work of spending time with people in the culture we want to reach out to, and asking them about the deeper implications and meanings of words that are important in our idea system.  A deep discussion about the meaning of the word ‘leader’ and its translations in other languages, for example, would seem to me to be very important for anyone in that thought leadership category – and I know that’s many of the readers of this blog.