On his book Translating Happiness: A Cross-Cultural Lexicon of Well-Being
Cover Interview of February 27, 2019
In a nutshell
Translating Happiness celebrates the idea that untranslatable words – terms without an
exact equivalent in our own language – can expand our emotional, intellectual,
and even experiential horizons. Such words represent phenomena or ideas which
have been overlooked or underappreciated in one’s own culture, hence the lack
of a specific signifier. Crucially though, they have been identified and
labelled by another culture, from whom we can learn. These words therefore have
the potential to help us better understand and articulate our experiences,
providing us with new linguistic tools to make sense of our world. They can
even reveal new phenomena, which had previously been veiled to us, pointing us
towards realms of life which we had not before noticed.
The book is based on an on-going
lexicographic research project, initiated in 2015, to collect and analyze
untranslatable words. To limit its scope to a manageable area of enquiry, the
project’s focus is on wellbeing, specifically. This is because I am a
researcher in positive psychology, which is essentially the scientific study of
wellbeing. The lexicography currently comprises over 1,000 words, many of which
have been crowd-sourced through generous contributions to a website I created
to host the project. My analytical approach to these words has been to explore
and organize them thematically. I have identified six main categories, each encompassing
many different themes. These are positive emotions, ambivalent emotions, love,
prosociality, character, and spirituality. Together, I treat these categories
and themes as offering a comprehensive ‘map’ of wellbeing.
The book covers the regions of this map in
detail, delving into the various categories and themes by analysing a selection
of untranslatable words encompassed within them. The book also looks more
generally at the role of language in ‘mapping’ our experience, and the
significance of untranslatable words in that respect. In doing so, it also
reflects critically on the viability and validity of transposing words and
ideas from one cultural context to another. Overall though, it advocates for
the idea that cultures can develop and evolve (and always have) by learning
from each other. In that respect, the book argues that ‘we’ – readers
personally, the field of psychology, and English-speaking cultures more broadly
– have much to learn from the ideas and insights developed across the globe.
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
In a nutshell
Translating Happiness celebrates the idea that untranslatable words – terms without an exact equivalent in our own language – can expand our emotional, intellectual, and even experiential horizons. Such words represent phenomena or ideas which have been overlooked or underappreciated in one’s own culture, hence the lack of a specific signifier. Crucially though, they have been identified and labelled by another culture, from whom we can learn. These words therefore have the potential to help us better understand and articulate our experiences, providing us with new linguistic tools to make sense of our world. They can even reveal new phenomena, which had previously been veiled to us, pointing us towards realms of life which we had not before noticed.
The book is based on an on-going lexicographic research project, initiated in 2015, to collect and analyze untranslatable words. To limit its scope to a manageable area of enquiry, the project’s focus is on wellbeing, specifically. This is because I am a researcher in positive psychology, which is essentially the scientific study of wellbeing. The lexicography currently comprises over 1,000 words, many of which have been crowd-sourced through generous contributions to a website I created to host the project. My analytical approach to these words has been to explore and organize them thematically. I have identified six main categories, each encompassing many different themes. These are positive emotions, ambivalent emotions, love, prosociality, character, and spirituality. Together, I treat these categories and themes as offering a comprehensive ‘map’ of wellbeing.
The book covers the regions of this map in detail, delving into the various categories and themes by analysing a selection of untranslatable words encompassed within them. The book also looks more generally at the role of language in ‘mapping’ our experience, and the significance of untranslatable words in that respect. In doing so, it also reflects critically on the viability and validity of transposing words and ideas from one cultural context to another. Overall though, it advocates for the idea that cultures can develop and evolve (and always have) by learning from each other. In that respect, the book argues that ‘we’ – readers personally, the field of psychology, and English-speaking cultures more broadly – have much to learn from the ideas and insights developed across the globe.