Translating Ancient Greek emotions

One often reads that emotion terms in other languages are hard to translate. This is rarely true, though it can be the case that emotion concepts (like the concept of emotion itself ) are hard to define. Very few such concepts are simple. They regularly involve a plurality of scripts, each of which may itself be instantiated in a range of different ways. But it is not in itself difficult to deploy the term used to refer to a given script in on language to translate the term which refers to a similar script in another. Translation is about function in context. But the attention to context and function that we require in order to translate emotion terms well is also a significant feature of the emotion researcher’s art: it reminds us that emotions are events in time and space, not undetectable private experiences. They are contextually embedded and lend themselves to explanation in narrative terms. Thus, when we use emotion words in our own languages to translate the terms that name emotion scripts in other languages we go some way towards understanding what emotion concepts are.