Emotions Across Languages: Expression and Perception in Multilinguals
“Emotions Across Languages: Expression and Perception in Multilinguals” is proposed as a journey where cultures, languages, and points of view collide. It is an interactive and dynamic workshop designed for multilinguals across the EUPeace alliance, with the objective to explore how emotions shift when expressed in different languages, why some words resist translation, and how culture shapes the way we feel.
Format: Hybrid (in-person at University of Calabria + online access)
Duration: 3 hours
Target audience: University students, multilinguals, Erasmus participants, language students
Through dynamic activities, participants will have the opportunity to experience firsthand how language can amplify, soften or transform emotional intensity, and how emotional resonance can vary depending on personal values, experiences and cultural influence.
Guided by interactive tools, creative games, and intercultural dialogue, the workshop blends theory with practice, ensuring that students don’t just learn about emotional communication, but actively live and recognize it.
After warming up, theoretical explanations will alternate with hands-on activities such as:
- Meme Translation Lab where students translate memes and youth slang, revealing how humor and emotions shift across languages.
- Gesture Translation Game in which volunteer expresses an emotion only through gestures while others must guess and translate the emotion into multiple languages to show how nonverbal communication can be interpreted differently depending on culture.
- Slang without Borders which consists in participants sharing untranslatable terms from their own cultures, comparing them with global expressions such as YOLO or cringe. Small groups discuss terms such as saudade or ikigai, seeking cultural equivalents.
- Music & Language will show musical clips from diverse cultures to highlight how linguistic codes shape aesthetic and emotional perception (e.g., Why are in South America even sad situations often faced with a smile?). This also explores how different languages can alter the perception of the same song. The workshop concludes with a collective reflection captured in a final word cloud.
Each participant will also receive a booklet called “Communicating Emotions Across Languages – A Practical Guide” to follow the theoretical insights, capture key concepts, learn practical techniques to improve emotional cross-linguistic communication and keep a guide that could help them even after the workshop.
A final project will be the creative output of this workshop: Participants will produce an 8–10 minute short film featuring interviews, live scenes, and artistic inserts, to be shared beyond the campus.
