Understanding and translating the HEART and the SOUL

Understanding and translating the heart and the soul This paper will focus on two rival synonyms, the heart and the soul, in order to understand what they mean and the values they engender. Is the soul a value in itself or the property of other ideals? How does the heart contain or relate to other virtues? Is the heart good in and of itself? This would appear to be the case, if we consider ‘heartless’, and the gift of the heart to men by God. But even at the beginning of Genesis, the heart of men is said to be ‘evil’. For recent scholars such as Naugle (2002), on the other hand, the heart offers us a way out of the relativism inherent in the concept of ‘worldview’: the heart perceives, receives, wills, believes intuits and understands. This paper aims to raise questions about the methodology of ethnolinguistic research, and to make a contribution to translation studies