Una traduzione al bacio. “A kiss is still a kiss?”

Translating kisses, kissing, sending and receiving kisses, and the action of kissing, is a most challenging and delicate work for the cross-cultural difference in meaning, traditions, and usage, also within European languages. Romance languages like Latin and French have different words to define kisses. The English and the Germans have invented the “French kiss” which can also have different meanings; there is no British kiss, however.  German has myriads of categorizations with compounds and affixations. Erotic scenes, description of passion and feelings,  spiritual love, symbolic kisses, rituals of emotions, and even cuddling  run such risks. Translating can thus be a daunting task, especially in scenes of kissing, when even adding the lightest feather  to the softest breath may unbalance the scales of emotions thus flawing the image it evokes. The intensity of the visual and verbal description may weigh upon the scale of the emotional flow and climax.

The book has been translated into German as Übersetzung Zum Kuss. “A Kiss is Still a  Kiss...?” Ein Komparativer und Kultureller Übersetzungsansatz: Zwischen Archetypen  Stereotypen und Metaphern, edited by Hannelore Lee-Jahnke and Tanja Heiden; technical coordinator Fabio Speciale with the translators recorded on the cover, Nina Kienzler, Barbara Leuenberger, Thomas Pescia, Katharina Tschopp, and Nelly Sciumbaruto (University of Geneva).