Interpreting ‘grief’ in Senegal: language, emotions and cross-cultural translation in a francophone African context

This article reflects on the profound complexities of translating
and interpreting ‘grief’, and emotions and responses to death more
broadly, in multilingual, cross-cultural contexts. Drawing on qualitative
research conducted in urban Senegal, West Africa, we discuss
the exchange of meanings surrounding grief and death through
language, including the process of translation, in its broadest sense,
between multiple languages (Wolof, French, English). Our experiences
demonstrate the crucial importance of involving interpreters and field
researchers throughout the research process, to gain fundamental
insight into the cultural nuances of indigenous languages and how
these are translated and potentially re-framed in the process. We
reflect on our iterative process of discussing emerging interpretations
with participants in follow-up workshops and with our interpreter. This
approach helped shed light on language use surrounding ‘grief’ and
how this is bound up with wider socio-cultural norms which make
particular emotions surrounding death and experiences/meanings
of death and bereavement possible and ‘speak-able’. Our research
calls for greater recognition in death and bereavement studies of the
cultural specificity of conceptual frameworks developed in minority
European socio-linguistic contexts and demonstrates the need for
greater engagement with theoretical, empirical and methodological
insights gained in diverse cultural contexts in the Majority world.