TITLE: Notes on Translation
Can We Truly Feel What Another Person Feels?
There are experiences in life that resist explanation. You can describe them carefully, patiently, even beautifully, and still fail to make another person feel what you mean. Take the sensation commonly described as “butterflies”.
A person can study it in detail: the physiology of anticipation, the tightening of the stomach, the quickening pulse. They can learn why the sensation exists and what purpose it serves. None of this guarantees understanding. Until it is felt, the experience remains abstract. In moments like these, understanding depends less on explanation than on whether the listener has lived something close enough to recognise it.
This gap is where explanation and feeling diverge. Medical science can explain what happens during a stroke, and economics can explain how debt accumulates. Yet these explanations do not transmit the pain of illness or the anxiety of mounting bills. Knowledge moves easily between people; experience does not.
To translate a feeling is not to reproduce it, but to approximate it. When we try to understand how another person feels, we do not enter their experience directly. We search our own past for something structurally similar; an emotional echo we can use as a reference point.
An Olympic sprinter may never know what it feels like to win Wimbledon, yet they can recognise the compression of years of discipline into a single moment where everything is at stake. A chef earning three Michelin stars may recognise something similar in a banker taking a company public: long periods of obscurity, obsessive attention to detail, responsibility for large teams, and the knowledge that a single failure can undo years of work. The outcomes differ, but the internal pressures align closely enough for recognition to occur. Experience does not need to be identical for understanding to travel; it needs only to be adjacent.
This is where empathy enters, and where its limits become visible. Empathy is often described as the ability to feel what another person feels. In practice, it relies on lived reference. We approach another person’s inner world only as far as our own experience allows. Without a comparable internal structure, empathy becomes imaginative rather than experiential; an act of inference rather than feeling.
Grief makes this especially clear. We do not need to have lost a loved one to recognise grief, but we do need some experience of loss: the end of a relationship, the collapse of an imagined future, the realisation that something once central is gone for good. These moments create the internal reference points that allow descriptions of grief to land. Without them, language remains abstract. With them, recognition can be immediate.
To fully feel what another person feels would require more than sympathy or imagination. It would require a complete alignment of inner conditions: memory, risk, consequence, and bodily state. This is not something human consciousness can sustain.
Imagine reacting to every stranger’s distress with the same urgency you reserve for your own child or partner. A cry on the street would carry the same weight as a call from home; a headline would interrupt your day as forcefully as a family emergency. Daily life would become unmanageable.
Human empathy is therefore constrained by necessity. We attend most strongly to those whose survival is bound to our own — family, kin, close allies. Care radiates outward, but it weakens with distance. This is not a moral failing; it is a condition that allows social life to function at all.
It’s also important to note that feeling cannot be shared; it can only be reconstructed through individual memory. Language does not carry experience from one mind to another; it prompts reconstruction. Words do not transmit pain, fear, or joy directly; they activate stored experiences in the listener. Meaning arrives not through the word itself, but through the memory it summons.
If someone tells you they slipped, fell, and bruised their knee, you do not feel their pain. You feel your memory of pain. The sharp sting of impact, the heat beneath the skin, the dull ache that follows. Their words do not deliver the sensation itself; they cue a retrieval. You reach backward into your own experience and assemble a stand-in.
Without that internal reference, the account remains factual but inert. You understand what happened, but not what it felt like. With it, understanding becomes possible, not because the experience has been shared, but because something structurally similar has already been lived. Language, in this sense, does not transmit feeling. It instructs the listener where to look inside themselves.
This reveals an irony at the heart of empathy: the more severe the situation, the harder it becomes to truly feel the actual emotion the original event produced. Take the example of The Diary of a Young Girl; it brings us closer to its author than almost any historical document. Anne Frank’s voice feels immediate, personal, alive. We read her words knowing they were written under constant threat, in real time, without hindsight.
And yet this proximity sharpens an uncomfortable truth. Even here, we do not feel what she felt. We encounter her thoughts, her fear, her hope, but not the tension of hiding, the sustained confinement, the uncertainty of survival. Whatever reaches us is filtered through safety. The diary carries consciousness with extraordinary clarity, but experience remains anchored to its original conditions. The distance narrows, but it does not disappear.
Taken together, this suggests a interesting and even unsettling conclusion. Language can bring us close, sometimes close enough that understanding feels complete. But feeling what another person feels would require more than words, resonance, or empathy. It would require becoming them.
Experience does not travel freely between people. It is bound to the body that lives it, the memory that shapes it, and the moment that contains it. We can approach another person’s inner world, recognise its contours, and respond with care. But we never fully cross the threshold.
So the answer to the question is both simple and limited. We can understand others only through approximation. We can feel with them, but not as them. Language brings us to the edge of another person’s experience, and no further; and perhaps that is the true beauty of empathy itself.
Author’s Note
This piece was inspired by a book that treats translation as more than language; as a way of thinking about consciousness and how meaning takes shape. What started as a question about whether experience can be translated slowly shifted into something more personal: a reflection on empathy, and on whether it’s ever possible to feel exactly what another person feels, or whether that idea collapses at the edges of human awareness.
