Eventually we circle back to the problem of translation: How are we to understand these Minangkabau and Indonesian words through English? We have already stated the assumption that single-word translations are, a priori, suspect. In fact, there are some translation equivalents that may turn out to be quite satisfactory: “anger” and marah, for example, match very well. In other parts of the emotion realm the correspondence is less good: cinta is close to “love,” but it implies more of pity and sadness, less of happiness, than does the English word.

The most economical solution would be to compare unabridged dictionary definitions for closest-fit words in two languages. This move would be based on the (ironic) assumption that although a one-word translation is likely to be off, lots of these inaccurate words will describe a lexical concept better.

Here we can draw on several rich sources. For English, we have the definitive Oxford English Dictionary and the study by Joel R. Davitz, “The Language of Emotion” (1969). (Davitz used a checklist of 556 possible statements about emotions. Fifty American subjects selected the appropriate items on the checklist for each of fifty common emotion words.