Pain is a sensory and emotional experience that relies heavily on language for communication. While English pain expressions often use vivid metaphors such as "a burning fire" or "a storm in my head" to describe sensory and emotional experiences, Chinese expressions frequently incorporate imagery from TCM, such as “气痛” (qi pain) or “风湿” (wind-damp), which cannot be translated directly into English.
This study proposes the following questions:
RQ1: How do English and Chinese speakers express pain in their native language, and what are the key linguistic and cultural differences?
RQ2: What challenges do English and Chinese language learners face when expressing pain in their second language, and how do linguistic and cultural factors influence their ability to express pain?
RQ3: How do cross-linguistic variations in pain expressions inform cross-cultural communication, healthcare practices, and patient-provider interactions, and what insights can these variations offer for improving cultural sensitivity in medical settings?
We will combine quantitative and qualitative methods, including corpus analysis and real-life observations in medical settings. Data will be collected from native speakers and second-language learners through medical scenarios and semi-structured interviews. Contrastive and discourse analyses will be conducted to uncover linguistic patterns, cultural nuances, and common challenges in pain expression.
The findings are expected to enhance cross-cultural communication in healthcare, improve multilingual pain assessment tools, and contribute to linguistic theory and second-language acquisition studies. By addressing linguistic and cultural nuances, the research aspires to bridge communication gaps and foster more empathetic and effective patient care in multilingual healthcare environments.