How much information is lost when conveying an experience or emotion to another person? Certain languages have words that do not literally translate into any another language.  There is already a small loss of information in this sense.  

Emotions are a personal experience and the gravity and meaning of them are dependent on the person who experiences them.  The same goes for all conscious experiences.

So how much information is lost when one person is trying to convey these personal experiences with another person?  Will actions carry more relevant data than words when explaining a personal experience?

Is there any way to quantify the loss in translation of experiences?
Communication is always a lossy and inexact process. If I am trying to convey information to you - the times of trains, for example - I can use dates and times that I can be confident that you will interpret the same way I do. But you may not - I may say the train leaves at 8:40, and you assume I mean the morning, whereas I actually mean the evening. So while there is a consistent and standardised worldview that I share, I can have reasonably high confidence in this.

When it comes to emotions, these are, by definition, more subjective. The shared worldview is much smaller, and the chances of the words having the same meaning between us is significantly less. Because most words actually have emotional resonances, there is always this danger, but when the emotional resonance is the intention, this is an issue. I can only be sure of communicating the emotions to you if we share the same emotional language.

This language is build though our experiences, memories, make-up etc, so to share a language, we need to share all of this - effectively impossible. To measure the difference, we would need to do a substantial comparison of the relevant worldviews of the two communicants. Given that most people cannot even start to quantify their own dominant worldview, this does not seem likely.


Just noted - you referred to experiences not emotions. However the same applies, because our experiences are communicated emotionally.