Native speakers of English, Korean, and Malayalam (N = 30 in each group) rated their emotional reactions to stories describing events leading to anger, fear, sadness, and disgust. Speaker’s language had no significant effect for anger, fear, and sadness stories, but did for disgust stories. The category named by the English word disgust includes emotional reactions to distaste, pathogen-containing substances, blood, sex, and moral violations. The category named by disgust’s translations into Korean and Malayalam were narrower, a result that challenges translation equivalence. Lack of equivalence across languages is consistent with the argument that the English word disgust refers to a heterogeneous mix of similar but different emotional reactions.