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Fellow German here. Funny thing about DeepL: It translates "pathetisch" as "pathetic". For example: "Das war eine pathetische Rede." -> "That was a pathetic speech." I guess we have to get used to software redefining the meaning of words. It was kind of funny when that happened regarding Google Maps / neighborhood names, but with LLMs it's a different ballgame.
Pathetic can mean emotional in English as well. Though I only discovered that by reading the dictionary. For anyone who doesn't speak German, pathetisch means with pathos, impassioned.
A native English speaker probably would only use "pathetic" to mean "emotional" if the emotions were specifically negative. They also would use pathetic to describe someone experiencing non-emotional suffering such as injury or poverty.
Therefore, a native English speaker probably would not use "pathetic" to mean "emotional" in everyday writing. However, I could definitely see someone using it to mean emotional when they were being more poetic. For example, I could see someone calling an essay on the emotional toll of counseling "The Pathetic Class" in order to imply that social workers are a class that society has tasked with confronting negative emotions.