Translation and Semiosisby Susan

Week 4

Translation and interpretation

• To translate is to interpret. 17• Translation is indirect discourse masked

as direct discourse. 22• Translation is indirect discourse if by

indirect discourse is understood discourse that analyzes, interprets, explicates, clarifies, solves ambiguities, decides on senses, establishes the intonation, orientation, intent according to which something is pronounced. 22

• As indirect discourse masked as direct discourse, as explanation and unfolding of the word of the other, translation must not be deferent towards the word in translation, it must not consider it as an authoritative word protected by boundaries, an inaccessible word, a word that withdraws from contact, closed in an attitude of haughty self-sufficiency. 22

Translation and dialogic interaction

Translation recovers the word’s constitutive dialogism with respect to other words. But not only: translation recovers the constitutive dialogism of historical-natural languages and their special languages in relation to other historical-natural languages and other special languages. 22

• To be an adequate interpretant…the translation-text must not simply repeat the interpreted, but must establish a relation of answering comprehension to it, a relation of dialogic distancing. 24

• Not a transferral of the “same meaning” into different signifiers. It is not a question of the “same” meaning transiting from the original-text to the translation-text. 24

“Iconic” relation

• Not a causal relation but a relation of “resemblance” to what it refers to. 24

• The translation must resemble the original.

• Resemblance does not obstacle the capacity for inventiveness, creativity and autonomy with respect to the original-text… 25

Iconic character of the translation

• A translation may have different aspirations and pretensions: it may simply accompany the original-text word by word, but, on the other hand, it may have the pretension of recreating the original-text in another language and succeed brilliantly, to the point that the translation has a value in itself and, if a question of a literary text, whether in prose or in poetry, reach high levels of esthetic value. 25

The question of translatability• The metalinguistic character of verbal signs: • reporting the discourse of others• But “translatability” does not only signify the pos

sibility of translation. It also indicates an open relation between a text in the original and its translation. As the general “interpretability” of a text… translatability also indicates that the translation of a text remains open, that a translated text may continue to be translated…31

• The inexhaustibility of the original in the text that translates it. 31

transsigns

• Signs translate each other: this is their condition of being signs. 32

• That signs and life—which is made of signs (life=semiosis)—are only possible in interrelation, interpretation, transposition, translation means that the being, the identity of something that signifies and is significant is inevitably rooted in otherness. The same sign is always the same other, for in order to be itself and continue being so, it must become other in intersign or transsign interpretation/translation processes. 33

• The sign does not only flourish on signs; it also flourishes among signs. It is this second situation, that of flourishing among signs, which provides the condition for the sign to subsist as a sign, that is, for the sign to flourish on signs. 33

• This among, between, trans, inter, does not only stand for relation but also for separation. 33

• The relation among signs is not continuous, but rather it is discontinuous, discrete. 33

Paradox of translation

• The text must remain the same while becoming other…the translated text is simultaneously identical and different with respect to the original text. 16