Both interlingual translation shifts and poetic production can be seen from a semiotic perspective in terms of mental filtering. The shared ground of the three processes - cognition, translation, versification - is to be found in the semiotic perspective: signs (prototext, reality, perception) are interpreted and worked through (mind, interpretants, cognition) and give as an output an object (metatext, poem, worldview). By trying to classify the shifts resulting from such processes - distortions - with a semiotically shared grid of categories, the hypothesis is that the categories themselves - already existing within the separate fields - can be reciprocally fine-tuned. The very notion of “shift” - derived from translation criticism, and in particular from the prototext-metatext comparison - becomes in this hypothesis a connection transforming the shifts possible in the other mentioned fields into mutual benchmarks.
The main problem of the historical understanding of translation lies in finding the appropriate metalanguages. Revisiting time in translation studies means finding complementarity between historical metalanguage for description of translational activity and semiotic metalanguage for understanding different sides of translatability. We have distinguished the achronic theoretical component in the unified discussion of translation history, the component concentrating on the analysis of the translator and the translation method. Next comes the synchronic receptive component, i.e., the analysis of the translator, translation and the target language culture thus concentrating on the status of translation in the given culture, the functions of translations, and the ways of rendering meaning to them. The third, evolutionary component is connected with the so-called minor diachrony, the analysis of the technical and psychological features of the translation process. The fourth, cultural history component is based on the so-called grand diachrony and focuses on the development of the translation practice with reference to the varying cycles in cultural history and the styles of specific periods.
This paper proposes a model of meaning-based translation shifts. While the definition of ‘meaning’ may be problematic at best, in practice it is possible to observe what remains in the reception of a message after it has been translated. The author draws on the work of Leuven-Zwart and Torop to build a new model with seven shift categories, each one identified by its influence on various aspects of reception. Examples for each shift category are taken from the first book of the Bible. The findings are channelled into a model for translation meaning.
Jakobson, in his essays, has tried to insert Peirce’s typology of signs (icon, index, symbol) in his own binary logic, in which every feature of a text may be considered or dismissed either with a 0 or with a 1 (absent, present). In so doing, he used the features “similarity versus contiguity” and “imputed versus factual”, and discovered that the notion of “imputed similarity” was not covered by Peirce’s triad. Hence the search for it. In this article, whose ideological basis and quotations are mostly from Jakobson’s essays, the author tries to show that the notion of “translation” may be the missing link. Starting from Peirce’s main triad, and its initial incomprehension among Western scholars influenced by Saussure, the interpretant is then viewed as the subjective, affective component of sign and its interpretation. Syntax, considered in Peircean and Jakobsonian terms, is iconic. The evolution of meaning, characterizing all communication, is possible thanks to construction and thanks to metaphoric and metonymic connections. In the last part of the article, cultural implications of communication — and translation — are considered.
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