Broken signs: The architectonic translation of Peirce's fragments

Abstract

Peirce's writings are understood and translated in their interweaved fragments without final form. The broken and unbroken fragmentary items of language correspond to degrees of tone, token, and type as Peirce's building blocks of his three superlative categories. The collective and private meanings of Firsts, Seconds, and Thirds are embodied in vague bricolages and grounding paraphrases toward the (maybe idealized) whole manuscript version. Semio-translation, the process of reading and translating from one language into another, speaks about metaphrase, periphrase, and superphrase in order to construct the proposed verbal meaning, corresponding to the judgmental semiosis of Peirce's writings. The text of his entire manuscripts (in edited and unedited versions) give the readers (including translators as privileged readers) the opportunity of various degrees of justification and doubt of possible meanings, casted on what is the fragmentariness, elementariness, and holism of his oeuvre. Using the available translations of Peirce's English writings into German, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, Norwegian, and other languages, translation criticism perceives di¤erent upward and downward habits at work, creating acceptable and unacceptable solutions in the target language of philosophical and narrative genres.

Goethe's glosses to translation

“…Anticipating the idea of intersemiotic translation, Goethe's approach seemed in some ways to anticipate biosemiotics. Indeed, the wilderness of the thistle pathshooting up from the wild rhizomes, thrusting forth thorny weeds with sharp spines and prickly margins -comes alive in the nomadic wanderings into the translator's semiosis or pseudo-semiosis (Kull, Torop 2003, Gorlée 2004a). As a warning against the business of "a thousand hindrances" of translation, Goethe's proverb said, "one must not expect grapes from thorns, or figs from thistles […]" (Eckermann 1946: 385, 199).…”

“…The threeway elements are not separate but interact with each other in semiosis, when possible. Translators, as human interpreters, work with pseudo-semiosis or Peirce's degenerate semiosis (Gorlée 1990; see fn. 1), as argued here.…”

“…A translation is a (re)creative work by a translator (or various translators), going through successive moods, aspects, and phases of the never-ending acts of translation. Simplifying the complex tasks of the translator, the vague and impromptu translations, made by so-called "bad" translators bringing in unintegrated and illogical impressions, could under the fortunate circumstances of "good" translators grow to become clear translations, giving higher determined and logical features -or performing any interpretant-messages whatsoever between "good" and "bad" (Gorlée 2004a(Gorlée : 167, 2004b) in what can be called intermediate types.…”

Meaning in translation: A model based on translation shifts

“…Charles Sanders Peirce, the founder of the science of signification, did not leave a corpus of texts, but rather fragments (Gorlée 2007), which are a virtually unending source for reflection on, among other things, the nature of meaning; and one of the most widespread definitions of 'meaning' coincides with the process of translation. According to Peirce, who as far as we know never had in mind interlingual or verbal translation, "the meaning of a sign is the sign it has to be translated into" (4:132).…”

From words and sentences to interjections: The anatomy of exclamations in Peirce and Wittgenstein

“…The geometrical diagrams are unable to provide the general meaning of the linguistic universe of discourse, but remain within the literal and figurative forms of "language." "Language" turns into fragmentary forms (Gorlée 2007) of writing separate paragraphs, lectures, and manuscripts embodying the interjectional mood of the culturally-linked ideas, aphorisms, and episodes of Peirce's metanarratives.…”