Semiosis and intersemiotic translation

Abstract

This paper explores Victoria Welby's fundamental assumption of meaning process ("semiosis" sensu Peirce) as translation, and some implications for the development of a general model of intersemiotic translation.

C. S. Peirce and Intersemiotic Translation

“…Our approach is based on the premise that IT is fundamentally an irreductible triadic relation (semiosis). Beyond that, as many authors have claimed (see Petrilli and Ponzio 2010;Gorlée 1994Gorlée , p. 10, 2005Plaza 1987), we assert that IT is predominantly a multilayered iconic relation (see Queiroz and Aguiar 2013;Aguiar and Queiroz 2009, 2011a. Here, we explore some consequences of those perspectives.…”

Sensory translation between audition and vision

“…For example, a wide variety of inventors, designers, and artists have tried to translate music into light, colours and perfumes, while many novelists and poets have shaped their own style through the use of cross-sensory, or synaesthetic, metaphors, that is, ways of describing one kind of sensory experience by means of another presented in a different sensory domain. Here, exploiting the traditional meaning of translation, conceived as “a craft consisting in the attempt to replace a written message and/or statement in one language by the same message and/or statement in another language” (Newmark, 1981 , p. 7; see also Aguiar & Queiroz, 2013 ), we propose to refer to this broad spectrum of phenomena with the umbrella term ‘ sensory translation ’ (see Table 1 for a definition of a number of the key concepts appearing in this review).…”

Transduction and Meaning–Making Issues Within Multimodal Messages

“…to transpose their components from one modality to another. In the literature, this action is called 'translation' and it takes place both at an intrasemiotic and an intersemiotic level (O'Halloran 2005, Aguiar and Queiroz 2012, Aguiar and Queiroz 2013. As presented in the literature, the difference between the two resides in that intrasemiotic translation implies transposing data within the same type of modes, such as translating from one language to another, whereas intersemiotic translation regards the cases when translation is transmodal, i.e.…”

“…In this respect, Thibault (2000) argues that multimodal analysis must not divide meaning according to codes or channels deployed, on the contrary, it should treat the message as an ensemble. Also, researchers are divided between those claiming that modes are able to replace each other (O'Halloran and Liu 2009), and those insisting that different meaning-making systems are incommensurable and cannot remake meaning in one-to-one correspondence (Lemke 1998, Chiew 2004, Aguiar and Queiroz 2012, Aguiar and Queiroz 2013.…”