Chapter 5
Tom, Dick and Harry as well as Fido and Puss in boots are
translators
The implications of biosemiotics for translation
studies
As a field, translation studies arose from the
practice of interlingual, mostly written translation. Though not an
invalid point of departure, this assumption, which had not really
been investigated critically despite lip service to Jakobson’s
categories of intralinguistic, interlinguistic and intersemiotic
translation, has meant that translation studies has limited its
field of interest to, mainly, written, literary, professional
translation as instantiated by Western practices. This linguistic
bias has an anthropocentric bias as its logical implication. The
limited conceptualization of translation has become untenable for a
number of reasons, not least of which is the growth in multimodal
communication made possible by information-technology developments
as well as the growth in posthumanist thinking. Lastly, semiotic
conceptualizations of translation clearly pose theoretical
challenges to a translation studies that is conceptualized on the
basis of interlinguistic translation only or that is based on a
linguicentric and thus anthropocentric bias.
This chapter investigates the Peircean definition
of meaning as “the translation of a sign into another system of
signs” (Peirce
1931–1966: 4.127), in particular the ways in which this kind
of thinking has evolved in the modern field of biosemiotics. If all
meaning creation is, per definition, translation, it means that
every living organism is a translator. It further means that one
needs to consider translational actions by animals and plants at
both intraspecific and interspecific levels. The chapter addresses
the asymmetry both in the relationships between human and non-human
animals and in the attention that translation studies pays to this
power dynamic.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Non-Professional Interpreting and Translation (NPIT)
- 3.Biosemiotics
- 3.1Theoretical biosemiotics
- 3.1.1Overview
- 3.1.2The evolution of semiosis
- 3.1.3The unity of life
- 3.1.4Questioning cultural and linguistic relativism
- 3.1.5Meaning is grounded
- 3.1.6The adjacent possible
- 3.2Applied biosemiotics
- 4.Implications
- 5.Conclusion
-
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