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Article published In:
Translation and Translanguaging in Multilingual Contexts
Vol. 8:3 (2022) ► pp.232–259

Translatability, modeling, otherness and the intersemiotic spaces of meaning

| Università degli Studi di Bari Aldo Moro

What comes to the attention immediately in translation is the relationship between the initial text and the destination text. In interlingual translation these two texts belong to two different historical-natural languages, the transition is from the verbal to the verbal. But the interpretive trajectory transits through multiple sign systems, never exclusively verbal. Interlingual translation involves the verbal signs of historical-natural languages, but is also of the semiotic order. Signs call for interpretants. In terms of Ogden and Richard’s meaning triangle, to reach from the sign to what it means without passing through the apex representing the act of interpretation is not possible. Evoking authors who have contributed to understanding the semiotic nature of interpretive work and signifying processes, implied in the simplest act of translation, my task here is to evidence just how semiotically complex the work of translation is even in the case of interlingual translation.

Keywords: alterity, common-meaning, expressibility, interpretant/interpretation, metalinguistic-capacity, modeling/translatability, repeatability/uniqueness, sense/meaning/significance
Article outline
  • 1.Translation and intersemioticity
  • 2.Two texts and many signs, modeling and translation
  • 3.Translatability and expressibility
  • 4.“Common meaning” (Welby) and “common speech” (Rossi-Landi)
  • 5.Translation, dialogue and alterity
  • 6.Reported discourse as translation
  • 7.Translation faithful to the text’s alterity
  • 8.Translation between repeatability and singularity
  • 9.By way of concluding
  • References
Published online: 13 October 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ttmc.00093.pet
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