A (Bio)Semiotic Theory of Translation

The Emergence of Social-Cultural Reality

Kobus Marais

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351392044
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This volume outlines a theory of translation, set within the framework of Peircean semiotics, which challenges the linguistic bias in translation studies by proposing a semiotic theory that accounts for all instances of translation, not only interlinguistic translation. In particular, the volume explores cases of translation which does not include language at all. The book begins by examining different conceptualizations of translation to highlight how linguistic bias in translation studies and semiotics has informed these fields and their development. The volume then outlines a complexity theory of translation based on semiotics which incorporates process philosophy, semiotics, and translation theory. It posits that translation is the complex systemic process underlying semiosis, the result of which produces semiotic forms. The book concludes by looking at the implications of this conceptualization of translation on social-cultural emergence theory through an interdisciplinary lens, integrating perspectives from semiotics, social semiotics, and development studies. Paving the way for scholars to analyze translational aspects of all semiotic phenomena, this volume is essential reading for graduate students and researchers in translation studies, semiotics, multimodal studies, cultural studies, and development studies.

1 Translation Problematized

Over the past eight years, I have had the privilege to host in our department five brilliant postdoctoral researchers from all over the globe. They have all, in various ways, been instrumental in shaping my thinking on the nature of translation by confronting me with a variety of data about translator and translation practice, and conflicting ideas about translation and translation studies. This introductory narrative serves both as acknowledgment of their scholarship, friendship, and formative influence on my thinking, and as evidence of the wide variety of translation processes and phenomena that occurs across the world.

Sergey Tyulenev asked hard questions about translation being only about language—or even about meaning—using his in-depth knowledge of, among other fields, Luhmann’s systems sociology to explore the range of meanings of the notion of ‘inter,’ including the possibility that ‘inter’ is a purely logical category applicable to all of reality.

In our discussions, Caroline Mangerel presented fascinating data concerning semiotic process. One of her most famous examples involves translations of The Count of Monte Christo. She illustrates how this novel has been translated into different languages, and also into movies, cartoons, video games, and other media. She goes on to show a Japanese series with the title The Count of Monte Christo in which nothing but the title bears any relationship to the original novel. On basis of this data, she asks questions about the boundaries of translation. Is this Japanese series a translation of The Count of Monte Christo? If it is, is it a different type of translation, theoretically speaking, then interlingual translations? What are the minimum requirements for anything to be called a translation, because Japanese viewers would not necessarily regard these series as translations in the sense that Toury’s conceptualization of translation (as something regarded as a translation by the target culture) requires.

David Orrego Carmona told stories about colleagues who did not want to admit that his research on fan-subbing falls under translation studies. They argue that translation studies should study only professional translation. David’s data raise the following question: If modern communication and entertainment are increasingly multimedial, or multimodal, what is the relevance of definitions of translation that are limited to interlingual translation?

If DJ Afro, in Nairobi, Kenya, deletes the soundtracks on DVDs, and replaces it with that of soap operas from Hollywood or Bollywood, and adds his own text and even political commentary, is he a translator? How do you deal with being a refugee and being selected to act as an interpreter for the authorities, thereby holding in your hands the future of fellow refugees, who are your neighbors when you return to your tent at night? Are you translating or interpreting when you, as an ad hoc interpreter in a refugee camp, read questions from a list, but not in the language in which they are written? Carmen Delgado brought these and other questions to our discussions in the Department.

In a setting of religious interpreting in Turkey, Duygu Tekgul had to consider whether you can call someone a professional translator if this person interprets in a church, views her role as professional, and tries to submit to all professional requirements, but does not want to be paid (because her aim is rendering a service), has had no training and has no contract. Is the question about professionalism even relevant in the context? Duygu also confronted me with data about blogs aimed at popularizing scientific findings, and about the role translation plays in crossing both the boundary between expert and lay person (intralingual translation), and distributing the information across linguistic boundaries (interlingual translation) through a variety of modes (intersemiotic translation).

To these kinds of questions, I can add those that my news-translation colleague faces on a daily basis. Marlie van Rooyen deals with the reality that it is impossible to determine how many source texts there were for a particular news bulletin. It is equally impossible to determine how many target texts (spoken news, written news, twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc.) a news story, as source text, causes. Another colleague, Monnapula Molefe, studies all kinds of versions of public-service interpreting and translation, and found that people in the Global South find ways of communicating, despite a lack of political will to serve them in this regard. What about interpreting between animals and humans, is the question my interpreting colleague, Xany Jansen van Vuuren, is investigating in cases of ad-hoc interpreting during animal-welfare outreaches.

From all corners of the world, in this case, Russia, Canada, Columbia, Switzerland, Turkey, and South Africa, I have, thus, been confronted with data and ideas about translation processes and phenomena that question a conceptualization of translation that is limited to language, the formal economy, professional circles, or high literature (Marais & Feinauer, 2017).

Furthermore, in October 2016, I attended a conference called ‘Transmediations!: Communication Across Media Borders’ at the University of Linnaeus in Sweden (Transmediations Conference, 2016). On the last day of the conference, the well-known social semiotician, Gunther Kress, in a plenary address, listed some terminology referring to ‘trans’ phenomena that had been circulating at the conference: transcription, transformation, transduction, translation, transposition, transmission, transfer, transmediation, and transcultural. During the conference, I had also picked up, from the program and in presentations, terms such as transmodality, transfiction, transliteracy, transmedia navigation, transcreation, adaptation, ekphrasis, intersemiotic translation, semiotranslation, interart, voice description, cinematization, and gamification, representation, visual transmediation, metafilmic, kinekphrastic, transideology, interfigurality, and shapeshifting, which were used to refer to roughly similar phenomena or processes. One can add to this the notions of intermediality, intermodality, multimediality, and multimodality, as well as some very specific terminology, such as Elleström’s notion of media transformation, Ryan’s transmedia storytelling, Vitali-Rosati’s mediating conjuncture, Monjour’s anamorphosis, and Queiroz’s metaphor of cyborg (see the conference program at Transmediations Conference, 2016).

Elsewhere, I have also heard the terms intertextual, plurimedial, intermedial transposition, transfixing, transfiguration, resemiotization, transsensorial perception, inter-exchangeability, hypertextuality, and trans-editing strategy. Then there are the well-known ones, addition, deletion, retopicalization, restructuring, abridgment, and synthesis. Milton (2010), in turn, refers to appropriation, re-contextualization, tradaptation, spinoff, reduction, simplification, condensation, abridgment, special version, reworking, offshoot, transformation, remediation and re-vision, and Pym (1998, p. 60) coined the term ‘weakly marked translation’ for texts that are not marked as translation, but are built on previous semiotic traditions. Further additions include the notions of voice-over, audio-description, subtitling, and dubbing—all well-known in translation studies—as well as framing, rewriting, editing, and bulletin writing, from news translation and journalism. In language education, the notion of translanguaging has become popular (Makalela, 2015a, 2015b), and current culture experiences the notion of convergence in the simultaneous release of movies with games, toys, apps, etc., or the multimedia distribution of a particular news story (Jenkins, 2006).

In the Global South, one is, furthermore, confronted by refugees interpreting for relief organizations, by children reading medical prescriptions for grandparents who cannot read, and by community members who tell each other in a local language what a visiting politician said during a speech in English (Marais, 2014, pp. 146–159; Molefe & Marais, 2013). These are all phenomena for which we do not have names—yet. Ralarala (2016) coined the term ‘transpreters’ for the translator-interpreter in the police office, who, both verbally and in written language, interacts with complainants when taking down evidence. In Alamin Mazrui’s (2016, p. 157) book on translation in East Africa, he refers to the famous African scholar Ali Mazrui’s use of the terms transvaluation and transverbalization in the context of political and social development in Africa. In another context, he also speaks about transtextualization, and Aroch Fugelli (2008, p. 104) uses the term transcontextualization, in referring to the use of external referents without which a text would not be interpretable in a new context.

The practices, ideas, and terms I list earlier raise a number of pertinent questions. The first of these is whether all these practices or terms have something in common, or whether they refer to unique events or practices. Concomitantly, one can ask whether understanding the commonalities between them, if any, would add any value to understanding and theorizing these phenomena. Second, the practices and terms raise the question whether current conceptualizations of translation in translation studies and semiotics are broad enough to cover all of these examples. Should one argue that the conceptualization of translation needs to be broadened, it remains to argue how one would go about it. A third question relates to the relationship between these events or practices and the society or culture in which they emerge and which they cause to emerge. How do they constrain and how are they constrained by the social-cultural context in which they take place? These three questions drive the investigations in this book and my effort to suggest a comprehensive theory of translation that explains not only translational phenomena of all kinds, but also the pragmatic, social embeddedness, and creative power of translation.

First, if all of these ‘inter’ and ‘trans’ process-phenomena (and others) have anything in common, what could that be? In this book, I present the argument that all the terms noted earlier have in common, from the perspective of Peircean semiotics, that they are translation processes or phenomena. All these terms refer to the semiotic process-phenomena called ‘translation’ by Peirce, namely relating one system of signs to another system of signs, thus, creating interpretants. Linking interpretants to interpretants is the process through which all meaning is constructed, irrespective of the medium in which it is done and the socio-cultural constraints under which it takes place. Contrary to conventional wisdom in translation studies, which conceptualizes translation inductively, I argue that Peirce gave us a way to complement inductive conceptualizations of translation with a deductive conceptualization: Translation entails negentropic semiotic work to create meaning by means of imposing constraints on the semiotic process. I work out the details of this conceptualization in Chapters 4–6. The implication of this approach is that I am not looking for process-phenomena that are ‘translations,’ and I am not looking for people who call themselves translators or are called ‘translators’ by others. Rather, the definition allows me to look for the translational aspect of any semiotic process. This does not mean that everything is translation, far from it. It might, however, mean that processes or phenomena that are not called translations—or that are not immediately recognized as interlingual translations—might have translational aspects to them. It might also mean that phenomena that are not recognized by a society or culture as a translation might entail translational aspects. Thus, wherever there is semiosis, there will be some kind of translational aspect to it. My approach is advantageous in that it does not submit scholarly work to the limitations of popular perception, namely that a scholar can only study something as a translation if a particular audience regards it as such. With my approach, scholars of translation can study all semiotic process, comparing translations ranging from DNA processes through animal interaction and human politics and power, to dreams and other flights of fantasy.

It is noticeable from the plethora of terms earlier that the prefixes ‘inter’ and ‘trans’ dominate, reflecting process thinking. Also noticeable is a growing focus on linking ‘inter’ and ‘trans’ to a particular material medium or cultural mode, e.g. transfiction, interart, which is caused, among others, by technological developments and the ability to reconstruct meaning in a variety of material forms. As indicated, the examples in the previous paragraphs reflect the variety of media and modalities, the development of technology with its concomitant affordances and the differences in social and cultural organization that play a role in shaping the different forms that semiotic processes take. Reciprocally, these processes also shape the media or modalities, technology, and social-cultural¹ organization in which they operate. While process is, thus, at the center of my interest in this book, process itself does not remain formless. This means that form and structure is equally—paradoxically and complexly—central in this book. I take process and form to stand in a complex relationship, where process is primary, both historically and logically, and where form emerges out of processes as they move forward in time. In a reversal of the conventional figure and background, which take form to be primary and processes of change to be secondary, I am interested in the emergence of form from process. As far as translation is concerned, I am interested in the emergence of forms of meaning from processes of meaning (processes to which Merrell, 2000a, p. 48) generally refers to as making and taking meaning, i.e. producing and interpreting signs). I have this interest, because, as much as I argue for the primacy of process (Whitehead, 1985), I understand that processes have the habit (in the Peircean sense, to be explained later) of taking form. In particular, I am trying to investigate the relationship between process and form in semiosis, and I mostly use the term process-phenomenon to make it clear that I refer to both.

This book is, therefore, not about things. It is about processes, in particular, the processes of creating relationships between things—including ideas. It is about the way processes become things. It is about change, but not about how things change. It is about how processes change to become things—and are changed to become other things. While much thinking in the humanities assumes things and is trying to explain change and process, I am assuming change and process with the aim of trying to explain how these processes become stable enough to be recognized as things. Process, left to its own devices, results in chaos. What we need to understand is how to constrain process to create form.

Though process, translation takes a plethora of forms, depending on medium, technology, culture, time, and space, among others. This means that one needs to provide subcategories of translation in order to operationalize the theoretical Peircean construct for the sake of doing empirical research. Differences in the materiality of the translation process, caused by new developments in technology and various social constraints, are highly relevant to detailed empirical analyses, though, as I shall argue in Chapter 5, these are not the only types of translation. Thus, if one focuses on the commonalities among semiotic processes only, the theory is too vague to be of empirical-analytical use—just like the inductive focus causes translation studies to be limited in its theoretical conceptualization. Also, if one focuses on the differences among semiotic processes, as is currently the trend, the theory becomes solipsistically closed in on itself, claiming that the communication in a particular medium is so unique that it has no links with other forms of semiotic process. This causes a lack of comparative awareness between different semiotic systems and different translations. I explore Peircean phenomenology and semiotics to see if it renders any useful notions with which to categorize the diversity of translational phenomena and processes. To this task of conceptualizing categories of translation, I turn in Chapter 5.

One point of criticism that can be leveled against my project is that it stretches the concept of translation so thin that it undermines the discipline. First, I am not interested in defending or promoting a discipline. Rather, I am interested in understanding a process-phenomenon in reality. Second, I am not convinced by the argument that a broader conceptualization is harmful to any field of study. Would that be so, historians would have come up with a very restricted notion of what history entails, or mathematicians or physicists would have come up with a similarly restricted conceptualization of mathematics or physics. Third, from a complexity perspective, I choose not to favor either universalism or particularism. Rather, the way in which we understand anything entails a complex interplay of more general and more particular conceptualization and data.

Second, why is current translation studies not able to, or why does it choose not to study all of the phenomena in which the prefix ‘trans’ or ‘inter,’ to which I referred earlier, occurs (Robinson, 2016, p. 11)? It is frustrating (for me) to see how translation studies, which could be a field of study concerned with all of these process-phenomena, have limited itself to the notion of interlinguistic translation. I spend some time in the book explaining the origins and the nature of this linguistic bias, and point out that it has become irrelevant, if not downright obstructive to do so in a context of technological advances, basing my argument on, among others, Peirce. He argues that ‘[i]t might be supposed that although such a study [of speculative semeiotic] cannot draw any principles from the study of languages, that linguistics might still afford valuable suggestions’ (MS 693, pp. 191–192). I also spend some time explaining the bias as originating in a cultural context where (written) language is seen as the pinnacle of civilization, thereby favoring one set of historical-social constraints at the expense of many others (Bandia, 2008; Finnegan, 2007; Jousse, 2000; Ong, 1967, 1995). The Peircean conceptualization I present makes it possible to explain the ‘translation-ness,’ or the translationality of all of the ‘inter’ and ‘trans’ process-phenomena, and even process-phenomena indicated by other terms, thereby expanding the comparative power of translation studies. This effort, indeed, reminds of the Russian Formalists at the beginning of the 20th century, trying to come to terms with the ‘literariness’ of literary texts. My approach will be neither formalist nor structuralist, but, rather, process-oriented and, thus, emergent, but I do think that translation studies would, like literary studies, benefit from moving toward an interest in translationality, rather than translations or translators—although the former does not exclude the latter.

The question is then whether, in its current form, translation studies is able to account for the proliferation of translational actions made possible by technological development? The answer has to be no. Translation studies that focus on interlingual translation are not able to account for new developments in technology—developments that are not only recasting the notion of text, but also that of communication, meaning and, perhaps, even language (Danesi, 2016). Kress (e.g. 2010) has noted for a while now that very little, if any, communication takes place within one, what he calls, modality only. I try to show how irrelevant translation studies is becoming, because its bias toward written language is excluding it (translation studies) from the debate about multimodality/multimediality. Communication and meaning-making and meaning-taking usually takes place with various modalities or mediums at the same time. Even the written text is influenced by the multimodal materiality of the pages, the font type and color, the size of the book and the cover thereof, among others (Sonzogni, 2011).

Third, if my earlier argument, namely that the empirical evidence calls for a wider conceptualization of translation, holds, the question is, how can the current conceptualization be expanded? Translation studies has gone through a number of turns that had the aim of expanding the conceptualization of translation. I shall argue in Chapter 2 t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Translation Problematized
• 2 Conceptualizing Translation in Translation Studies
• 3 Conceptualizing Translation in Semiotics
• 4 Translation: The Process Underlying Semiosis
• 5 Conceptualizing a Semiotic Theory of Translation
• 6 Translating Socio-cultural Emergence
• 7 Musing About the Future of Reality in the Humanities
• References
• Index