The Routledge Handbook of Translation Theory and Concepts [1 ed.] 036775200X, 9780367752002

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
List of Contributors
Part I: Introduction
Part II: Foundations
1 Epistemological Positions
2 Ontological Positions
3 Positions in Research Methodology
Part III: Object Translation
4 Biosemiotic Approaches
5 Approaches to the Sociology of Knowledge
6 Ecological Approaches
Part IV: Representamen Translation
7 Philosophical Approaches
8 Linguistic Approaches
9 Functionalist Approaches
10 Descriptive Approaches
11 Systems Approaches
12 Cultural Approaches
13 Sociological Approaches
14 Activist Approaches
15 Anthropological Approaches
16 Interdisciplinary Approaches
17 Approaches from Computational Sciences
18 Intersemiotic Approaches
19 A Social Semiotic Multimodal Approach to Translation
20 Intermedial Approaches
Part V: Interpretant Translation
21 Hermeneutic Approaches
22 Approaches to Knowledge Translation
23 Approaches to Reception
Index

Citation preview

The Routledge Handbook of Translation Theory and Concepts

This is the first handbook to focus on translation theory, based on an innovative and expanded definition of translation and on the newest perspectives in the field of Translation Studies. With an introductory overview explaining the rationale, a part on foundational issues and three further parts on object translation, representamen translation and interpretant translation, the handbook provides a critical overview of conceptual approaches to translation which can contribute to our understanding of translational phenomena in the broadest sense. Authored by leading international figures, the handbook covers a wide range of theories and approaches from ecological and biosemiotic approaches to philosophical and cultural approaches, and from computational sciences to anthropology. The Routledge Handbook of Translation Theory and Concepts is both an essential reference guide for advanced students, researchers and scholars in translation and interpreting studies, and it is an enlightening guide to future developments in the field. Reine Meylaerts is Full Professor of Comparative Literature and Translation Studies at KU Leuven, Belgium, and is currently (2021-2025) Vice-Rector Humanities and Social Sciences. She was review editor of Target. International Journal of Translation Studies (2011–2017) and former Secretary General (2004–2007) of the European Society for Translation Studies (EST). She is the author of various books, including co-editor, with Kobus Marais, of Complexity Thinking in Translation Studies: Methodological Considerations (Routledge, 2018). Kobus Marais is Professor of Translation Studies in the Department of Linguistics and Language Practice at the University of the Free State, Bloemfontein, South Africa. He has published two monographs, Translation Theory and Development Studies: A Complexity Theory Approach (2014) and A (Bio)Semiotic Theory of Translation: The Emergence of Social-Cultural Reality (2018), with Routledge. He has also published two edited volumes: Translation Studies Beyond the Postcolony (with Ilse Feinauer, 2017) and Complexity Thinking in Translation Studies: Methodological Considerations (with Reine Meylaerts, Routledge 2018).

Routledge Handbooks in Translation and Interpreting Studies

Routledge Handbooks in Translation and Interpreting Studies provide comprehensive overviews of the key topics in translation and interpreting studies. All entries for the handbooks are specially commissioned and written by leading scholars in the field. Clear, accessible and carefully edited, Routledge Handbooks in Translation and Interpreting Studies are the ideal resource for both advanced undergraduates and postgraduate students. The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Methodology Edited by Federico Zanettin and Christopher Rundle The Routledge Handbook of Audio Description Edited by Christopher Taylor and Elisa Perego The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Memory Edited by Sharon Deane-Cox and Anneleen Spiessens The Routledge Handbook of Sign Language Translation and Interpreting Edited by Christopher Stone, Robert Adam, Ronice Quadros de Müller, and Christian Rathmann The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Religion Edited by Hephzibah Israel The Routledge Handbook of Translation, Interpreting, and Bilingualism Edited by Aline Ferreira and John W. Schwieter The Routledge Handbook of Latin American Literary Translation Edited by Delfina Cabrera and Denise Kripper The Routledge Handbook of Translation Theory and Concepts Edited by Reine Meylaerts and Kobus Marais

For a full list of titles in this series, please visit https://www.routledge.com/RoutledgeHandbooks-in-Translation-and-Interpreting-Studies/book-series/RHTI.

The Routledge Handbook of Translation Theory and Concepts

Edited by Reine Meylaerts and Kobus Marais

Designed cover image: Getty Images | lindsay_imagery First published 2023 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 selection and editorial matter, Reine Meylaerts and Kobus Marais; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Reine Meylaerts and Kobus Marais to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Meylaerts, Reine, editor. | Marais, Kobus, editor. Title: The Routledge handbook of translation theory and concepts / edited by Reine Meylaerts, Kobus Marais. Description: Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY : Routledge, 2023. | Series: Routledge handbooks in translation and interpreting studies | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022047481 | ISBN 9780367752002 (hardback) | ISBN 9780367752019 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003161448 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Translating and interpreting. | LCGFT: Essays. Classification: LCC P306.R69 2023 | DDC 418/.02—dc23/eng/20221006 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022047481 ISBN: 978-0-367-75200-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-75201-9 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-16144-8 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003161448 Typeset in Bembo by codeMantra

Contents

List of contributors

ix

PART I

Introduction Reine Meylaerts and Kobus Marais

1

PART II

Foundations

11

1 Epistemological positions Álvaro Marín García

13

2 Ontological positions Piotr Blumczynski and Neil Sadler

28

3 Positions in research methodology Gabriela Saldanha

51

PART III

Object translation

75

4 Biosemiotic approaches Kalevi Kull

77

5 Approaches to the sociology of knowledge Maud Gonne

94

6 Ecological approaches Carolyn Shread

113

v

Contents

PART IV

Representamen translation

127

7 Philosophical approaches Salah Basalamah

129

8 Linguistic approaches Kirsten Malmkjær

155

9 Functionalist approaches Christiane Nord

169

10 Descriptive approaches Alexandra Assis Rosa

185

11 Systems approaches Sergey Tyulenev and Wenyan Luo

208

12 Cultural approaches Brian James Baer

224

13 Sociological approaches Moira Inghilleri

241

14 Activist approaches Jan Buts

263

15 Anthropological approaches Peter Flynn

283

16 Interdisciplinary approaches Cornelia Zwischenberger

307

17 Approaches from computational sciences Lynne Bowker

326

18 Intersemiotic approaches Susan Petrilli and Margherita Zanoletti

340

19 A social semiotic multimodal approach to translation Elisabetta Adami

369

20 Intermedial approaches Lars Elleström

389

vi

Contents

PART V

Interpretant translation

411

21 Hermeneutic approaches Douglas Robinson

413

22 Approaches to knowledge translation Karen Bennett

443

23 Approaches to reception Keyan G. Tomaselli

463

Index

485

vii

Contributors

Elisabetta Adami, PhD, is Associate Professor in Multimodal Communication at the University of Leeds, UK. Her research specializes in social semiotic multimodal analysis, with a current focus on issues of culture and translation. She has published on sign-making practices in place (on urban visual landscapes and superdiversity), in digital environments (on webdesign aesthetics and interactivity, on YouTube video-interaction, on the affordances of mobile devices and on intercultural digital literacies) and in face-to-face interaction (in intercultural contexts and in deaf-hearing interactions). She coordinated the transnational and transmedia participatory project PanMeMic – Meaning-Making of Interaction and Communication in the Pandemic and beyond, is editor of Multimodality & Society (SAGE) and leads Multimodality@Leeds. Alexandra Assis Rosa  is Professor of English at the School of Arts and Humanities University of Lisbon, Portugal. She teaches Media, Scientific and Technical Translation, English Linguistics and Discourse Analysis, at the graduate level (BA); and Translation Studies, Translation and Text Linguistics, Translation and Applied Linguistics, Audiovisual Translation and Research Methodologies, at the post-graduate level (MA and PhD). At the Faculty of Languages and Translation, Polytechnic University of Macau, she has taught Translation Studies (PhD in Portuguese). In the Interuniversity PhD in Translation Studies (ULisboa, UCP, UNova Lisboa), she has taught Translation Studies and Research Methodologies in Translation Studies I and II. Her main areas of research are Descriptive Translation Studies and Applied Linguistics, norms in both literary and media translation. Her publications focus on the translation of forms of address and linguistic variation in fiction, censorship in translation, reader profiling, retranslation and indirect translation. Brian James Baer is Professor of Russian and Translation Studies at Kent State University, USA. He is the founding editor of the journal Translation and Interpreting Studies and co-editor of the Bloomsbury book series Literatures, Cultures, Translation and of the Routledge series Translation Studies in Translation. His recent publications include the monographs Translation and the Making of Modern Russian Literature (2016) and Queer Theory and Translation Studies (2020), as well as the collected volumes Researching Translation and Interpreting, with Claudia Angelelli (2015), Queering Translation, Translating the Queer, with Klaus Kaindl (2018), Translation in Russian Contexts, with Susanna Witt (2018), and Teaching Literature in Translation (2022), with Michelle Woods. He is the current President of the American Translation and Interpreting Studies Association and a Member of the Advisory Board of the Mona Baker Centre for Translation Studies at Shanghai International Studies University and the Nida Centre for Advanced Research in Translation in Rimini, Italy. ix

Contributors

Salah Basalamah  is Associate Professor at the School of Translation and Interpretation, University of Ottawa, Canada. His fields of research include the Philosophy of Translation, Translation Rights, Social and Political Philosophy, Postcolonial, Cultural and Religious Studies, as well as Western Islam and Muslims. He is the author of Le droit de traduire. Une politique culturelle pour la mondialisation [The Right to Translate. A Cultural Policy for Globalization] (2009) at the University of Ottawa Press, and he translated from English into French Fred A. Reed’s Shattered Images (2002) [Images brisées at VLB (2010)] on the ancient and contemporary history of Syria. Since 2014, he teaches a multidisciplinary PhD seminar on the diversity of Canadian Muslims at the Institute of Canadian and Aboriginal Studies (ICAS) at the University of Ottawa. He is currently working on a forthcoming book about the philosophy of translation and its various applications in the fields of humanities and social science. For more details, please visit http://www.basalamah.org Karen Bennett is Associate Professor in Translation Studies at Nova University, Lisbon, and Coordinator of the Master’s programme in Translation. She also coordinates the Translationality strand at the Centre for English, Translation and Anglo-Portuguese Studies (CETAPS), and is general editor of the journal Translation Matters. Having published widely on many translation-related themes, she is currently preparing a three-volume mini-series for Routledge entitled Multilingualism, Lingua Franca and Translation in the Early Modern Period. Piotr Blumczynski  is Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Translation and Interpreting, Queen’s University Belfast, UK, where he teaches postgraduate programs and supervises doctoral research. He is the author of Ubiquitous Translation (Routledge 2016) and Experiencing Translationality (2023), and co-editor, with Steven Wilson, of the volume The Languages of Covid-19 (Routledge 2023). He is a Member of the advisory board of the Nida Centre for Advanced Research on Translation in Rimini, Italy. In 2022–2024 he is co-directing the international research project ‘MISTE: Multilingual Island: Sites of Translation and Encounter.’ He is the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Translation Studies. Lynne Bowker is Full Professor at the School of Translation and Interpretation at the University of Ottawa, Canada, where she also holds a cross-appointment at the School of Information Studies. She is author of Computer-Aided Translation Technology (University of Ottawa Press, 2002) and De-mystifying translation (Routledge, 2023), and co-author of both Working with Specialized Language (Routledge, 2002) and Machine Translation and Global Research (Emerald, 2019). Jan Buts  is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Translation and Interpreting Studies, Boğaziçi University, Turkey. He is a member of the IndirecTrans Network and co-coordinates the Genealogies of Knowledge Research Network. He is also a Member of the executive council of IATIS, the International Association for Translation & Intercultural Studies. Lars Elleström  was professor in Comparative Literature at Linnæus University, Sweden, and director of the Linnæus University Center for Intermedial and Multimodal Studies, and head of the International Society for Intermedial Studies until his untimely death in 2021. Elleström created a systematic terminology and theory of intermedial and multimodal studies based in Peircean semiotics. Among his many contributions to the field is the edited volume, with an influential introductory chapter, Media Borders, Multimodality and Intermediality x

Contributors

(Palgrave Macmillan 2010), Media Transformation. The Transfer of Media Characteristics Among Media (Palgrave Macmillan 2014) and ”Coherence and Truthfulness in Communication: Intracommunicational and Extracommunicational Indexicality”, Semiotica 225, 2018 are other important texts. In 2020 he edited Beyond Media Borders: Intermedial Relations Among Multimodal Media, Volume 1 and 2, (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan 2020) and posthumously “Symbolicity, Language and Mediality”, in Semiotica 247, 2022 was published. Peter Flynn is Professor (emeritus) in Translation Studies and English at KU Leuven, Belgium and Research Fellow at UFS, Bloemfontein, South Africa. He is also a Member of the CETRA staff. He has (co-)organized conferences and events and has published articles and edited volumes on a number of topics in Translation Studies. His main areas of interest are ethnographies of translation practices, empirical and functionalist approaches to translation studies, (Irish) literature and sociolinguistics. Maud Gonne  is an Assistant Professor of Translation Studies (Dutch-French) in the Department of Modern Languages at the University of Liège, Belgium. Her research interests include translation history, cultural mediators and transfers, and Actor-Network Theory. She has authored numerous articles on these topics as well as the monograph Contrebande littéraire et culturelle à la Belle Époque (Leuven University Press, 2017). She co-edited the special issue Cultural Mediators in Belgium, 1830–1945 (Revue Belge de Philologie et d’Histoire, 2014) and the volume Transfer Thinking in Translation Studies (Leuven University Press, 2020). Moira Inghilleri is Professor and Program Director of Comparative Literature and Director of Translation and Interpreting Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is the author of Translation and Migration (2017) and Interpreting Justice: Ethics, Politics and Language (2012). She was co-editor of The Translator from 2011–2014 and review editor from 2006 to 2011. She served as co-editor for the Routledge series New Perspectives in Translation and Interpreting Studies from 2013 to 2018 and guest-edited two issues of The Translator: Bourdieu and the Sociology of Translating and Interpreting (2005) and Translation and Violent Conflict (2010, with Sue-Ann Harding). She has published in numerous journals and edited volumes, including Emotions in Translation: An Inter-Semiotic Approach (2022), The Routledge Encyclopedia of Citizen Media (2021), The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Globalization (2021), The Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies (2020), The Palgrave Handbook of Languages and Conflict (2019), The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Culture (2018), The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Politics, Translators Writing, Writing Translators (2016) and Remapping Habitus in Translation Studies (2014). In 2017 she was appointed to the Fulbright Specialist Program in the field of translation and migration studies for a three-year period. Kalevi Kull is Professor of Biosemiotics at the University of Tartu. His research interests include biosemiotics, general semiotics, theoretical biology, and ecology. His publications include “Evolution and semiotics” (1992), “Introduction to Uexküll” (2001), “Choosing and learning: Semiosis means choice” (2018), “On the theoretical biology between mathematics and semiotics” (2019), etc. Wenyan Luo holds a PhD in Translation Studies from Durham University. Her research interests lie mainly in the sociology of translation, translation history and translator studies. She recently published Translation as Actor-Networking (Routledge, 2020), and is currently co-editing The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Sociology with Sergey Tyulenev. xi

Contributors

Kirsten Malmkjær is Emeritus Professor of Translation Studies at the University of Leicester, UK. She is especially interested in translation theory – that is, in understanding the phenomenon that is translation, an interest that she has pursued throughout her academic career. She has focused on the translations into English of Hans Christian Andersen’s stories, in particular on the extent to which Andersen’s linguistic artistry is represented in the translations, and in the effect this may have on the reception of the oeuvre. In addition to teaching at Leicester, she has taught at the universities of Birmingham, Cambridge and Middlesex. Recent publications include Translation and Creativity, (Routledge 2020) and The Cambridge Handbook of Translation (Cambridge University Press 2022). Forthcoming is Introducing Translation for Cambridge University Press. She edits the Cambridge Elements series on Translation and Interpreting. Kobus Marais is Professor of Translation Studies in the Department of Linguistics and Language practice of the University of the Free State, Bloemfontein, South Africa. He published three monographs, namely Translation Theory and Development Studies: A Complexity Theory Approach (2014), A (Bio)Semiotic Theory of Translation: The Emergence of Social-Cultural Reality (2018) and Trajectories of Translation: The Thermodynamics of Semiosis (In print) and an edited volume with the title Translation Beyond Translation Studies (2022). In addition, he published edited volumes with Ilse Feinauer, Translation Studies Beyond the Postcolony (2017), and Reine Meylaerts, namely Complexity Thinking in Translation Studies: Methodological Considerations (2018) and Exploring the Implications of Complexity Thinking for Translation Studies (2021). His research interests are translation theory, complexity thinking, semiotics/biosemiotics and development studies. Álvaro Marín García is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Translation and Interpreting at the University of Valladolid, Spain. Previously, he worked as a Translation Lecturer at the University of Essex, UK. He has also taught translation theory and practice at Kent State University (USA), where he completed his PhD in Translation Studies. His research interests are in translation theory, the philosophy of science, intellectual history and its relation to translation practices, cognitive Translation and Interpreting Studies and the epistemology of Translation Studies. He has published in relevant journals and publishing venues, mainly on Translation Studies epistemology and new forms of theory development from a pluralistic methodology. He has also explored translation expertise from a variety of theoretical and empirical angles. Recently he has co-edited with Sandra Halverson the volume Contesting Epistemologies in Cognitive Translation and Interpreting Studies (New York & London: Routledge 2021). Reine Meylaerts is Full Professor and currently (2021–2025) Vice-Rector of Social Sciences and Humanities at KU Leuven, Belgium. Her research interests concern translation policy for minorities, intercultural mediation and transfer in multilingual cultures, past and present. She has written or edited about 150 articles, book chapters and books on these topics (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8088-1519). She was keynote speaker/invited expert at some 40 International Conferences/Expert Workshops and has been lecturing at Harvard University, Beijing Foreign Studies University, Beihang University, Copenhagen University, Universidade Estadual de Santa Cruz (Brazil) and Abu Dis University, among others. She has been coordinating national and international research projects and supervising more than 20 doctoral students. She was Director of CETRA (Centre for Translation Studies; https://www.arts.kuleuven.be/cetra) from 2006 to 2014 and is now a Board Member. She is xii

Contributors

the former Secretary General (2004–2010) of the European Society for Translation Studies (EST). Christiane Nord graduated as a Translator for German, Spanish and English at Heidelberg University, Germany. She holds a PhD in Romance Studies and a post-doc qualification for Applied Translation Studies and Translation Pedagogy. Involved in translator training since 1967, she is now Professor Emerita of the University of Applied Studies, Magdeburg, Germany, Professor Extraordinary and Research Fellow of the University of the Free State at Bloemfontein, South Africa, and Honorary Professor of several universities. She received honorary doctorates from the University of Geneva, Switzerland, and the Universidad de Baja California in Tijuana, Mexico. She has approximately 230 publications in German, English and Spanish on translation theory, methodology and pedagogy. (Homepage: www. christiane-nord.de) Susan Petrilli  is Professor of Philosophy and Theory of Languages, University of Bari “Aldo Moro”, Italy; 7th Thomas Sebeok Fellow of the Semiotic Society of America; Fellow of the International Communicology Institute, Washington; past Vice-President of the International Association for Semiotic Studies (2014–2020); Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Adelaide, SA; Honorary Member of the Institute of Semiotics and Media Studies, Sichuan University, China. She is author, editor, and translator of numerous publications, including books, articles and essays relating to her studies in the Philosophy of Language, Semiotics and Translation. She has contributed to the dissemination of works by Victoria Welby, Charles Peirce, Mikhail Bakhtin, Emmanuel Levinas, Gérard Deledalle, Adam Schaff, Thomas A. Sebeok, Giorgio Fano, Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, Ferruccio Rossi-Landi, Umberto Eco, Massimo A. Bonfantini, and Augusto Ponzio. Recent monographs include (ed.) Translation Translation (Rodopi 2003), Signifying and Understanding (de Gruyter 2009), Sign Crossroads in Global Perspective (Transaction 2010), Expression and Interpretation in Language (Transaction 2012), Un mondo di segni (Laterza 2012), The Self as a Sign, the World and the Other (Transaction 2013), Sign Studies and Semioethics (de Gruyter 2014), Signs, Language and Listening (Legas 2019), Significare, interpretare, intendere (Mimesis 2019), Senza ripari (Mimesis 2021), (ed. with E. Kourdis) Translation and Translatability in Intersemiotic Space (Punctum, 2021), (ed. with M. Ji) Intersemiotic Perspectives on Emotions (Routledge 2022) and Exploring the Translatability of Emotions (Palgrave 2022). Among her latest essays related to translation theory: ‘At the Margins of Speaking of Love with Roland Barthes and Mikhail Bakhtin,’ in Acta Translatologica Helsingiensia (ATH), vol. 4, pp. 21–57, 2020 and ‘Translation, Ideology, and Social Practice,’ in The Oxford Handbook of Translation and Social Practices (Oxford University Press 2021). Douglas Robinson, Professor of Translation Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, has been translating professionally between Finnish and English since 1975; since 2009 his translation work has been entirely literary, cinematic, and dramatic. His most recent book-length translations are a transcreation of Volter Kilpi’s unfinished posthumous novel Gulliver’s Voyage to Phantomimia (Zeta Books, 2020) and Mia Kankimäki’s feminist travel memoir Women I Think About at Night (Simon & Schuster, 2020). He is best known as a translation scholar, with monographs from The Translator’s Turn (1991) to Transgender, Translation, Translingual Address (2019), the anthology Western Translation Theory From Herodotus to Nietzsche (1997-2014), the textbook Becoming a Translator (1997-2020), and Translation as a Form: A Centennial Commentary on Walter Benjamin’s “The Task of the Translator” (2023). xiii

Contributors

Neil Sadler is Associate Professor in Translation Studies at the University of Leeds. He is author of the monograph Fragmented Narrative: Telling and interpreting stories in the Twitter age (2021) and articles in New Media & Society, Disaster Prevention and Management, and the Journal of North African Studies. He also contributed entries on ‘Twitter’ and ‘Social Media’ to the Routledge Encyclopedia of Citizen Media (2021) and translated three entries from Arabic to English for the Routledge Anthology of Arabic Discourse on Translation (2022). His forthcoming publications include articles in Translation Studies and Cultus as well as a chapter in the edited volume Debates in Translation Studies. He is Associate Editor of the journal Target. Gabriela Saldanha is research associate at the Centre for Sustainable Healthcare Education (SHE), University of Oslo, and honorary researcher at the School of Languages and Cultures, University of Warwick, UK. Gabriela has a long-standing interest in research methodologies. Her research has focused on stylistics, the nature of translation as an artistic process, the circulation and reception of translated literature and the discourse of global health. She is co-author, with Sharon O’Brien, of Research Methodologies in Translation Studies (2013), co-editor, with Mona Baker, of the Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, and co-editor, with Angela Kershaw, of Global Landscapes of Translation (2013). Gabriela is a member of the Executive Council of the International Association of Translation and Intercultural Studies, member of the Editorial Board of the series Approaches to Translation Studies, published by Brill; founding editor and member of the Editorial Board of New Voices in Translation Studies, member of the Peer College for the Martha Cheung Award for Best English Article in Translation Studies by an Early Career Scholar; member of the International Advisory Board of InTRAlinea, and member of the Editorial Board of Translation Today. She is currently leading a Circle U Interdisciplinary Thematic Research Network on Global health, Sustainable Development and Individual Responsibility: Contradictory or Complementary Concepts?, contributing to the development of the Oslo Medical Corpus and working on the UiO: Democracy project The medicalization of reproductive rights. Carolyn Shread is Senior Lecturer in French at Mount Holyoke College and teaches translation at Smith College, USA. She has translated over ten books, mostly scholarly and literary texts, and published numerous articles in the field of translation studies. Her articles address the intersection of translation and Malabou's signature concept, plasticity, as well as introducing Bracha Ettinger’s psychoanalytic concept of metramorphosis to rethink translational paradigms. She has a longstanding interest in feminist translation and decolonial translation practices and published several articles on translating Haitian author Marie Vieux-Chauvet’s Les Rapaces. Her recent translations include six books by contemporary French philosopher Catherine Malabou, and a blog post by Achille Mbembe on “The Universal Right to Breathe” for Critical Inquiry. Her current Malabou translation is entitled Stop Thief! Anarchism and Philosophy. Keyan G. Tomaselli is Distinguished Professor, Humanities Dean’s Office, University of Johannesburg, and Professor Emeritus and Fellow, University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. He is a Laureate Fellow of the International Communicology Institute and served for many years as the regional representative for the International Association of Semiotic Studies. He has published widely on semiotics, including Appropriating Images: The semiotics of visual representation (1999) and Cultural Icons (with David Scott) (2009). He is founder and co-editor of Critical Arts: South-North Cultural Studies and the Journal of African Cinemas.

xiv

Contributors

Tomaselli is an Editorial Board Member of Social Semiotics, New Techno Humanities and many other journals. Sergey Tyulenev  is Professor of Translation Studies and the Director of Postgraduate Research at the School of Modern Languages and Cultures, Durham University, the Editor of the Routledge Introductions to Translation and Interpreting series and a Member of the advisory boards of the journals Translation and Interpreting Studies and Translation in Society. He holds a PhD in linguistics (2000, Moscow State University) and a PhD in Translation Studies (2009, University of Ottawa) and conducted postdoctoral research at the University of Cambridge, UK, and at the University of the Free State, South Africa. He has been a Guest Professor at Nankai University, Tianjin, and Guangdong Foreign Studies University, Guangzhou, China. His academic interests include social aspects of translation, the epistemology of TIS research, translator/interpreter training and the history of translation. He has published widely in leading TIS journals and among his major publications are Theory of Translation (Moscow: Gardariki, 2004; translated into Chinese and published by the Wuhan University Press); Applying Luhmann to Translation Studies (New York and London: Routledge, 2011); Translation and the Westernization of Eighteenth-Century Russia (Berlin: Frank & Timme, 2012); Translation and Society: An Introduction (London and New York: Routledge, 2014); Translation in the Public Sphere (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). His personal website is tyulenev.org. Margherita Zanoletti is a Graduate of the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan, Italy and holds a PhD in Translation Studies at the University of Sydney, Australia. From 2006 to 2009, she taught Italian language and translation at the University of Sydney and Macquarie University, Sydney. As Reference Services Specialist at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan, she currently guest lectures to Modern Languages undergraduate and doctoral students. As a Researcher in translation theory and practice, she has a special focus on word and image, and intercultural studies. On these issues, she has published translations, monographs, essays and articles in academic journals and has participated in national and international conferences. Her publications include Oodgeroo Noonuccal, My People. La mia gente (edited, Milan 2021); Bruno Munari: The Lightness of Art (co-edited with P. Antonello and M. Nardelli, Oxford 2017); Oodgeroo Noonuccal: con We are Going (with F. Di Blasio, Trento 2013). Cornelia Zwischenberger is Full Professor and Chair in Transcultural Communication at the Centre for Translation Studies, University of Vienna. Prof. Zwischenberger has published numerously on both translation and interpreting studies. Cornelia Zwischenberger’s current research focuses on the use of the translation concept beyond Translation Studies from a transdisciplinary/transcultural perspective as well as on online collaborative translation as a prototypical form of transcultural communication.

xv

Part I

Introduction1 Reine Meylaerts and Kobus Marais

The rationale for this handbook is for it to be a source of information about conceptual frameworks (e.g. functionalist, linguistic, intersemiotic or multimodal approaches, to name just a few) that can be used when studying translation in the broadest sense.2 It wants, in particular, to provide a response to recent calls for expanded conceptualizations of translation and the consequences thereof for conceptual approaches to translation. As a result of the exponential growth of multimodal and hyper objects massively distributed in time and space, and dethroning the (literary) written text as the primary product of translation, the need for expanded definitions of translation as a complex, unpredictable process (rather than as a product), involving much more than written texts (linguistic bias) and overcoming the binaries (source-target, original-translation, domestication-foreignization, for example) that have traditionally delimited its field of study, has come to the fore. Such expanded definitions consider translation not merely as a research object but also as ‘a (research) practice, a process constructing, (re)assembling, and (re)connecting the social’ and as ‘an intersemiotic all-encompassing epistemological tool and ontological concept’ which produces knowledge (Gonne). Of course, the more traditional definitions of translation have a long history and long-lasting consequences in the field of Translation Studies (TS). As illustrated by Alvaro Garcia Martin in this handbook, the ‘understanding of translation as a written phenomenon happening across/between absolutes (content/form, fidelity/treason, source language/target language) goes back to Aristotle and made empiricism “a key element in the future epistemology of TS,”’ whereas the linguistic bias long privileged hermeneutics as one of the main approaches for studying literary translations. Structural linguistics’ preference for positivist models as well as Shannon’s groundbreaking work on information theory had the effect that translation was conceptualized as a mere transfer from one code to another, thus strengthening TS’s binarism and its linguistic bias. Tomaselli discusses this problem and argues that reception theory has become a prerequisite for any communication process in order to avoid reducing communication to coding-decoding. Descriptive approaches, which long dominated TS, were also based on empiricism and have been criticized for their ‘evident limitation of a positivist view of translation’ (Garcia Martin; see also Gonne in this volume) and for the epistemological problems associated with their aiming at explaining and predicting the future states of complex systems (Assis Rosa). DOI: 10.4324/9781003161448-1

1

Introduction

Yet, as the different chapters of this handbook will also show, both recent and not-sorecent approaches (have the potential to) respond to the need for expanded definitions of translation. So, e.g., in his chapter, Salah Basalamah discusses how philosophical approaches allow TS to overcome the linguistic bias. Although descriptive approaches have been ‘mainly formulated with literary translation in mind, [they] (…) have been very productive when applied to research on other text types and translation modalities’ (Assis Rosa). Jan Buts moreover argues that ‘much work on activism in translation has focused on a principled rejection of the binaries and boundaries of old, in favour of a vision of an in-between that can accommodate plurality and diversity.’ According to Christiane Nord, Functionalism (including loyalty) is an approach that is applicable to all forms of translational action (written translation, interpreting, sight translation, multimodal translation etc.) without any expansions or adaptations. Thanks to its foundation in action theory, intersemiotic aspects have always been included in the concept. In her chapter on sociological approaches, Moïra Inghilleri analyses Bourdieu’s photographic archive going back to his fieldwork during Algeria’s war for independence from the viewpoint of intersemiotic translation, in which Bourdieu the ethnographer acts as a translator. For Gabriela Saldanha, multimodality questions ‘the very notion of “text” and “product,” and, in particular, it has blurred the line between what had been traditionally been considered ‘context’ as opposed to “text,”’ while Cornelia Zwischenberger holds that interdisciplinary conceptions of translation coming from disciplines other than TS can ‘feed into intersemiotic and also biosemiotic translation as all of them go beyond the lingual plane and also involve non-human actors.’ Similarly, Brian Baer shows how interdisciplinary and transnational approaches are challenging ‘the longstanding binary of the material and the symbolic, making possible the emergence of “a new epistemology of translation studies”’ (Marais, 2014, p. 15) predicated on new understandings of culture and its relationship to translation.’ Yet, as Lynn Bowker’s chapter on computational approaches illustrates, the need for expanded definitions does not imply doing away with binary distinctions or other traditional delimitations. In certain contexts or for certain purposes they may remain useful or even necessary: ‘Machine language is the only language that a computer can work with directly. In machine language, the instructions and data must all take the form of binary numbers (i.e., 0 or 1).’ Sergey Tyulenev and Wenyan Luo argue that a systems approach operates on the assumption that any particular phenomenon that one wants to study is always related to or embedded in other systems, including material, social and cultural systems. In their view, ‘[t]he discussed systems approaches show how studying translation moves away from isolationist theories of interlingual translation in favour of seeing it as one of the similar or comparable phenomena which can be found in the human world and beyond.’ Similarly, Moïra Inghilleri shows how Bourdieu’s photographs are part of an ongoing process of semiosis within a larger system of meaning-making. In his chapter, Kalevi Kull argues that ‘[s]emiotics as a skill is the proficiency to translate – not only between languages, but also between different media, cultures, or species, between very different umwelten and sign systems.’ His chapter opens up the possibility to study the translational activities of zoo keepers, farmers, veterinarians and ethologists, to name a few. In addition, the chapters on intersemiotic translation (Petrilli & Zanoletti), multimodal translation (Adami) and intermedial translation (Ellestrom) demonstrate the extent to which semiotic systems are entangled and the necessity for studying them together, i.e. as intersemiotic translation processes. These fields have been

2

Introduction

interested in translation for a number of decades now and can no longer be ignored in TS. The last part in the handbook, that on interpretant translation, demonstrates approaches to translation that take existing texts as their point of departure. Douglas Robinson argues that translation always entails the interpretation of already existing texts, but he then specifies this interpretation as embodied in the material existence of human animals. Equally, Keyan Tomaselli’s chapter problematizes the reception of semiotic material as always embedded in a horizon of expectations, and he discusses a number of stances or attitudes that an interpreter can take toward a text. In yet another chapter that expands the conceptualization of translation, Karen Bennett explores the role that translation plays in the creation and distribution of knowledge. She shows how translation creates new knowledge and, equally important, distributes existing knowledge to new contexts. These chapters on ‘interpretant’ translation all operate on the assumption that translation is not limited to the interpretation or reworking of linguistic material only. Rather, it is work performed on semiotic material of all sorts, including concepts. The expanded definitions and approaches thus call to complement the hitherto dominant conceptualization of translation, defining translation not only in linguistic and anthropocentric terms but also as a semiotic process that takes place in and between all (living) organisms – human and non-human alike. Not only the translation of Hamlet into French, or of oral speech into subtitles, but also communication between dolphins or between a dog and its companion, or moving a statue from one place to another, or rewatching a film are translation processes. In this respect, the recurrent use of Latour’s Actor-Network-Theory ‘in the conceptualization of complexity models is significant for its [TS] inclusion of non-human actors, challenging any simple binary of the material and the symbolic’ (Baer). Indeed, as Maud Gonne points out, for Latour human and non-human actors have to be treated alike within a network, and translation processes connect and transform both human and nonhuman actors. Similarly, computational approaches define translation as ‘a multistep process involving both computer and human agents’ and translator as a technical term referring to ‘a processor that converts code from one computer language to another, and more specifically from one level of computer language to another’ (Bowker). Kull’s chapter argues that translation starts at a molecular level in DNA and occurs throughout the biosphere, thus including all living organisms, such as plants, animals and fungi, in the tradosphere. From a more general, large-scale ecotranslational (Cronin, 2017) or biosemiotics (Marais, 2019) point of view underlying this handbook, translation then becomes an all-encompassing concept to think the interconnectedness of all human and non-human activities and to apprehend the emergence of social-cultural phenomena. Therefore, Michael Cronin calls ‘tradosphere’ all translation systems on the planet, all the ways in which information circulates between living and non-living organisms and is translated into a language or a code that can be processed or understood by the receiving entity (Cronin, 2017, 71). Obviously, these are important expansions with potentially far-reaching consequences for the discipline of TS, to which the chapters in this handbook can contribute: ‘Marais,’ (2020) proposal to extend the notion of translation as constituting society not only among human beings but among all kinds of living beings may come to redefine the place of translation studies in the academic field.’ (Saldanha – see also below) Given the way in which the concept ‘translation’ has been expanded over the past two decades, we conceptualize translation in this handbook as ‘the work performed to impose constraints on a semiosic process’ whereby, according to Peter Flynn, the concept of work still requires a further definition:

3

Introduction

Given that semiosic process is probably endless, layered and multidirectional, discovering what the nature of the work performed is, along with the constraints that (types of ) work assert, is of vital importance in arriving at any idea of translation in a pragmatic contextual sense. Such an expanded definition does not mean that everything is a translation but that many things have a translational dimension and can be better understood if this dimension is taken into account. This should be taken into consideration by Translation Studies if the discipline wants to stay relevant in the twenty-first century digital age, characterized by an exponential growth of multimodal and hyper objects. In principle, and as already pointed out, the potential for repositioning the discipline of Translation Studies is enormous since, as observed by Assis Rosa, ‘a variety of academic and socio-political events occurring internationally have made conditions ripe for a “translation turn” in several fields simultaneously, including linguistics, anthropology, psychology, women’s studies, cultural studies, and postcolonial studies.’ In any case, according to Flynn, ‘if Translation Studies is becoming an ever-expanding universe, semiotics can still offer a touchstone for common theoretical and practical debate.’ Moreover, also from a methodological viewpoint, expansion is not good in itself: suffice to refer to examples of gender and racist bias in machine translation based on large corpora (Saldanha). This means more in general and importantly, that we still need to complement innovative big data methods with more traditional, qualitative methods based ‘subject positions’ (Saldanha) instead of simply doing away with them. Building on Peircean semiotics, translation is then the semiosic process of creating relationships between something (representamen/sign vehicle) standing for something else (object) in relation to someone (the interpretant) in some respect. Peircean semiotics differs from Saussurean semiology (see also Malmkjær and Flynn in this volume) in that it is triadic rather than dyadic and in that it includes the object or referent in its conceptualization. Being part of Peircean phenomenology, signs are not merely meaningful as (logical) differences in a system. Rather, they are pragmatically intertwined with the phenomenology of living organisms and are therefore related to the environment of the sign user (Deely, 2010, pp. 13–26). In other words, ‘without the inclusion of context, the whole edifice of Peircean semiotics would crumble’ (Flynn; see also Tomaselli’s insistence on reception in the translation process). The consequences of such an expanded definition of the role of language and translation in society cannot be overestimated: The sign relation is thus endless, like thought and language within and among people. This is not a weakness of language, but a major strength. It allows for development of language along with life – in fact, it justifies the general optimism about interpersonal communication that we require to maintain human societies and also to translate. (Malmkjær) It also allows Translation Studies to move away from ‘an unproblematic, naively representational theory of language’ on which its notions of text, author and meaning are based and which ‘prevents the discipline (…) from advancing’ (Niranjana quoted in Zwischenberger). These important observations are also echoed in Blumczynski and Sadler’s chapter on ontological approaches, maintaining that analytical approaches such as narrative theory and critical discourse analysis are characterized by ‘naïve constructionism,’ viewing reality as created by language, whereas ontological questions, which according to Blumczynski and Sadler are translational questions, are not explicitly addressed in TS. Still, according to Blumczynski and Sadler ‘the discipline’s 4

Introduction

ontological underpinnings have evolved substantially,’ as hopefully the various chapters in this handbook will illustrate. Through her chapter on ecotranslation, Shread also contributes to the debate on translation in context. She argues that the ecological crisis requires TS to rethink its relationship to capital, but she also suggests that translators could find ways to overcome the disinterested stance that many people have toward the ecological crisis. To expand further on Peircean semiotics, for Peirce, the sign is not just something. Rather, it is a relationship between representamen, object and interpretant. The sign is therefore never the representamen or sign-vehicle only. We thus use the Peircean term of representamen, which would be the sign in common parlance or the signifiant in Saussure terms. We also use the term interpretant, which would be the meaning in common parlance or the signifié in Saussurean terms. We also use the term object, which would be the thing or idea to which the sign refers in common parlance and for which Saussurean semiology does not provide. It is important to note that Peirce does not claim that representamen, object and interpretant are ontological categories. They are phenomenological and analytical categories, in the sense that they were designed to analyze phenomena (Ransdell, 1977). So, phenomenologically speaking, the semiotic process always starts with a first, then moves to a second and then to a third. Empirically, however, what is an interpretant in an incipient translation process can be a representamen in a subsequent translation process. Or an object in one process could be an interpretant in another process. Consider the following example. When an interlingual translator sits down to translate a famous novel, the text on the page is a representamen (First) for that particular translator. However, the text is simultaneously an object (Second) that constrains the translator. It is also simultaneously an interpretant (Third), namely the end result of a previous interpretive process – the work that the author of the novel did to create the work of fiction. In this sense, there is a difference between interlingually translating a novel and writing a novel, though they share the similarities of being semiotic processes. Now, also consider the following example, taken from Eco’s (1997) famous work, Kant and the platypus. When Westerners first reached Australia, they observed an animal that they did not know, which is now known as the platypus. Their original observations were obviously Firsts, but at the same time, it was a Second for which, at that time, there existed no Third (interpretation) as Eco so eloquently narrates. Well, the initial Third was probably just, ‘What the hell?’ These examples demonstrate the theoretical point that translation is a process that can originate in either the representamen, the object or the interpretant, or any relationship between them, to various degrees. Since we want this handbook to be a tool for studying translation in the broadest sense, we take representamen, object and interpretant (and the relations between these) as an analytical structuring principle (see also infra). We are aware that the Peircean semiotic tradition is not the only one available. We realize that the French, Italian and Estonian traditions of semiotics, amongst others, have much to offer, for instance through Lotman’s ideas of culture as a translational system. We hope that this volume will stimulate further research to enrich a semiotic conceptualization of translation by integrating perspectives from these various traditions. For now, we think that the Peircean tradition has been best worked out in TS, starting from Gorlee’s (1994; 2004) foundational work through Petrilli’s (2003) substantial contribution to Queiroz’ (Aguiar & Queiroz, 2009; Aguiar & Queiroz, 2013; Ata & Queiroz, 2016; Queiroz & Ata, 2019; Queiroz & Ata, 2020) groundbreaking work on relating translation, semiosis, cognition and creativity. In this sense, the conceptualization in this handbook reflects the current state of affairs in TS, as we interpret it, but we definitely foresee that a similar handbook in twenty years’ time will have a different look to it.

5

Introduction

The choice of what to include under a particular focus group (category) is based on our judgment as to whether the particular approach would focus on or originate with the representamen, object or interpretant, without ever claiming necessary and sufficient conditions or positivist conceptualization. We are here probably engaging in Wittgenstein’s family resemblances, and we are well aware that there might be conceptual overlaps between the categories, seeing that they are resemblances and not cases of pure or formal logic. We do not see any reason why the use of concepts for analytical purposes should be equated with a substantialization or essentialization of the processes to which they refer. Just like referring to reality as consisting of both matter and energy does not mean that you reify either, referring to empirical translation processes as originating in one of the relata does not mean that you reify any of them or the analytical distinction between them. If we do not make this distinction, we shall not be able to distinguish the interlingual translation of a novel (which has as an incipient sign an already existing interpretant) from the translation of the phenomenon that later became the platypus (which was a dynamic object without interpretant) in Eco’s narrative above. While it is true that these two processes both entail semiotic work, the nature of the empirical semiotic work differs in each case. The first one constructs a subsequent interpretant from an existing interpretant while the second one constructs an interpretant without the existence of a previous interpretant. Empirically, therefore, one needs conceptual distinctions with which to operate. Our choice to use the Peircean relata in the semiosic process as ‘categories’ needs to be seen against this background. It does not mean that we claim that reality is cut up in this way. The ‘categories’ are analytical or epistemological not ontological. Legg (Legg, 2015, p. 8), for instance, makes the same claim about the distinctions between icons, indexes and symbols, focusing on the subtlety of analysis, which is also our argument here: It is important to recognise that as with all distinctions deriving from his short list of three fundamental categories, Peirce distinguishes between icon, index and symbol in functional rather than sortal terms. This allows any given sign to be a mix of icon, index and symbol, enabling considerable subtlety of analysis. (emphasis added – RM/KM) The implication is that our conceptualization therefore does not mean that we reduce the process of translation to any one of the three relata in the sign. What it does mean is that we consider the point that empirical translation processes start with or are focused, to a greater or lesser extent, on one of these relata, only to include all three in a dynamic relationship. In terms of complexity theory, this is a way of framing the process conceptually so that we can study it without totally reducing the complexity. Object translation is thus not about translating objects. Rather, it is about the whole semiosic process of translation, starting with or focusing on the object, but immediately relating that object to a representamen and interpretant. Translation processes like adaptation, we argue, are focused on the representamen, but the translation still influences the object and the interpretant. Equally, there are translation processes like scholarly reinterpretations of classical literature that focus on the interpretant, but with implications for the object and the representamen. As indicated above, cuts need to be made (Barad, 2007), and here we try to be up front about the ones we make. It is not possible empirically to observe reality as a whole, and for this reason, we need to employ conceptual categories without thereby claiming that we have made ontological distinctions. Such an expanded definition also moved us to do away with the Jakobsonian tripartite of intralingual, interlingual and intersemiotic translation because these categories overlap. 6

Introduction

For instance, translating a written English text into a spoken French text is simultaneously interlingual and intersemiotic translation, and translating a written English text into a spoken English text is simultaneously intralingual and intersemiotic translation. Thus, we rather suggest that all translation processes are complex and that the nature of the relationships between incipient and subsequent sign systems can be determined empirically only, not in an a priori fashion. We therefore stick to the suggestion that each case of translation could have intra-systemic, inter-systemic and supra-systemic features. The nature of the system needs to be specified empirically in each case. For instance, when one studies the ‘interlingual’ translation of a novel, one could specify that the systemic level of observation is that of language. The translation would, given this specification, therefore be intersystemic, between two languages as systems. Should one, however, consider the notion of genre for the same translation, one would have to say that it is at the intra-systemic level because both texts would be novels. As another example, one could also study the intralingual translation of a poem, e.g. a sonnet translated into haiku. In this case, if the level of observation is genre, the two genres would be in intersystemic relation to one another while, at the level of natural language, the translation takes place inside one system, i.e. intra-systemic. This conceptualization should be able to explain all possible translational phenomena and processes, linguistic and nonlinguistic, human and non-human. The expanded definition of translation on which this handbook is built has found its origin in some important meta-theoretical developments in Translation Studies during the last decade. They include an ecological perspective of translation in relation to the rest of the cosmos, a post-humanist perspective on (non-human) animal and plant life, a complex systems perspective on the interdependence of nature and culture, a semiotic perspective to counter the anthropocentric and linguicentric biases in the field and a multimodal perspective to give recognition to the technological advances in human culture over the past two centuries. In terms of the structure of this handbook, this means that we first present some ‘foundational’ chapters on ontology, methodology and epistemology to give voice to our complexity view that fields of study do not operate in isolation but as part of larger systems of thinking. As already mentioned, we maintain that the fact that ontological questions are not explicitly addressed in TS (see also Blumczynski in this volume) is a major weakness for the discipline. Questions of being and non-being, especially through the concept of absence, are key for TS. Having played a groundbreaking role in mathematics or biology (Deacon), the conceptualization of the absential (zero in the case of mathematics) is an equally essential category in conceptualizing translation. For something to be absent requires not only for it to not be there but for it to be encountered in terms of its not being there. For something to have changed it must no longer be as it was. For somebody to be other, they must not be the self – at least not only self. We see all these issues arise in the context of translation. Translation confronts us with the not-being-there of what is translated. Rather than simple indifference, it produces an absence which, without positively existing, can nonetheless be encountered. To think of translation in terms of change is to raise the question of what exactly there was in the first place but that no longer is. (…) Nowhere are the tensions between stability and change which characterise thinking about ontology brought into view more clearly than with translation in both its lingual and non-lingual variants. From this perspective, translation moves from being a peripheral limit case to a model for approaching the most basic and universal of questions. (…) We have argued that translation studies needs robust, careful, and sustained ontological reflection. But the reverse seems just as true: 7

Introduction

our understanding of being, in order to further to enlarge and develop, must continue to be stirred, irritated, and transformed by translation. (Blumczynski and Sadler) Indeed, as Maud Gonne, referring to Callon, states: ‘Translation is a mode of existence.’ We therefore hope that this handbook can serve as a next step in addressing the necessary ontological questions within TS, which may then also inspire other disciplines. In an epistemology of complexity, the complex, undetermined and emergent phenomenon of translation cannot be grasped through deterministic models and binary categories but should rather be apprehended through relational, processual and non-linear models and categories. Indeed, as Alvaro Marin Garcia rightfully observes, epistemology is of central concern for investigating ‘the constructs and methods around which knowledge and discourse are generated’; however Marin Garcia also shows how ‘the particular history of TS as an academic discipline shaped an epistemology that has remained fragmentary and implicit until very recently.’ He therefore proposes an empirical agenda and semiotic categories fit for critical empirical investigation. In terms of methodology, TS, like other disciplines, is constantly evolving and adapting itself to the current twenty-first century digital and ecological age and to the expanded definitions of translation. It has complemented its earlier core focus on product-oriented methodologies with a combination of product, process, context and participant-oriented methodologies (Saldanha). Saldanha perceives this growth and diversification as a positive evolution and as a sign of disciplinary maturity. Moreover, ‘as we moved from prescriptivism to descriptivism and critical approaches, we need to keep adapting not only our methods, but our understanding of what is research.’ Saldanha rightly concludes. The remainder of this handbook is devoted to a critical overview of conceptual approaches that are available in the field and that can contribute to our understanding of translational phenomena in the broadest sense. This means that we are excluding all empirical or descriptive work as well as the history of the field as evidenced by the different turns. We also exclude an overview of the various types/modes and themes of translation (e.g. audiovisual translation, conference interpreting and literary translation) because these are covered in other handbooks and because they partly overlap (cf. supra). With this move, we also want to make clear that the same translational phenomenon can be studied from a variety of theoretical perspectives and that the approaches available to (budding) scholars in Translation Studies are a complex of possibilities rather than a normative, linear set that are in competition with one another. This means also, and importantly, that each approach is discussed not only in its affordance to study translation according to a traditional, more narrowly linguistic and anthropocentric definition, but also in its capacity to study the translational dimension in all semiotic processes that take place in and between all (living) organisms – human and non-human alike. As such, this handbook wants to provide both a state-of-the-art overview of approaches that have proven their utility in the field and, simultaneously, open up these approaches to studying translational phenomena wherever and whenever they occur, whether professional or not, whether recognized as translation or not, but that will make up the field of TS in the twenty-first century. In this way, the handbook will be both a reference guide to existing conceptual approaches and a guide to future developments in the field. The categories as suggested also clearly show the dominance of interlingual translation in Translation Studies.3 As such, they are a reflection of the current state of affairs in the field, leaving room for future developments. While we are aware of work on translation in many fields other than TS and while it would be an advantage to have an overview of these, the 8

Introduction

nature of a ‘handbook,’ in our view, guides us to think about the field of TS as currently institutionalized by, for instance, MA and PhD programs. We are not sure that the study of translation in other fields, at this point in history, justifies a handbook. We are aware of work that was done and that is being done to explore this broader interest, but we do not think that it has generated enough conceptualization to justify a handbook.

Notes 1 We would like to thank the members of the advisory board, Claudia Angelelli, Mona Baker, Ebru Diriker, Sharon O’Brien, and Maria Tymoczko, for helping us in conceptualizing this handbook. The content of this handbook is the sole responsibility of the authors and the editors. 2 We therefore consistently tried to limit chapter titles to the name of the approach, though a few exceptions were required. 3 We also planned a chapter on cognitive approaches which unfortunately could not be delivered.

References Aguiar, D., & Queiroz, J. (2009a). Modelling Intersemiotic Translation: Notes Toward a Peircean Approach. Applied Semiotics/Semiotique Appliquee, 24, 68–81. Aguiar, D., & Queiroz, J. (2009b). Towards a Model of Intersemiotic Translation. The International Journal of the Arts in Society, 4, 203–210. Aguiar, D., & Queiroz, J. (2013). Semiosis and Intersemiotic Translation. Semiotica, 196, 283–292. Ata, P., & Queiroz, J. (2016). Multilevel Poetry Translation as a Problem-Solving Task. Cognitive Semiotics, 9(2), 139–147. Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. London: Duke University Press. Cronin, M. (2017). Eco-translation: Translation and Ecology in the Age of the Anthropocene. New York: Routledge. Deely, J. (2010). Semiotics Seen Synchronically: The View from 2010. New York: Legas. Eco, U. (1997). Kant and the Platypus: Essays on Language and Cognition. London: Harcourt Inc.. Gorlee, D. (1994). Semiotics and the Problem of Translation: With Special Reference to the Semiotics of Charles S. Peirce. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Gorlee, D. (2004). On Translating Signs: Exploring Text and Semio-Translation. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Legg, C. (2015). The Purpose of the Essential Indexical. s.l., s.n., pp. 1–14. Marais, K. (2014). Translation Theory and Development Studies: A Complexity Theory Approach. London: Routledge. Marais, K. (2019). A (Bio)Semiotic Theory of Translation: The Emergence of Social-Cultural Reality. New York: Routledge. Petrilli, S. ed. (2003). Translation Translation. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Queiroz, J., & Ata, P. (2019). Intersemiotic Translation as an Abductive Cognitive Artifact. In K. Marais & R. Meylaerts (Eds.), Complexity and Translation: Methodological Considerations (pp. 19–32). New York: Routledge. Queiroz, J., & Ata, P. (2020). Intersemiotic Translation as a Creative Thinking Tool: From Gertrude Stein to Dance. In N. Salmose & L. Ellestrom (Eds.), Transmediations: Communication Across Media Borders (pp. 186–215). New York: Routledge. Ransdell, J. (1977). Some Leading Ideas on Peirce’s Semiotic. Semiotica, 19, 157–178.

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Part II

Foundations

1 Epistemological positions Álvaro Marín García

Introduction Epistemology is the field of philosophy that deals with knowledge. It analyzes how justified belief is attained and assessed, and the ways in which these knowledge and certainty generation processes pertain to experience and reason.1 As such, epistemology is a central concern of philosophers of science, who inquire about scientific methods and progress, and also for scholars within each discipline interested in investigating the constructs and methods around which knowledge and discourse are generated. Philosophers of science have approached these issues along with the ontological assumptions and commitments about reality and human understanding, traditionally focusing on the natural sciences and their description of the physical world (see Rosenberg & McIntyre, 2020 for an updated overview on the philosophy of science). The social sciences, however, with varied and often intersecting research traditions, offer good examples of the evolution of how the particular epistemologies of fields of inquiry relate to the methods and constructs with which members within a scholarly community of practice consider reliable knowledge is generated and tested. More than rooted in disciplinary convention or institutional status, epistemological positions are closely linked to the historical development of each field. Translation Studies (TS) is no exception. We will see in the next section how the particular history of TS as an academic discipline shaped an epistemology that has remained fragmentary and implicit until very recently. In the subsequent sections, I will explore how the different epistemic positions in TS, dichotomous epistemologies and complexity epistemologies relate to an intersemiotic theory of translation. I will also explain how a complexity-oriented epistemological position, together with a pluralistic approach to translation theory, would benefit the development of an intersemiotic view of translation and how semiotic understandings of translation, on their part, enable a complex, pluralistic epistemic agenda in TS.

Dichotomous epistemologies in TS TS epistemology is traditionally considered to have had its origin in Holmes’s ‘The Name and Nature of Translation Studies’ (1972), where the new discipline and its contents were DOI: 10.4324/9781003161448-3

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Álvaro Marín García

literally mapped. However, translation had received the attention of writers, scholars and translators themselves for centuries, generating a body of reflections that did not engage with the methods and ideas of scientific inquiry, but definitely shaped Western notions of translation in ways that would still imbue TS constructions. An important, recurrent feature in these pre-TS discussions was the focus on the interlingual translation of literary and religious texts, setting the preeminence of source texts and their authors and the immutability of meaning. Reflections on translation often took the form of prescriptive accounts, prefaces and commentaries pivoting on literality and fidelity that would reflect the ideas of the philosophical tradition prevalent at each time. The understanding of translation as a written phenomenon happening across/between absolutes (content/form, fidelity/treason, source language/target language) led to an influential dichotomous view that Blumczynski and Hassani trace back to Aristotelian views (Blumczynski and Hassani, 2019). The disperse and diverse nature of schools of thought – in the absence of a translation school proper – and the establishment of dichotomies dominated the discussion of mainly interlingual written translation, which would end up marking TS epistemology: up to today, TS scholars have in a vast majority focused on binary constructions of interlingual communication and extensively draw from other fields, leading to diverging understandings of the object of study and generating epistemological clashes (the most conspicuous of which can be found in the debate hosted by Chesterman and Arrojo, 2000). Despite these differences, the dichotomous distinction of absolutes and the focus on written linguistic communication remained constant and central. Until the second half of the twentieth century translation was constructed either as a literary phenomenon or merely a linguistic one. Interestingly, but not surprisingly, given the focus on linguistic texts, one of the main frameworks of reference for the study of literary translation was hermeneutics. Influenced by the philosophers of German Romanticism and their ideas on language and nation (see Von Humboldt, 1996, and also the works of Schlegel and Herder), Schleiermacher brought to bear a hermeneutic approach to translation, posing one of the most influential dichotomies in the study of translation when he introduced his two methods of translation (1813). These opposing methods and the romantic notion of language as a repository or vehicle for national or cultural elements would inspire Antoine Berman (1984) and Lawrence Venuti (1995) to develop what we might call dichotomous theories of literary translation. From the perspective of Linguistics, dichotomous views, reducing translation to a change in code or a mere transfer across linguistic systems, were further reinforced by positivist models of language dominating the structural linguistic paradigm in TS, for instance, Vinay and Darbelnet (1958), Jakobson (1959) and Catford (1965). These scholars favored a focus on language as a system and translation as a phenomenon that could be studied by contrastive analysis between systems. While Jakobson introduced intralinguistic and intersemiotic translation, he did so from a dichotomy-based understanding of signs, and the focus in TS would remain on interlingual translation. Within the linguistic, semiotic paradigm two main schools emerged during the second half of the twentieth century, the Leipzig School and the Paris School, which accepted that communication across systems was possible by means of deverbalization (Seleskovitch, 1978), or simply detaching signifieds from signifiers. Both Leipzig School and Paris School researchers initiated the empirical study of the processes of translation and interpreting, pioneering the observation of practitioners and trainees as a proxy to the mental processes involved (Kade, 1964, Jäger, 1977, Wotjak, 2003). The linguistic paradigm evidences the dualism between content and form and spearheaded the observation of subjects in earnest, introducing a key element in the future epistemology of TS, empiricism. 14

Epistemological positions

By the early 1970s, Holmes considered that translation transcended literary and contrastive, linguistic accounts. The discipline had developed enough to start discussing its object, ambit and amenable methodologies. He set out to delineate an empirical discipline whose main objective would be describing, explaining and predicting translation-related phenomena. He does that from an epistemological perspective. Holmes’s map laid the foundations for the descriptive agenda later to be developed by Gideon Toury (1982) in a radical shift toward the social sciences. The epistemology of descriptive TS is eminently rationalist and realist: it assumes there is a stable reality that can be known by means of observation and that tentative statements can be formulated in the form of falsifiable hypotheses to be tested against that same reality (Popper, 1959). The empirical, descriptive paradigm has not been uncontested. It poses the evident limitation of a positivist view of translation, assuming stability of meaning and real phenomena that would lead to a landscape where, according to Anthony Pym, ‘a rather quaint empiricism reigns, as in much of DTS, or in corpus linguistics, or think-aloud protocols, which rarely transcend positivist notions of science’ (Pym, 2007, p. 38). In parallel to the development of Descriptive Translation Studies (DTS) following the work of Gideon Toury (1995/2012), some TS researchers working on the literary translation or interested in cultural aspects of translation brought to bear poststructuralist and deconstructionist theories rooted in a relativistic tradition (Derrida, 1985; Arrojo, 1993). From an epistemological perspective, relativism entails that all knowledge is unstable and therefore relative, that is, there is not such a thing as a real touchstone against which theories can be checked, let alone meaning, and so empiricism is not a valid way of gaining generalizable knowledge. The divide between descriptive and relativistic scholars persists despite their evolution over time and it has been one of the hot topics about the (dis)unity of TS as a discipline (Arrojo, 2002 & Chesterman, 2002). Postmodern epistemologies, of course, go far beyond the schematic simplification of deconstructionism here presented for the sake of argument. There are postmodern epistemic positions that are not necessarily relativistic, but that rightly problematize translation as a multifaceted and complex phenomenon that transcends dichotomies and is mediated by human, social, and economic variables (among others) that easily escape from the narrowing down that empirical research requires, making generalizations difficult. For example, from the perspective of historiography, scholars have pointed out that the wide-ranging generalizations of DTS explanatory frameworks do not accommodate the need for a specific historical research in TS (Rundle, 2012). From the perspective of didactics, Donald Kiraly developed a model of translation competence acquisition based on socioconstructivist and postmodern postulates that acknowledges the emergent nature of knowledge, cognition, and translation itself (2000, 2015). While still focusing on language-based communication, in its application to TS didactics, socioconstructivism breaks away from hard realism and absolute categories arranged in dichotomies. Translation knowledge (and, also, epistemic cognitive success) is constructed in each translation instance in a process of interaction with the environment and other people, who, together with the task requirements, constrain the meaning-making process of translation. We will see in the next sections how these positions resonate with a semiotic theory of translation and its proposed epistemology. Efforts to investigate the translation process initiated by scholars in the Leipzig and Paris schools had been continued over the following decades, favoring the models and methods of experimental psychology and cognitive sciences to the detriment of Linguistics. From an epistemological perspective, this meant the adoption of a realist, empirical agenda based on first-generation information-processing paradigm models (for a discussion see Muñoz & Marín, forthcoming). Despite an explicit interest in the translation process, the models 15

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applied depicted cognition as a linear set of discrete stages that happened without any link to the environment. A period of extensive borrowing ensued bringing from other disciplines methods and ideas that were simply applied to translation phenomena. The already mentioned recurrent characteristics (binary conflation of variables, focus on language and realist constructions of phenomena in discrete units) transpired in the modelling of translation. We find a telling example in models of translation processes skill acquisition (Wilss, 1976; PACTE, 2003; Göpferich, 2009). These models were multi-componential, including a series of discrete categories to account for the complex web of variables entailed in translation. However, this approach faces a major challenge: dichotomous and absolute categories cannot provide a description for an undetermined, emergent process, which leads to the proliferation of categories, leading to the paradox of overly deterministic models underspecifying a highly complex, undetermined set of phenomena. During the first decades of the new century, an increasing number of TS scholars shifted their attention to the theoretical apparatus of TS in an attempt to revisit long-established concepts and stances. In doing so, these scholars looked for the specifics in translation to abstract it into categories and embed it into traditions that could account for the complex, emergent nature of translational phenomena as we will see in the next section.

Complexity epistemologies in TS Starting in the second decade of the twenty-first century, a number of scholars in TS began to develop translation-specific theoretical frameworks that problematized and posed alternatives to dichotomous epistemologies. In Cognitive Translation Studies (CTS) Ricardo Muñoz (2010) proposed cognitive translatology as an alternative to models and theories of the translating mind rooted in the cognitivist postulates of the information processing paradigm (see Piccinini, 2012 for a discussion of cognitivism in cognitive science). Drawing from situated cognition or 4EA cognition (embodied, extended, embedded, enacted and affective cognition) tenets, Muñoz (2010) proposes the first translation-specific cognitive paradigm. It assumes cognition to be an adaptive, bodily process leading to emergent mental constructions. Thus, cognitive translatology does away with the distinction of body/mind and also with the divided mind/environment, since cognitive processes are assumed to be supported by the physical environment and the interaction with other actors in the process. The notion of interaction is critical here, as cognitive translatology proponents view cognition (and therefore the cognitive underpinnings of translation and meaning-making) as a continuous engagement with the environment and with others, that is, constrained by the physical medium, including our own bodies (Muñoz, 2016). The continuum is no longer a cline between two opposing ends, but a plait of interrelated variables that call for complex modeling (Spivey, 2008). This view resonates with the already mentioned constructivist work of Kiraly that moves beyond linear, transmissionist approaches to translation skill development ‘towards an approach that acknowledges the complexity of learning systems’ (2015, p. 21 original emphasis). Importantly, cognitive translatology embraces socioconstructivism without abandoning an empirical agenda based on embodied realism, which considers that ‘the locus of experience, meaning, and thought is the ongoing series of embodied organism-environment interactions that constitute our understanding of the world’ ( Johnson & Lakoff, 2002, p. 249). Other voices pointed out the limitations of dialectal discourses in translation that minimized or simply swept complexity under the rug of absolute categories (Gentzler, 2012).

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Among these voices were the calls to address epistemological issues in TS and align them with current developments in Western philosophy (Arduini & Nergaard; Marais, 2014). Marais poses a framework for an epistemology of complexity that is eminently relational, focusing on the links and engagement of elements rather than making distinctions between parts and whole or opposing binaries (2014, p. 20). The complexity theory advocated by Marais is a reaction against the long-standing reductionism of the sciences, prone to isolate the object of study in favor of controlled conditions that disregard the varying, movable nature of reality –both as experienced and as constructed– that doesn’t impose radical rationalizations: Complexity is a philosophical stance that does not try to reduce either the one into the many or the many into the one. (…) It is a philosophy that does not reduce messiness to some neat principle or law (Latour, 2007), but rather seeks to deal with both organization and disorganization (Morin, 2008, p. 6). (Marais, 2014, p. 22) In this sense, it is a realist yet not a positivist proposal that recognizes the adaptive nature of phenomena (Kiraly, 2015; cf. Muñoz, 2016): Conceptualized in the terminology of complex adaptive systems theory, translation is both a complex adaptive system constituted by complex adaptive subsystems and a complex adaptive subsystem that co-constitutes a number of complex adaptive systems, or social reality as a complex adaptive supra-system. (Marais, 2014, p. 44) Translation is thus conceptualized in strata that are in contact and pivot around transformation and similarity. Marais proposes a processual epistemology of translation that avoids absolute or reductionist understandings of the phenomena under study. Not surprisingly, his approach to complexity theory and call for a philosophy of translation fits his proposal for an intersemiotic theory of translation that depicts translational phenomena as an ongoing process of constrained meaning-making and meaning-taking (2019). Blumczynski and Hassani review the dichotomies in TS epistemologies and identify the shortcomings of binary, unidimensional theories and models (2019, p. 340–341): Despite the frequent admissions that translation is an extraordinarily complex concept, phenomenon and practice, much of the theoretical reflection devoted to it – as we sought to demonstrate – draws on a simplistic logical paradigm and a unidimensional model. Dichotomous epistemologies (binary, unidimensional in Blumczynski & Hassani’s terms; reductionist in Marais’s) offer obvious limitations to an intersemiotic conceptualization of translation that constructs phenomena in terms of a continuous meaning-making process according to Peircean categories (interpretamen, interpretant, object). Reduction of translation to absolute categories of meaning, transfer or source/target (linguistic) text poses an incommensurability issue vis-à-vis a framework that underscores the processual nature of translation in many, diverging instances as shaped by constraints that are an inherent part of the meaning-making process (cf. also with Blumczynski, 2021). This stance supersedes the focus of dichotomous epistemologies on immanent properties from a static perspective.

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Complexity epistemologies, on the other hand, do provide two main advantages when conceptualizing intersemiotic translation: a b

A processual construction of the phenomena under study that fits semiotic views on meaning, and the fact that they are translation-specific and do not squeeze phenomena into other disciplines’ theoretical apparati, which provides frameworks to develop a translation-semiosis theory catering to the specifics of translation phenomena.

Grounding complex conceptualizations of translation in semiotic theory entails a relational ontology that assumes meaning to be undetermined, not consistent and reliant on the environment of a given communicative event (Merrell, 1997; Marais, 2019, p. 131). If meaning depends on the relationship between representamen and object as mediating the interpretant’s relationship to the object, any meaning-making activity (translation included) is a continuum that is never complete and therefore is not amenable to formalized, logic analyses only. I stress the ‘only’ as an intersemiotic, complexity-based layout does not preclude formal logic as an epistemological approach, it simply cannot be fully explained by it (Marais, 2019). As Marais explains when discussing Merrell’s ontology, the implication for meaning is (…) that its existence is relative to other things. In particular, meaning is never monadic. It emerges through complex interrelationships and through relationships between relationships. Thus, the meaning of any part of the semiotic process, i.e. a particular representamen, cannot be separated or conceived of apart from the whole of the semiotic process. (2019, p. 131) Against this background, translation is an emergent phenomenon that is relative to a never-ending set of phenomena. From an epistemological point of view, this means an idealistic standpoint that might prove a challenge for empirical research if phenomena are always derived from or related to other objects of study and therefore cannot be properly observed (see for instance Quine’s positions). Also, the relative and emergent qualities of meaning would make it impossible to do empirical research according to set variables as it would be a relativistic construction. Marais acknowledges this issue ‘A philosophical position that holds that everything is related to everything else might thus be possible theoretically, but it does not allow for the study of phenomena and processes in reality’ and resources to Salthe’s take on hierarchical levels to set the first level of observation based on the object of study and according to Peircean phenomenology (Salthe, 2009, 2012) (2019, p. 137). The interrelation here exposed resonates with Stecconi’s discussion on the triadicity of T-semiosis where the foundation (the vague qualities that make translation) is a first in relationship with translation events (second) and concepts of translation (third) (Stecconi, 2004, p. 483). The relational nature of meaning is also the nature of knowledge. Marais (2019) discusses the epistemology of John Deely’s semiotic realism (2007) as an epistemic theory describing the relational, emergent nature of knowledge construction of which both reality and ideas partake (cf. Latour, 2007). Marais stresses the relevance of Deely’s epistemology as based on semiotic translation processes of meaning-making and its convenience to avoid the blind alley of solipsistic idealism/constructivism (2019, p. 153). Deely’s work and Marais’s application to translation epistemology are indeed a lucid description of knowledge construction. However, those relational categories remain fuzzy and empirical research into translation 18

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processes would require neater, operationalized categories and a firmer form of realism that rightly problematizes positivist positions, but that allows for the construction (for the abstraction) of clearly delimited phenomena as objects of study. In order words, and in terms of Stecconi’s take on Peirce’s phenomenology (2004): if semiotic realism is a valid and suggestive theory of knowledge construction at the foundational level, there is no reason why we should not avail ourselves of well-delineated models that lend themselves to empirical observation at the event or concept levels provided the data gathered are stable and meaningful to the vaguer or more underdetermined categories (Horst, 2016). I would like to contend that a critical realism position would fit this purpose for an epistemology of TS as a link between fuzzy categories and empirical concepts, and that such an epistemology could be combined with semiotic realism from a pluralist stance. One of the more suggestive traits of both complexity epistemologies and a semiotic theory of translation is that they lend themselves to a plurality of epistemic approaches to explore different facets of translation. This is relevant for intersemiotic theories of translation that provide a baseline explanation of translation as a semiotic process in iterations between first, second and third instances, but that provide ample space to qualify those processes according to which the concrete semiotic system, communicative event or actual interpretant, representamen and object are. It is a simple set of fuzzy categories. In this sense, complexity epistemologies and intersemiotic theories dovetail in catering to the multiplicity of variables producing, enabling and constraining translation and, at the same time, offering an allencompassing explanatory framework, that is, semiosis. It might be contended that such an approach would veer into monism, one explanatory framework to rule them all. However, a(n inter)semiotic theory of translation is just a proxy to explain a myriad of constraints at such a basic level that saying translation is a semiotic process, without further elaboration, might end up being banal without ever being wrong. Therefore, further models, possibly pertaining to different traditions, might be necessary. Overly complex models and theories paradoxically fail to describe accurately phenomenal complexity (as shown by Pym, 2003); whereas models, theories or basic constructs that are simple and flexible categories better account for complex processes involving many variables. This is not only a matter of parsimony or economy of means; it is a theoretical design that avoids internal inconsistencies at a given level while allowing enrichment of the object of study at other levels. Having a set of broad categories that pertain to the very essentials of a phenomenon while acknowledging, even if implicitly, the complexity of a said phenomenon as an object of study allows for the ad hoc modeling of all the other aspects or variables of that object at several levels and, at the same time, would let us accommodate them in the wide-ranging, more general account. Such an approach would lead us to epistemic scientific pluralism.

Scientific pluralism and intersemiotic translation Already introduced to TS by Marín (2019, 2021), particularly in application to theoretical development in Cognitive Translation and Interpreting Studies (CTIS), epistemic scientific pluralism as an epistemological position considers that there is more than one possible viable and valid system of epistemic values, that is, ways of constructing knowledge (Coliva & Pedersen, 2017). The possible existence of more than one way of knowing does not follow that all approaches are valid or that they serve the same purposes. Isaiah Berlin, one of the main proponents of pluralism in the history of ideas, already warned against relativism stating that every stance or claim is to be tested for its falsehood according to the given parameters of said system (Berlin 2013). Epistemic scientific pluralism, therefore, advocates for a plurality of 19

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approaches to gain valid knowledge, not for the blanket-bombing acceptance of approaches or for diluting the validity of knowledge in relativism. It focuses on how the knowledge is attained, not on its quality or nature: ‘Knowledge might be one – have one nature – even though it depends on a plurality of makers’ (Zangwill, 2020, p. 497). Thus, a pluralist approach would not contravene the relational nature of knowledge. It relates to the ways and methods through which we gain knowledge, in this case, scholarly methods. In fact, the origins of scientific pluralism and the disunity of science are rooted in the interrelated meaning of scientific theories. With the notions of paradigms and their incommensurability Thomas Kuhn (1962) offered a response to positivist takes on the independent meaning of logical propositions (Popper, 1959) and brought to the fore the fact that the meaning of scientific theories could not be isolated from a network of significances (Sellars, 1963) and that their meaning, therefore, was dependent on the use of communities of practice (Wittgenstein, 1953). The logical consequence of this is that scientific knowledge as codified in theories is not universal and that there may be as many theories, and paradigms, as there may be communities of scientific practice. Kuhn’s initial radical views on incommensurability would be later qualified by the author himself and further developed in the work of other philosophers of science in the next decade (Lakatos, 1970, Laudan, 1977, Feyerabend, 1978). Kuhn’s work, particularly the concept of paradigm remains very influential to this day (also in TS Gengshen Hu, 2019, Kenneth McElhanon, 2007, Siobhan Brownlie, 2003, Derek Boothman, 2014, Maria Tymoczko, 1999, Muñoz, 2010) and over the turn of the century fueled descriptive or normative pluralistic models of scientific practice in the philosophy of science that contested monism and reduction as an end in and of itself. Most of the issues found pertain to the study of translation, and even more so to the development of a semiotic theory of translation, for instance: the complexity of an object of study that goes beyond disciplinary or methodological boundaries (Kellert et al., 2006) or the convenient use of a panoply of methods and reasoning styles (Hacking, 1996; Suppes, 1978, compared to Blumczynski & Hassani, 2019 or Blumczynski, 2021). There is also a matter of scope: theories extend in scope as far as their models do (Cartwright, 1999) and therefore are limited; and of validity: scientific knowledge is sometimes generated in circumstances (a lab setting, a given environmental setting for an ethnographic research project on interpreting, for instance) out of which they may not be replicable (Hacking, 1983). Let us remember here the different levels of observation Salthe (2009) mentions as a way to overcome category fuzziness: different levels might require different, not always necessarily compatible models to inform one only theory. Radical pluralism might seem at odds with the firmer, critical realism I have advocated before. Several possible ways of knowledge, that are constructed differently, might defeat the purpose of inquiring one reality. However, epistemic pluralism does not necessarily entail ontological pluralism. Dupré (1983) argues for the compatibility of pluralism with a realist stance as many methods can converge – and even cohere – on a ‘real’ discovery. Also, from a pragmatist angle, ‘various successes of science will easily lead us to the knowledge of various realities (or various versions or aspects of Reality)’ (Chang, 2018, p. 185). A relational ontology might as well be an aim for a variety of approaches across levels of investigation or focus on different aspects of the semiotic process. Ludwig (2015, p. 15) considers the ontological question to be an empirical one and doubts that everything can be reduced to a ‘fundamental physical ontology.’ Maul et al. (2016, p. 318) on their part discuss diverging commitments about the world (metaphysical), their properties about truth (semantic) and their interpretation (epistemological) that inform varying types of realism. These differences

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relate to notions of ‘style of scientific reasoning’ (Hacking) that permeate object descriptions as theory-laden. That is, what is considered to be true at the ontology level depends on the system of knowledge, its style and commitments and, importantly, on the constraints of the environment – it is a semiotic process itself. Pluralism offers the possibility to integrate different traditions and styles to tackle complexity when no single approach would suffice (Longino, 2002; Mitchell, 2003) and, what is more important, it enriches our description of our objects of study by adding different layers that can correspond to the different levels of analysis (Barberis et al., 2017; Ruphy, 2017). Again, these proposals do not naively accept positivist realism, but provide for multiplicity of constructed realities as modeled. By the same token, according to Marais (2014), what makes the object of study belong in a discipline is not the phenomenon, but the approach to it, its abstraction into a research object. Thus, different scientific styles impose different criteria for the investigation of the phenomena: ‘a style is not valued because it would allow us to discover some truths; rather, a style is what defines the kinds of propositions that can be a candidate for being true or false’ (Ruphy, 2011, p. 1214). Styles, therefore, introduce their own research objects with their own ontological commitments, which triggers an ontological debate (Hacking, 1992/2002). These debates are connatural to scientific enterprises and are at the core of their success, leading to deliberation and consensus-reaching engagement within scholarly communities (Latour, 2007). I would like to contend that monist approaches to scientific research tend to obliterate these debates and shrug away complexity by not acknowledging it. On the contrary, pluralism focuses on these debates. A general, semiotic theory of meaning and therefore of translation would allow for the endorsement of scientific pluralism by providing a foundational benchmark, vague or fuzzy categories if we like, on which different, more concrete models can be developed. When discussing Peircean categories (representamen, interpretant and object) in application to translation, Marais points out that: The categories are, therefore, only a rough indication and not a detailed characterization. Because semiosis is a complex, fuzzy, and messy process, thinking that one would be able to provide clear conceptual categories would be a mistake. I am looking for categories that would be workable, not absolutely clear in terms of logic. The categories are, therefore, pragmatic and processual rather than logical. (Marais, 2019, p. 143) It is precisely this pragmatism that makes a semiotic theory and pluralism enable each other. Again, pluralism does not preclude possible, eventual unification either in terms of method or in terms of justification, which, in most cases across the empirical styles, are not that different (see Haack, 1993 for a differentiation between pluralism in knowledge justification criteria and pluralism applied to the ‘conduct of enquiry’). Pluralism provides an epistemic approach to endorse a semiotic theory of translation in that it also avoids naïve realism or isolating idealism. At the same time, it is not excluding, accepting, in a pragmatist tradition of which Peirce himself partakes, that there is more than one way of approaching reality, and that ‘There is both natural and social reality’ (Haack, 2016, p. 78 original emphasis). It is the same pragmatism that allows us to turn fuzzy categories into logical ones for the sake of empirical research with any necessary provisos and the enrichment of the object of study by the accumulation of styles.

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Ruphy introduces the notion of foliated pluralism to describe this enrichment by the addition of layers and reasoning styles. Foliated pluralism exhibits the characteristics of transdisciplinarity, synchronicity, nonexclusiveness, and cumulativeness: (…) the introduction of new kinds of entities gives rise to an ontological enrichment of the objects studied by science, to the extent that the use in scientific practice of different styles of reasoning widens and diversifies the classes of propositions that can be true or false about them. (2011, p. 1219). We can be posed with two questions at this point: a b

how can we reconcile the different ontological (or metaphysical) commitments brought along by different styles with a basic realism allowing empirical research; and how can different styles or research traditions be combined with a general semiotic theory of translation?

In arguing in favor of the compatibility of scientific pluralism and realism, Chang (2018) offers an answer to the first question in two parts: first, he sets out from the premise that empirical success is the base to consider a given theory or model true. Further, Chang contends that it is not possible to attribute success in science to one simple trait or dimension, and that empirical success depends on a variety of factors that cannot be reduced to one single dimension: ‘(…) successfulness, in science as in life, is not something for which we can have a coherent one-dimensional ordinal measure. Successfulness is something that comes in various shapes as well as degrees’ (2018, p. 178). From this argument it follows that the many paths into empirical success invite us to use different ‘systems of practice’ (cf. Hacking’s & Ruphy’s styles). If the success of science has many dimensions, it is not likely that various competing scientific systems of practice can be ranked in a single order of successfulness. In that situation it will be very difficult to argue that any particular system of practice is surely the royal road to truth. So it will be difficult to avoid epistemic pluralism, and there will be a methodological dimension to epistemic pluralism, since different systems of practice will typically involve different methods. (Chang, 2018, p. 178) This kind of methodological pluralism might still be compatible with ontological or metaphysical monism – all the different methodologies leading to one and only reality. However, Chang pursues his argument further, advocating for a pragmatic metaphysical pluralism that accepts an alternative construction of ‘truth’ based on what he calls a ‘coherence theory of truth.’ Coherence is here understood as the relation between epistemic activities conducive to success (cf. Haack’s ‘conduct of enquiry’) whereby we assign truth value or deem real the object of a representamen (a theory in this case) in a given context. In Chang’s example, the atomic weight of an element is real in chemistry but not in nuclear physics (2018, p. 182); in a translation example, the stability of the meaning of the Spanish word mesa is seen as the suitable translation for table. In other words, it is a way to fit reality into pluralism, acknowledging the constructed nature of reality as an object of scientific inquiry. It is also consistent with semiotic theories as it is a relational ontology in the way of 22

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Deely’s semiotic realism, since our empirical understanding of reality, as much as meaning, emerges in interaction: As it is a relationship between epistemic activities, coherence is not reducible to the logical consistency of the propositions involved in the activities, though it would often be helped by consistency. Coherence is an attribute of a set of epistemic activities, which, together, can be said to form a system of practice if there is sufficient coherence among them (see Chang 2014 and Chang 2017 for further discussion). (Chang, 2018, p. 182) The second question posed before a pluralistic approach was how can different styles or research traditions be combined with a general semiotic theory of translation? While pluralistic accounts usually focus, as we have seen, on the disunity of science and the need to embrace more than one epistemic system, pluralism can also be integrative. Marín (2021) offers a pluralistic approach to translation theory development by distinguishing between epistemic levels: theories and models. Theories are to be considered general, internally consistent descriptions of real phenomena abstracted into objects of study, while models are to be considered concrete, idealized representations of the object of study that can be tested empirically. Models are interpretative (Bailer-Jones, 2009) and therefore may favor some aspects of the phenomenon to the detriment of others. For instance, a model of translation as a negentropic semiotic work (Marais, 2019) might include environmental and physiological constraints as an integral part. These two epistemic levels respond to different coherence requirements: while theories are to be internally coherent and consistent with other theories in their research tradition, models do not need to cohere, provided they provide empirical access to the phenomenon under study (Horst, 2016; Marín, 2021, p. 228). As such, models do not claim any ontological reality, they are functional entities (Giere, 2008; Veit, 2020) that serve as ‘intermediaries’ (Morgan & Morrison, 1999) between the phenomena and the theory. This kind of model pluralism allows empirical data from different aspects of the object of study into only general theory. For instance, effort models in CTIS can be used to feed the description of the interpretant in semiotic theory of translation or the socio-cognitive constraints of meaning-making in intersemiotic translation can be modeled according to Kotze’s view of translation as a phenomenon constrained by socio-cognitive dimensions, which can then be adopted as analysis variables (2020). This pluralistic understanding of theory development also provides for a mechanism to turn the ‘pragmatic and processual rather than logical’ categories (Marais, 2019, p. 143) in a semiotic theory of translation into neater, operationalized categories in models. A semiotic theory of translation would benefit from pluralism as an approach that allows for critical realist research that shuns idealist isolation, and that provides for the articulation of general descriptions and fuzzy categories into more determined models to be used in empirical or non-empirical research. At the same time, one of the major challenges for an integrative pluralistic agenda in TS is the absence of a general theory of translation into which the growing translation knowledge could be fed, and a semiotic theory of translation offers the most possible solution to that predicament.

Concluding remarks Based on the discussion above, combining an intersemiotic theory of translation and scientific pluralism as an epistemological agenda bears the promise of advancing theoretical 23

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development in Translation and Interpreting Studies and, at the same time, enhancing its object of study, transcending dichotomous views of mediation. The benefits of such an approach can be summarized as follows: •

It would contribute to a critical realist scientific agenda avoiding both idealism and positivism (semiotic realism and pluralistic realism) It would provide a solution for the tension between fuzzy categories and empirical models It would provide a wide-ranging theory to explain away translational phenomena that are studied by means of diverging models It would lead to the enrichment, and not only the broadening, of translation as an object of study.

• • •

Note 1 For a full definition, see the Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy: https://www.oxfordreference. com/view/10.1093/acref/9780198735304.001.0001/acref-9780198735304-e-1113?rskey= lZ0KbH&result=1151

References Arrojo, R. (1993). Tradução, Desconstrução e Psicanálise. Río de Janeiro: Imago. Arrojo, R. (2002). Lessons Learned from Babel. Target, 14(1), 137–143. Bailer-Jones, D. M. (2009). Scientific Models in Philosophy of Science. Pittburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Barberis, S. D., Branca, M. I., & Venturelli, A. N. (2017). A Pluralist Framework for the Philosophy of Social Neuroscience. In A. Ibáñez, L. Sedeño & A. García (Eds.), Neuroscience and Social Science (pp. 501–530). Cham: Springer. Berlin, I. (2013). The Crooked Timber of Humanity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Berman, A. (1984). L’épreuve de L’étranger: Culture et Traduction dans l’Allemagne Romantique. Paris: Gallimard. Blumczynski, P. (2021). Processualizing Process in Cognitive Translation and Interpreting Studies: A Philosophical Intervention. In S. Halverson & A. Marín garcía (Eds.), Contesting Epistemologies in Cognitive Translation and Interpreting Studies (pp. 32–50). Routledge. Blumczynski, P., & Hassani, G. (2019). Towards a Meta-Theoretical Model for Translation. In T. Hermans (Ed.), Target: International Journal of Translation Studies, 31(3), 328–351. New York: Routledge. Boothman, D. (2014). Translatability Between Paradigms: Gramsci’s Translation of Crocean Concepts. In Crosscultural Transgressions: Research Models in Translation: v. 2: Historical and Ideological Issues (pp. 103–119). Brownlie, S. (2003). Berman and Toury: The Translating and Translatability of Research Frameworks. TTR: Traduction, Terminologie, Redaction, 16(1), 93–120. Cartwright, N. (1999). The Dappled World: A Study of the Boundaries of Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Catford, J. C. (1965). A Linguistic Theory of Translation: An Essay in Applied Linguistics. London: Oxford University Press Chang, H. (2018). Is pluralism Compatible with Scientific Realism? In J. Saatsi (Ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Scientific Realism (pp. 176–186). New York: Routledge. Chesterman, A. (2002). Shared Ground Revisited. Target, 14(1), 143–148. Chesterman, A., & Rosemary, A. (2000). Forum: Shared Ground in TS. Target. International Journal of Translation Studies, 12(1), 151–60. Coliva, A., & Pedersen, N. J. L. (2017). Epistemic Pluralism. Cham: Palgrave. Derrida, J. (1985). Des Tours de Babel. In J. F. Graham (Ed.), Difference in Translation (pp. 165–208). Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

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Deely, J., (2007). Intentionality and Semiotics: A Story of Mutual Fecundation. Scranton: University of Scranton Press. Dupré, J. (1983). The Disunity of Science. Mind, 92(367), 321–346. Feyerabend, P. (1978). Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge. London: Verso. Gentzler, E. (2012). Translation and Identity in the Americas: New Directions in Translation Theory. London: Routledge. Giere, R. N. (2008). Why Scientific Models Should Not Be Regarded as Works of Fiction. Routledge. Göpferich, S. (2009). Towards a Model of Translation Competence and its Acquisition: The Longitudinal Study Transcomp. In S. Göpferich, A. Jakobsen & I. Mees (Eds.), Behind the Mind: Methods, Models and Results in Translation Process Research 4(pp. 11–37). Copenhagen: Samfundslitteratur. Haack, S. (1993). Evidence and Inquiry. Towards Reconstruction in Epistemology. Oxford: Blackwell. Haack, S. (2016). Pining Away in the Midst of Plenty. The Irony of Rorty’s Either/or Philosophy. The Hedgehog Review, 18(2), 76–80. Hacking, I. (1983). Representing and Intervening. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hacking, I. (1992). ‘Style’ for Historians and Philosophers. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A, 23(1), 1–20. Hacking, I. (1996). The Disunities of the Sciences. In P. Galison & D. Stump (Eds.), The Disunity of Science (pp. 37–74). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Holmes, J. (1972). The Name and Nature of Translation Studies. Indian Journal of Applied Linguistics, 13(2), 9–24. Horst, S. (2016). Cognitive Pluralism. Cambridge: MIT Press. Hu, G. (2019). The Eco-Paradigm of Contemporary Translation Studies. 中国翻译 [Chinese Translators Journal], 40(4), 24–33. Jäger, G. (1977). Zu gegenstand und Zielen der Ubersetzungswissenschaft [On the Object and Goals of Translation Science]. In O. Kade (Ed.), Vermittelte Kommunikation, Sprachmittlung, Translation (pp. 14–26). Leipzig: VEB Verlag Enzykopladie. Jakobson, R. (1959). On Linguistic Aspects of Translation. In R. A. Brower (Ed.), On Translation (pp. 144–151). Cambridge: Harvard University. Johnson, M., & Lakoff, G. (2002). Why Cognitive Linguistics Requires Embodied Realism. Cognitive Linguistics, 13(3), 245–263. DOI: 10.1515/cogl.2002.016. Kade, O. (1964). Subjektive und objektive Faktoren im Ubersetzungsprozess. Ein Beitrag zur Ermittlung objektiver Kriterien des Ubersetzens als Voraussetzung fur eine wissenschaftliche Losung des Ubersetzungsproblems [Subjective and Objective Factors in the Translation Process. A Contribution to the Establishment of Objective Criteria for Translation as a Precondition for a Scientific Solution to the Problem of Translation]. (PhD dissertation. Karl Marx Universitat Leipzig). Kellert, S. H., Longino, H. E., & Waters, C. K. (Eds.) (2006). Scientific Pluralism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Kiraly, D. (2000). A Social Constructivist Approach to Translator Education: Empowerment from Theory to Practice. Manchester: St. Jerome. DOI 10.4324/9781315760186. Kiraly, D. (2015). Occasioning Translator Competence: Moving Beyond Social Constructivism Toward a Postmodern Alternative to Instructionism. Translation and Interpreting Studies. The Journal of the American Translation and Interpreting Studies Association, 10(1), 8–32. Kotze, H. (2020). An Outlook on Empirical Translation Studies. New Empirical Perspectives on Translation and Interpreting. In L. Vandevoorde & B. Defrancq (Eds.), New Empirical Perspectives on Translation and Interpreting. New York: Routledge. Kuhn, T. S. (1962). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lakatos, I. (1970). Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes. In I. Lakatos & A. Musgrave (Eds.), Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge (pp. 91–196). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Laudan, L. (1977). Progress and its Problems: Towards a Theory of Scientific Growth. Berkeley: University of California Press. Latour, B. (2007). Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-network Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Longino, H. E. (2002). The Fate of Knowledge. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Ludwig, D. (2015). A Pluralist Theory of the Mind (Vol. 2). Cham: Springer. Marais, K. (2014). Translation Theory and Development Studies: A Complexity Theory Approach. New York: Routledge. 25

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Marais, K. (2019). A (bio) Semiotic Theory of Translation: The Emergence of Social-Cultural Reality. New York: Routledge. Marín García, A. (2019). The Opportunities of Epistemic Pluralism for Cognitive Translation Studies. Translation, Cognition & Behavior, 2(2), 165–185. Marín García, A. (2021). Towards a Pluralist Approach to Translation Theory Development in CTIS. In S. Halverson & A. Marín García (Eds.), Contesting Epistemologies in Cognitive Translation and Interpreting Studies (pp. 221–236). New York: Routledge Maul, A., Irribarra, D. T., & Wilson, M. (2016). On the Philosophical Foundations of Psychological Measurement. Measurement, 79, 311–320. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.measurement.2015.11.001 McElhanon, K. (2007). When Quality Is in the Eye of the Beholder: Paradigm Communities and the Certification of Standards for Judging Quality. Journal of Translation, 3(1), 25. Merrell, F. (1997). Peirce, Signs and Meaning. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Mitchell, S. D. (2003). Biological Complexity and Integrative Pluralism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Morgan, M. S., & Morrison, M. (1999). Models as Mediators. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Muñoz Martín, R. (2010). On Paradigms and Cognitive Translatology. In G. Shreve & E. Angelone (Eds.), Translation and Cognition (pp. 169–187). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Muñoz Martín, R. (Ed.) (2016). Reembedding Translation Process Research. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Muñoz Martín, R., & Marín García, A. (2022). From the Black Box to Cognitive Translation and Interpreting Studies, But Still Part of the Original Descriptive Translation Studies. In J. Franco Aixelà & C. Olalla-Soler (Eds), 50 Years Later- What Have We Learnt after Holmes (1972) and Where Are We Now?. Colección Tibón Estudios Traudcotológicos, 4. Las Palmas de Gran Canaria: Ediciones de la Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. PACTE (2003). Building a Translation Competence Model. In F. Alves (Ed.), Triangulating Translation (pp. 1–26). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Piccinini, G. (2012). Computationalism. In E. Margolis & S. Stich (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Cognitive Science (pp. 222–249). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Popper, K. R. (1959). The Logic of Scientific Discovery. London: Hutchinson. Pym, A. (2003). “Redefining Translation Competence in an Electronic Age. In Defence of a Minimalist Approach.” Meta: Journal des traducteursMeta:/Translators' Journal 48(4), 481–97. Pym, A. (2007). TS and Western Philosophy. In P. Kuhlwczak & K. Litau (Eds.), A Companion to TS (pp. 24–44). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Rosenberg, A. & McIntyre, L. (2020). Philosophy of Science: A Contemporary Introduction, 4th Edition. New York: Routledge. Rundle, C. (2012). Translation as an Approach to History. Translation Studies, 5(2), 232–240. Ruphy, S. (2011). From Hacking’s Plurality of Styles of Scientific Reasoning to “Foliated” Pluralism: A Philosophically Robust Form of Ontologico-Methodological Pluralism. Philosophy of Science, 78(5), 1212–1222. Ruphy, S. (2017). Scientific Pluralism Reconsidered: A New Approach to the (Dis) Unity of Science. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Salthe, S. (2009). A Hierarchical Framework for Levels of Reality: Understandingthrough Representation. Axiomathes, 19, 87–99. Salthe, S. (2012). Hierarchical Structures. Axiomathes, 22, 355–383. Schleiermacher, F. (1813). On the Different Methods of Translating. In L. Venuti (Ed.), The Translation Studies Reader (pp. 43–63). London: Routledge. Seleskovitch, D. (1978). Language and Cognition. In: D. Gerver & H. W. Sinaiko (Eds.), Language Interpretation and Communication. NATO Conference Series. Cham: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/ 978-1-4615-9077-4_29 Sellars, W. (1963). Abstract Entities. The Review of Metaphysics 16(4), 627–671. Spivey, M. (2008). The Continuity of Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stecconi, U. (2004). Interpretive Semiotics and Translation Theory: The Semiotic Conditions to Translation. Semiotica, 150(1/4), 471–489. Stecconi, U. (2007). Five Reasons Why Semiotics Is Good for Translation Studies. In: Y. Gambier, M. Shlesinger & R. Stolze (Eds.), Doubts and Directions in Translation Studies (pp. 15–26). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

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Suppes, P. (1978). The Plurality of Science. PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 2, 3–16. Available at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/192459 (Accessed: 14 July 2021). Toury, G. (1982). A Rationale for Descriptive TS. Dispositio, 7(19), 23–39. Toury, G. (1995). Descriptive Translation Studies–and Beyond: Revised Edition 2012. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Tymoczko, M. (1999). Translation in a Postcolonial Context: Early Irish Literature in English Translation. New York: Routledge. Veit, W. (2020). Model Pluralism. Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 50(2), 91–114. Venuti, L. (1995). The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation. London: Routledge. Vinay, J. P., & Darbelnet, J. (1958, 1995). Comparative Stylistics of French and English: A Methodology for Translation. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Von Humboldt, W. (1996). De la Introducción a la Traducción Métrica del Agamenón de Esquilo. In D. López García (Ed.), Teorías de la Traducción: Antología de Textos (pp. 158–164). Cuenca: Ediciones de la Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha. Wilss, W. (1976). Perspectives and Limitations of a Didactic Framework for the Teaching of Translation. In R. Brislin (Ed.), Translation: Applications and Research (pp. 117–137). New York: Gardner Press. Wittgenstein, L. (1953). Philosophical Investigations. New York: John Wiley & Sons. Wotjak, G. (2003). La Escuela de Traductologia de Leipzig. Hyeronimus Complutensis, 9(10), 7– 26. https://cvc.cervantes.es/lengua/hieronymus/pdf/ 09_10/09_10_007.pdf Zangwill, N. (2020). Epistemic Pluralism: The Missing Link and the Ambitions of Epistemology. Metaphilosophy, 51(4), 485–498.

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2 Ontological positions Piotr Blumczynski and Neil Sadler

Ontological foundations To inquire into ontology is to ask questions at the most basic level – about the nature of being itself. It means asking what it really means to say that something exists. As such, ontology is concerned with everything that ‘is.’ This makes it further reaching than every other area of study. Not everything can think, act or be moral but everything, whether real or imagined, in some way is. Ontological assumptions, more often implicit than explicitly formulated, provide the ground from which knowledge, thought and action follow. What translation is, for instance, is an ontological question with significant implications for thought and practice. If a text has a ‘spirit,’ it is possible – and sensible – to think of translation in terms of transfer. But if translation is the basis of all semiosis, and semiosis is extended beyond human language to encompass all ‘physical-chemical-biological’ interaction and more, as Kobus Marais (2019) has it, then the idea of translation as transfer makes little sense. Questions about what translation is will ultimately end up raising deeper ontological questions. Speaking of the spirit of the text comes down to an ontology of essences and the idea that the truth lies hidden beneath the surface – in Immanuel Kant’s terms, in noumena (things-in-themselves) rather than phenomena (things-as-they-appear). Marais’s approach, on the other hand, is grounded in a relational, secular ontology inspired by the New Materialism of Terrence Deacon. If approaches in Translation Studies embrace a wide range of ontological stances, a bewildering array of approaches can be found among philosophers. The Western line of recorded thought about ontology is longer than almost any other, stretching back over 2,000 years to the Ancient Greeks. Perhaps more significantly still, thought from that time continues to exert enormous influence on contemporary thinking. Galen’s ‘humoral’ theory of medicine, for instance, has long since been abandoned, but Plato’s ideas on the nature of being remain profoundly influential, in both academic and broader circles. The sheer bulk of material and range of approaches that have been developed make any attempt to account chronologically – as is common in our own relatively young discipline – for developments in thinking on ontology simply impossible. With that in mind, and given the focus of the volume in which this chapter features, our goals are more modest. First, we explore some of the key issues in the study of ontology, considering both the challenges and the importance of addressing the 28

DOI: 10.4324/9781003161448-4

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question(s) of being. Second, we offer an introduction to a series of key ontological ideas. Third, we give an overview of several major traditions of thinking in ontology. Limitations of space, and in our own knowledge, mean that the second and third sections in particular are highly selective; they address only a small subset of ideas from Western thinking on ontology. Nonetheless, they were not chosen at random and we have emphasized ideas and thinkers who seem, to us at least, to offer ideas of real value to translation scholars.

Issues with the study of ontology The opening paragraphs aimed to show that getting a grip on our ontological assumptions is a desirable first step in most scholarly inquiries. Yet if ontology is uniquely valuable in understanding everything that is, it is also uniquely difficult to study. Rather than asking about specific beings – whether we are talking about translation or people, rocks or emotions – it asks about being itself. This makes it unavoidably abstract. Ontology resists quantification more strongly than almost any other area of inquiry. Physics is concerned with the study and quantification of the material world and phenomena such as gravity, chemical reactions and stars. Metaphysics (as one major approach to ontology), on the other hand, asks what makes gravity different from a chemical reaction and what makes a star a star rather than a squirrel. These questions to some extent might be approached by measuring and calculation, but they can never be reduced to them. Moreover, the copula ‘is’ is clearly employed in a very diverse range of senses. In his Introduction to Metaphysics (2000), for example, Martin Heidegger offers extended meditations on ‘being and becoming,’ ‘being and seeming,’ ‘being and thinking’ and ‘being and the ought,’ arguing that each constitutes an important aspect of being, without it ever being reducible to any one of them.1 Ontology provides the ground for other areas of study but cannot be fully separated from them. To ask what it is for something to exist inevitably means asking questions about how things appear, what knowledge human interpreters can have of them, what is valuable and what is not and so on. The questions it raises are frequently uncomfortable because they have implications far beyond scholarly inquiry. If I accept poststructuralist ideas on the essential indeterminacy of being, where does that leave me in terms of how I live and think about my own existence more generally? If I accept Christian teaching on the idea that God is the ultimate first cause of everything, where does that leave the belief – widely upheld in Translation Studies these days – that searching for the original or true meaning of anything is to search for something which does not ultimately exist? If I accept the rationalist position that everything which exists is amenable to being completely understood, must I see myself as having failed if I cannot understand everything that happens in my life? To ask such questions inevitably means encroaching on matters of faith, belief and commitment. The fields in which ontology has been most directly addressed are philosophy and theology – two areas in which the question of being assumes central importance. Yet even within these disciplines, ontology’s status as ground complicates attempts to study and bring it clearly into view. It has a tendency to slip from grasp and resist radical critique. Friedrich Nietzsche, writing in the late nineteenth century, for example, argued that the history of ontology in Europe was essentially one of repetition and continuity: Things of the highest value must have a different origin, an origin of their own; they cannot de derived from this perishable, seductive, deceptive, lowly world, from this confusion of desire and delusion! Rather, their basis must lie in the womb of existence, in the imperishable, in the hidden god, in the “thing in itself ”—and nowhere else! Judgements 29

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of this kind constitute the typical prejudice by which we can always recognise the metaphysicians of every age; this kind of value judgement is at the back of all their logical proceedings; from out of this ‘belief ’ of theirs, they go about seeking their ‘knowledge’, which they end by ceremoniously dubbing ‘the truth’ (Nietzsche, 1998, p. 6) He argues that despite the array of approaches developed across history, they are ultimately reducible to a single recurrent trope: the idea that truth must lie in some way beyond appearances, whether in the early Greeks’ understanding of being, the emphasis on eternal essences in Plato, the theological beliefs of medieval Christianity, or Enlightenment-era thinking exemplified by Kant. We will return to some of these specific approaches later on. For now, the key point is to emphasize the difficulty of thinking about ontology in new ways. After all, if thinkers such as Kant and Thomas Aquinas were unable to move much beyond the approaches they inherited, what chance do we have in Translation Studies? Even in philosophy, then, ontology often features largely in terms of basic assumptions rather than staying consistently in view as a subject of discussion and research in its own right. Beyond philosophy, the tendency of ontology to slip into the background is even stronger. This is certainly the case in Translation Studies where it is rare to see ontology addressed directly or discussed in detail. The main reason for this is that issues of being/existing/ becoming are frequently taken to be self-evident. Rather than being deemed insufficiently important to warrant discussion, it seems likely that in many cases they are simply not considered at all. Nonetheless, they have important implications for the kind of questions that are asked and the conclusions that can be drawn. Approaches that see translation as a science, for instance, rely on the ontological assumptions of rationalism: the basic idea that translation (and everything else that exists) has an inherently logical structure. This, in turn, enables the epistemological assumption that that structure can be identified through the application of reason. This assumption is not necessarily wrong – after all, rationalist assumptions are the building blocks for all scientific inquiry and have proven extraordinarily productive in many fields. Even so, we propose that such assumptions should not be made in a blind way. Where attempts to address ontology are made by translation scholars, on the other hand, they have not always been wholly successful. The analytical traditions in Translation Studies inspired by narrative theory and critical discourse analysis, for example, are different in important ways. Nonetheless, both suffer from a tendency to slide into a kind of naïve constructionism, with language understood as simply creating reality. A much-used quotation in work inspired by Critical Discourse Analysis, for instance, announces that ‘from a discourse-theoretical point of view, it is … not the subject who makes the discourses, but the discourses that make the subject … The subject is of interest not as an actor, but as a product of discourses’ ( Jäger & Maier, 2010, p. 37). Our purpose here is not to criticize scholars working in these traditions, both of which have proven extremely valuable for translation research. On the contrary, these researchers are to be celebrated for engaging with such questions. Nonetheless, the difficulties they face highlight some of the key problems with engaging with ontology: (1) a tendency for positions initially offered tentatively and with lots of caveats to quickly turn to unassailable orthodoxies, uncritically passed down through the tradition; and (2) the difficulty of outlining a clearly defined and workable ontological position without being drawn into complex and highly abstract areas of inquiry that seem rather distant from the original focus.2 The preceding discussion, then, might seem to leave us in an impossible situation. We need to get our ontological assumptions straight but almost inevitably run into trouble when 30

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trying to do so. Rather than leading to disillusionment, however, it is precisely this difficulty that makes ontology so fascinating. The fact it is so difficult to get a firm grip on it is not a reason not to try. Nor is an absolutely clear position necessarily what is needed: a bit of insight can go a long way toward making reality somewhat less murky (as Jürgen Habermas would define the intellectual’s task) and toward opening up new avenues for inquiry, allowing new questions to be asked and old questions to be re-thought in new ways. With this in mind, the aim of the following section is to discuss some of the most relevant ideas and concepts in the Western ontological tradition. We will explore how they have been understood and look at their, typically unrecognized, legacy within Translation Studies.

Key ontological concepts Categories and categorization Categorization is a way of organizing our experience that precedes conscious thought and language. It is a way of dealing with the complexity of the world. Indeed, ‘one of the most basic functions of all organisms is the cutting up of the environment into classifications by which non-identical stimuli can be treated as equivalent’ (Rosch et al., 1976, p. 382). Their survival and success depend on their ability to settle questions such as ‘Is this food or nonfood? A friend or a foe? A chance or a threat?’ in a timely and accurate manner. Timeliness is important because both opportunities and dangers often arise rapidly and unexpectedly; as a result, many acts of basic categorization are quick, near-instinctive reactions rather than conscious decisions. When there is less time pressure, though, and with sufficient cognitive skills and resources, chances for accurate categorization may be increased by a careful analysis of the data against the available body of knowledge and pool of experience, both individual and collective. It is here that fundamental ontological assumptions about ‘what things are’ or ‘how things can be’ become directly relevant. Of course, at this level, reflection involves the assessment of evidence and inferential reasoning and therefore becomes entangled with phenomenological and epistemological considerations. Inasmuch as it is possible to isolate an ontological thread in the question ‘How can we know things for what they are?’ by focusing mostly on its latter part, several approaches present themselves as potential responses. Before we discuss each of these approaches, some preliminary points must be made. Categorization proceeds by comparison. This involves recognizing similarities and differences, and assessing to what extent they are relevant and important in grouping entities together as members of the same category, or contrasting them as representing different categories. This process is fundamentally translational in the sense embraced throughout this book – as ‘work performed to constrain a semiosic process,’ it both depends on certain constraints and contributes to establishing them. Categorizing means translating: studying two separate things to establish how they are related to one another, what they share, and therefore whether and how one can stand in place of another – that is, represent it. Viewed this way, the basic ontological questions about various ways of being are, above all, categorizing and translational questions. ‘What is this’? is a call to perceive, identify, compare, and assign to a certain category. When we respond by saying ‘It is a kind of X,’ we categorize and therefore translate. To formulate this response, we need to be aware of what options – and what kinds of options – are available. One approach to categorization in the Western tradition, and the first one to be theorized, can be traced back to several influential ancient Greek philosophers, especially Plato and Aristotle, and is therefore often labeled classical. This label has a dual meaning: under 31

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the connotative layer (‘classical’ as ancient, original, dominant, mainstream, and so on) lies the basic concept of class. Based largely on the observation of the natural world, both animate and inanimate, this categorization model is concerned with the correct assignment of beings to appropriate classes. At the highest level, these are extremely broad and abstract. In his work Categories, Aristotle lists ten kinds into which entities in the world divide, namely: (1) substance; (2) quantity; (3) quality; (4) relation; (5) place; (6) date; (7) posture; (8) state; (9) action; and (10) passion (Thomasson, 2019; Studtmann, 2021). These distinctions seek to capture different kinds of being or indeed different senses in which things may be said ‘to be.’ As the most fundamental category in the classical view and a conceptual cornerstone of a major ontological tradition, substance will be discussed in detail later but what concerns us here is the basic principle of classical categorization. With some oversimplification, we can say that Aristotelian classes have clearly defined boundaries and are mutually exclusive. Assignment to classes proceeds along a series of binary questions isolating a critical difference. For example, ‘mobile substances’ are differentiated into ‘eternal’ (i.e. heavens) and ‘destructible’ (i.e. sublunary bodies); the latter into ‘unensouled’ (i.e. elements) and ‘ensouled’ (i.e. living things); the latter further into ‘incapable of perception’ (i.e. plants) and ‘capable of perception’ (i.e. animals); and the latter into ‘irrational’ (i.e. non-human animals) and ‘rational’ (i.e. humans) (Studtmann, 2021). Structurally, this categorization is arborescent (that is, it resembles a tree with a system of bifurcating branches) and hierarchical. Axiologically, it pursues clarity and simplicity, and eschews ambiguity. Logically, it is committed to binarism, viewed as the ultimate method of analysis and expressed in its maxim tertium non datur (‘there is no third [option]’). Class membership is determined on the basis of compliance with necessary and sufficient conditions; once these are satisfied, there is no internal gradation between members of the same category. For example, in the classical view, humans may be either free or enslaved, noble or common, male or female – but not simultaneously both or neither; likewise, no degrees of freedom, nobility or gender are recognized. Classical categories bring with them a promise of universal validity, permanence and completeness. There is usually no admission of a constructed character of these classes and their cultural or ideological inflection. They are typically viewed as ontologically autonomous and self-evident; as something given, observed or discovered, and thus in some way pre-existing the act of categorization. In Translation Studies, traces of a classical view of categorization – though not necessarily in its extreme form – may be found in some attempts to systematize the field, such as the famous HolmesToury ‘map’ and various other taxonomies. Indeed, classical categorization provides ontological footing for efforts to ‘chart waters’ and ‘map territories’ which, by definition, seek to be maximally exhaustive, leave no areas unaccounted for, do not allow overlaps, and tend to draw crisp boundaries. In the guise of zero-sum thinking, it is also the logic of percentages, pie charts, and clines (see Blumczynski & Hassani, 2019). But classifying entities based on an internalized checklist of sufficient and necessary conditions is not the only possible – or indeed, the most ‘natural’ or intuitively immediate – way of understanding what and how things around us are. In the last half-century, extensive research in psychology and linguistics has highlighted the power of the prototype as a central categorizing and cognitive mechanism. One of the pioneers of this approach, Eleanor Rosch, hypothesized and empirically demonstrated that even such basic domains as form and color – as well as many others – are structured around perceptually salient ‘natural prototypes’ (1973). Against the analytical, ever-bifurcating drive of a classical approach, Rosch and her collaborators accepted the premise that ‘the world is structured because real-world attributes do not occur independently of each other’ (1976, p. 383) but are clustered and patterned, 32

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which results in the emergence of prototypes. There is something refreshingly commonsensical in their observation that ‘[c]reatures with feathers are more likely to also have wings than creatures with fur, and objects with the visual appearance of chairs are more likely to have functional sit-on-ableness than objects with the appearance of cats’ (Rosch et al., 1976, p. 383). Our idea of what and how things are is therefore a function of our complex, embodied, multi-sensory, both intuitive and rational engagement with our environment – in short, our cognitive translation of ‘a virtually infinite number of discriminably different stimuli’ (ibid., p. 382) that make up the world, into manageable and meaningful groupings. The resulting categories are internally graded. Some members are better examples of their class than others, and thus may be said to occupy a central, prototypical position within it. Others are less typical, and in this sense more peripheral. For example, a chair with four legs and a backrest – the kind usually found in kitchens, dining rooms or libraries – is a more likely prototype for the abstract category chair than, say, a swivel chair, high chair, armchair, or wheelchair. In fact, while a wheelchair may in some ways be considered a chair, it would often be more readily categorized as a vehicle rather than furniture (of which chair would be a subset). This illustrates several important principles. Categories are clear at the center but become fuzzy at the periphery; there is usually some overlap between adjacent classes, which means that both partial and multiple class membership is possible – a wholesale rejection of tertium non datur. Whether a knife is a utensil, a tool or a weapon depends on what purpose it is used for. Tomatoes and peppers are commonly regarded as vegetables, even though, according to botanical criteria, they are undoubtedly fruits (since they develop from flowers and contain seeds). Prototype-based categorization is thus guided by salience, frequency, familiarity, expertise, context, perspective, intention, purpose, and countless other factors – some relatively stable, others emerging ad hoc. This view is sympathetic to variation and partiality; it permits ambiguity, paradox, and some degree of uncertainty. Various categories are related to one another but in more complex ways than through simple inclusion and bifurcation. Prototypes may be thought of as forming constellations subject to gravitational and magnetic pulls, or as local nodes in a rhizome. Even if we momentarily take the narrow sense of translation as a phenomenon involving language – whether this deserves to continue being the ‘prototypical’ sense is debated throughout this very volume – questions of categorization are not easily settled. For example, is translation a form of rewriting or vice versa? What is the superordinate category: translation or interpreting? Where does translation end and adaptation start? How firmly can the boundaries between source and target text be established? Once we give up the demand for or the expectation of a neat, orderly, and non-contradictory world, we are prepared to accept some fuzzy, uncertain, and partial answers about what and how things are as resulting not so much from ignorance or lack of scholarly rigor, but rather from the complex and chaotic ways of being (cf. Marais & Maylaerts, 2019a). Even though, as superordinate categories, vegetables, music and games are abstract products of human thinking processes and, in one sense, ‘do not really exist,’ yet eating vegetables, listening to music, and playing games are perfectly ordinary parts of our everyday experience, or at least the way we think and speak about it. This explains why issues of categorization and conceptualization have always been of central interest to philosophers and linguists. Language works by categorization and abstraction – the same word is used to designate ontically separate entities3 – and interlingual translation is an especially fertile ground for categorization debates because it constantly exposes mismatches and discontinuities between various linguistic and conceptual systems. In the famous words of Edward Sapir, ‘No two 33

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languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same worlds with different labels attached’ (1964[1929], p. 69). Although this observation has often been caricatured as implying linguistic determinism and ultimate untranslatability, it does so only from a strictly classical perspective in which distinctions are crisp and absolute, and labels firmly attached. But sameness and difference themselves may be scalar, relative and emergent, which leads us to another cluster of concepts extending into the ontological domain.

Sameness, difference and identity If the world is a practically infinite collection of various entities and events which we perceive in the flux of experience, to speak of two (or more) of them as ‘the same’ or ‘identical’ is to group them together as a ‘kind of something’ of a higher order – namely, a category. But categories, as we have seen, may be structured in different ways. What do we mean, then, by declaring that two entities are ‘the same’? Usually, that they share some abstract quality deemed salient or relevant: for example, shape, size, color, weight, position, value, function, and so on. Some of these qualities are reminiscent of Aristotle’s fundamental categories mentioned above, whose usefulness becomes obvious now; clearly, we must have some preexisting standard of roundness, greenness, largeness, and so on in order to conclude that, say, two green apples are ‘the same’ in any of these respects. But compliance with that abstract standard is a matter of degree, and this is where prototypes apply: no real apples are perfectly round or uniformly green, yet some will be rounder or greener than others. Somewhat paradoxically, sameness cannot be separated from difference, which starts with a fundamental ontological distinction. The expression ‘X is the same …’ is linguistically, logically, and ontologically incomplete unless it is followed by ‘… as Y.’ ‘Sameness implies the relation of “with,” that is, a mediation, a connection, a synthesis: the unification into a unity’ (Heidegger, 1969, p. 23). This means that ‘two beings which are the same are both like and unlike one another’ (White, 1980, p. 112). In Heidegger’s view, sameness is ‘the belonging together of what is distinct through the gathering by means of difference,’ therefore, declaring sameness involves ‘holding together and holding apart from another’ (White, 1980, pp. 110–111). What is worth noting here is the vocabulary of engagement, pointing us away from an ahistorical, static ontology in which ‘man as the rational animal … has become a subject for his objects’ (Heidegger, 1969, p. 32). On the contrary, being is ‘a question of world disclosure, historicity and language’ (Tombras, 2019, p. 44) – difference is gathered, sameness is held. In a philosophical version of the observer’s paradox, ‘when we think of something, the act of thinking itself changes the nature of the thing thought about’ (Griffiths, 2017, p. 331; see Heidegger, 1969, p. 23). Even that most fundamental dimension of sameness which is often called identity – namely, a relationship of an entity with itself across time – involves mediation and is predicated on change. From one moment to the next, bits of matter are not static collections of particles and atoms; the ontological stability of abstract entities such as ideas, concepts, signs, texts, words, views, positions, and so on is even more unlikely. What do we mean when we say that something, let alone someone, is ‘the same’ as they were a second ago or yesterday? One of the reasons why the concept of equivalence, once the inevitable pillar of mainstream theories of translation, has practically disappeared from scholarly accounts – as evidenced, for instance, by the absence of this entry in the 3rd edition of the Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies (Baker & Saldanha 2020) – is its inadequacy to account for these complexities which we will now consider.

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Change and stability A key concern in accounts of being for thousands of years has been the respective roles of change and stability. We find in the writings of Parmenides and Heraclitus, for example, some of the earliest Greek philosophical writings to have survived to the present day and which pre-date the introduction of the term ontology itself by around two centuries, discussion of precisely this issue. Despite the complexity of their thought, each subsequently came to embody an opposing stance on the nature of being: the former emphasizing stability, the latter change. As Heidegger (2000, p. 102) puts it: [For Parmenides] Being indicates itself … as the proper self-collected perdurance of the constant, undisturbed by restlessness and change. Even today, in accounts of the inception of Western philosophy, it is customary to oppose Parmenides’ teaching to that of Heraclitus: phanta rhei, all is in flux. From the beginnings of philosophy, then, thinkers have sought to reconcile the obvious fact that everything changes with the intuitive sense that, despite that change, somehow things also continue to be what they are. The cells in my body may constantly die and be replaced, but I am still in some sense me. A rock may erode over time and change its color and shape, but it is still in some sense the same rock. If the problem is longstanding, we must also recognize that stability has held a privileged position in relation to change in Western accounts of being for thousands of years. Perhaps the most important reason for this is the extraordinary influence of Plato’s theory of Forms. At its most basic, Plato argued4 that understanding what anything truly is means getting beyond how it appears to the senses. He justifies this by arguing that being ultimately lies in ‘ideas’ or ideal ‘Forms’5 which transcend their manifestation in any individual being – Beauty, Bigness, Virtue and so on. The Forms are transcendent because they go beyond any material iteration; the ideal Form is not the sum or composite of all existing things that are large or beautiful. Rather than largeness being a property which can be abstracted from concrete things which are understood to be large, Plato considered that individual things could only be large by ‘partaking’ in Largeness, deemed to pre-exist and enable the possibility for any individual thing to be large. For the present discussion, the key point is Plato’s distinction between the transience of visible, concrete things and the permanence of the Forms of which they partake: [Can] the Beautiful itself, each thing in itself, the real, ever be affected by any change whatever? Or does each of them that really is, being uniform by itself, remain the same and never in any way tolerate any change whatever? It must remain the same, said Cebes, and in the same state, Socrates. What of the many beautiful particulars, be they men, horses, clothes, or other such things, or the many equal particulars, and all those which bear the same name as those others? Do they remain the same or, in total contrast to those other realities, one might say, never in any way remain the same as themselves or in relation to each other? The latter is the case; they are never in the same state. (Phaedo, 78c–e) He was emphatic that the task of the philosopher lay in coming to know the Forms: to know what something really is means getting past changeable concrete manifestations to

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the unchanging Forms underpinning them. He was equally emphatic that appearances are deceptive and do not offer an easy path to the Forms: Then what about the actual acquiring of knowledge? Is the body an obstacle when one associates with it in the search for knowledge? I mean, for example, do men find any truth in sight or hearing, or are not even the poets forever telling us that we do not see or hear anything accurately, and surely if those two physical senses are not clear or precise, our other senses can hardly be accurate, as they are all inferior to these. (Phaedo, 65a–b) Change therefore comes to be seen with suspicion on the basis that it leads away from a genuine knowledge of being. On the other hand, true knowledge of the Forms, of what truly is, could only be apprehended through the operation of pure reason on the basis that ‘if we are ever to have pure knowledge, we must escape from the body and observe things in themselves with the soul by itself ’ (Phaedo, 66d–e). Plato’s approach, then, is grounded in a fundamental distinction between being and seeming, constancy and change, with a clear mistrust in both cases of the latter and privileging of the former. This approach has had an enormous impact on Western thinking about language and translation. As Piers Rawling and Philip Wilson put it in their introduction to the Routledge Handbook of Translation and Philosophy, ‘mainstream concepts of the “original” and its idealized relationship with translation are still very much reminiscent of Plato’s theory of Forms and its devaluation of representations’ (2019, p. 4). The distinction between (changeable) ‘form’ and (constant) ‘content,’ for instance, rests on the idea that what anything really is (i.e. its unchanging essence) transcends its appearance (i.e. its textual characteristics). This has implications for the way we think of the possibility or impossibility of equivalence. Although languages vary greatly, a term in one language can be understood as genuinely equivalent to a term in another language, say table in English and mesa in Spanish, if all possible and imagined tables ultimately partake of the same set of universal Forms. Consequently, it does not matter if tables typically look different in English-speaking and Spanish-speaking contexts since these differences operate only on the level of appearances; once we get past appearances, they can be understood as the same. The same can be said of textual material – if the words on the page are understood as mere visible appearance, what a text truly is must be somehow invisible: it lies beyond these words and is irreducible to them. Over the centuries, this approach has evolved while remaining largely unchanged in its basic assumptions. In the context of biblical translation, as with Eugene A. Nida, what is holy about the Bible is not the words themselves (perhaps in part because they are almost always accessed through translation) but the message of which the words are merely a bearer. What truly matters, and what the Bible is, lies in its message – a distinction between the Bible (as text) and the gospel (as idea). This example brings us back to the centrality of belief in questions of ontology. Nida’s position is wholly consistent with the ontological stances underpinning much of Christian theology. The problematic subsequent application of Nida’s ideas in very different contexts speaks to the dangers of not paying attention to ontological assumptions. His stance is wholly inconsistent, for instance, with Islamic beliefs regarding the Qur’an whereby the message and specific words included in the holy text are regarded as an indissoluble unity. Again, this is an ontological issue: the Qur’an is both the language used and the divine message it communicates, making a separation between untrustworthy form and sacred content impossible. With romantic hermeneutics, on the other hand, it is the individual genius and intention of the author which somehow lies beyond those parts of the text that are actually visible. An 36

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ideal translation, then, would first identify that genius, spirit or essence before communicating it with new words to a new audience. The recurrent notion of ‘equivalent effect,’ meanwhile, does away with God or an author’s genius while still holding to the idea of the truth of a text lying, invisibly, beyond and behind what is visible and apparent. Different as these approaches are, Plato’s ontological emphasis on stability runs through them all. Each also exhibits the ontological assumptions of what Jacques Derrida calls ‘the metaphysics of presence’ – the idea that if we study anything hard enough, whether a text or any other object of interpretation, we can get past variable appearances and the stable core (what he terms “the transcendental signified”) will be rendered ‘present,’ perceptible without any distorting representations. Reaching ‘the transcendental signified … would place a reassuring end to the reference from sign to sign’ (Derrida, 1974, p. 49).6 From this perspective, the task of the translator becomes the making-present of that transcendental signified, the stable core somehow behind and beyond the text. Perhaps ironically, many traditional critiques of translation grounded in the ontological assumptions of the metaphysics of presence ultimately strongly foreground change in their accounts of translation. The betrayal at the heart of traduttore, traditore lies in the translator’s inevitable failure to maintain stability. The ideal translation as a perfectly clear pane of glass or the translator acting as a conduit is likewise grounded in a desire for the translation to make the original present at the same time as almost lamenting the impossibility of doing so. Such approaches establish the idea that translation should be about stability but, in practice, is about change – even if that change is understood as highly undesirable. Stability, then, dominated approaches to ontology in the West for millennia and continues to underpin popular understandings of being that inform a great deal of academic inquiry beyond philosophy. Nonetheless, understanding being in such terms came under increasing criticism in the latter part of the nineteenth century from philosophers such as Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Peirce and throughout the twentieth with thinkers such as Heidegger, Ricoeur, Nancy, Lyotard, Laclau, Bakhtin and Derrida. Diverse as they are, all of them advanced perspectives that shifted the emphasis in their accounts of being away from stability and toward becoming and happening. All rejected the idea of there being transcendental ideal Forms or signifieds in favor of viewpoints which emphasize change and relationality. Over time, these ontological assumptions have also entered thinking about translation. As the idea of the stable transcendental signified fades in importance, it becomes possible to conceive of translations as existing in their own right, rather than purely as an unavoidably inadequate representation of a stable meaning. We see this, for instance, in the ‘manipulation school’ spearheaded by André Lefevere and developments in polysystem theory led by Itamar Even-Zohar from the late 1970s, for example, both of which, in different ways, aim to shift the focus from complaining about the introduction of changes through translation – a mainstay of translation criticism to the present day – toward analyzing those shifts as something worth studying in their own right. As Lefevere has it: The situation changes dramatically if we stop lamenting the fact that “the Brechtian ‘era’ in England stood under the aegis not of Brecht himself but of various second-hand ideas and concepts about Brecht, an image of Brecht created from misunderstandings and misconceptions” … and, quite simply, accept it as a fact of literature – or even life. How many lives, after all, have been deeply affected by translations of the Bible and the Capital? (Lefevere, 2000, p. 234) He grounds this argument explicitly in a desire to move away from romanticism and its emphasis on authorial intent as the ultimate origin, meaning, and point of stability for any 37

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work of literature. Lefevere’s argument is not simply that the stable origin is not the only thing that matters nor the epistemological idea that it is not methodologically possible to ascertain the point of stability. Instead, he argues that any text is its refractions and representations; change and transformation move from the periphery to the center. Plato and his successors’ emphasis on stability over change is reversed, with the focus shifting toward appearances as the key to understanding being. As this shift in ontological assumptions has become more established, the attention of translation scholars have continued to move. Activist translation lays emphasis on how translation can contribute to, or impede, fluid activist agendas. Approaches inspired by ActorNetwork Theory similarly set aside stable being in favor of seeing translation, translations and translators as nodes within constantly redefined networks. A growing interest in rewritings and retranslations stresses the extent to which even apparently fixed texts never truly settle but are rather swept up in an ongoing process of becoming. Bourdieusian approaches, common in Translation Studies for almost two decades, see what anything is as a function of complex and changing interactions between field, capital and habitus. There has been little explicit reflection on questions of being by translation scholars over this period but it is clear that the discipline’s ontological underpinnings have evolved substantially.

Being and non-being If it is difficult to speak with clarity about being, it is even more challenging to speak about non-being. It has, nonetheless, been a topic of explicit discussion among philosophers since at least the time of the Ancient Greeks. Plato’s dialogue ‘The Sophist,’ for instance, features an extended exploration of non-being, taking as its starting point Parmenides’ earlier statement that “never will you show that not-being is,’ and ultimately attempting to ‘insist by brute force both that that which is not somehow is, and then again that that which is somehow is not’ (Sophist, 241d). Georg Hegel (2010), meanwhile, sets up being and non-being as the equal poles of dialectic, with each including and requiring the other. Jean-Paul Sartre’s extended treatment of non-being in Being and Nothingness, on the other hand, argues that ‘nothingness lies coiled in the heart of being – like a worm’ (1957, p. 21). Deleuze describes the problem thus: In seeking to dispel the negative, we declare ourselves satisfied if we show that being is full positive reality which admits no non-being; conversely, in seeking to ground negation, we are satisfied if we manage to posit, in being itself or in relation to being, some sort of non-being … The alternative is thus the following: either there is no non-being and negation is illusory and ungrounded, or there is non-being, which puts the negative in being and grounds negation. (Deleuze, 1994, p. 79) Clearly, then, non-being, and its relationship to being, is not an easy (no)thing to get a handle on. Despite this difficulty, and the knots it can tie us in, the notion of non-being has been philosophically productive. Non-being plays an important role, for example, in Heidegger’s account of the temporal nature of existence in Being and Time (2010). Central to his argument is that past, present and future constitute an ‘ecstatic’ unity, belonging together in the first instance and only separable after the fact. Anything that is, exists in the present in terms of both having-been (which it now is not) and that which has not yet come to pass: ‘things past and things future belong to time. The former are no longer, the latter are not yet. Past and future 38

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have the character of a nullity’ (Heidegger, 1982, p. 233). He illustrates this with the example of an unripe fruit: it is what it is on account of its possible future ripeness, even if it is, as yet, not ripe. As he describes it, “the not-yet is already included in its own being, by no means as an arbitrary determination, but as a constituent” (Heidegger, 2010, p. 235). The same idea, he suggests, applies to human existence – to understand what it is to be the person that anybody is, we must also take into account what they might become and the future possibilities in relation to which they live their life. As Heidegger puts it: ‘Dasein [Heidegger’s term for the uniquely human way of existing], is always already its not-yet as long as it is’ (2010, p. 235). But even when we set aside the temporal dimension, existence and non-existence, presence and absence, are intertwined: in Heidegger’s famous example from his essay ‘The Thing’ (1971), a jug is defined by the void it holds. Or could it be that the void shapes the jug around itself? Non-being also plays an important role in writing likely to be more familiar to translation scholars. Saussurean linguistics, a key touch point for much twentieth-century writing on language, conceptualizes language as a system in which signs are defined not by any positive characteristics but by their differences from other signs. Their being is recognized in terms of that which they are not. In a different way, Derrida (1974) identifies the non-being of the transcendental signified as central to the operation of signification. It is never possible to find our way back to the original presence of the transcendental signified because, he argues, there is no transcendental signified. Nonetheless, he proposes that it continues to be crucial even in its own non-being, with ‘writing’ (which Derrida understands in a somewhat idiosyncratic way) acting as a ‘trace’ of an ‘absent presence’ which functions as an object of desire even as it does not exist. It can play a structural function and introduce play into the structure, without having any positive existence of its own. From a rather different perspective again, the accounts of distanciation found in Gadamer (1989) and Ricoeur (1976) argue that, in written material, the absence of an interlocutor produces a ‘surplus of meaning.’ Because the producers of pieces of writing typically are not there when these are interpreted, ‘the text’s career escapes the finite horizon lived by its author. What the text means now matters more than what they author meant when he wrote it’ (Ricoeur 1976, p. 30). It is the non-being of the author in a text that allows the text to have a being of its own. For Sartre, notions such as absence, change, otherness, repulsion, regret, distraction, and so on demonstrate that There is an infinite number of realities which are not only objects of judgment, but which are experienced, opposed, feared, etc., by the human being and which in their inner structure are inhabited by negation, as by a necessary condition of their existence. (Sartre, 1957, p. 21) Non-being has not been a specific focus of discussion within Translation Studies. Yet the idea does play an important role in several major debates in the discipline. Much criticism of translation and many accounts of the supposed impossibility of translation are grounded not so much in what translation is as a practice or what specific translations are but rather in what they are not: translation is to be understood as a ‘second-order’ activity because a translation can never be that which it translates. This mirrors Sartre’s stance on the need to recognize being as something separate from God as creator, arguing that Being … can only affirm itself as distinct from and opposed to its creator; otherwise it dissolves in him … [E]ven if it has been created, being-in-itself would be inexplicable in terms of creation; for it assumes its being beyond the creation. (1957: lxiv) 39

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The longstanding aim of recognizing translations as existing and having values in their own right can be seen as grounded in the same type of move. Allowing translations, whether linguistic or not, to step out of the shadow of their origins enables them to be recognized as existing in their own right, an existence which does not rely on their origin. They can come into view in terms of their own being rather than their alleged non-being. At the same time, this means that translations can no longer be explained in terms of what they translate – in being what they are, their being must exceed what they are not. Many other concepts which run through contemporary thinking about translation, and which transcend the discipline’s traditional linguistic focus, meanwhile, also raise difficult questions of being and non-being. For something to be absent requires not only for it to not be there but for it to be encountered in terms of its not being there. For something to have changed it must no longer be as it was.7 For somebody to be other, they must not be the self – at least not only self. We see all these issues arise in the context of translation. Translation confronts us with the not-being-there of what is translated. Rather than simple indifference, it produces an absence which, without positively existing, can nonetheless be encountered. To think of translation in terms of change is to raise the question of what exactly there was in the first place but that no longer is. To think of translation as the mediation of otherness is to ask what it is that causes the other to be not-self – complex enough on the level of the individual and fiendishly difficult when our attention shifts to broader collective and intercultural encounters with otherness. However broadly or narrowly understood, translation involves bringing together and holding apart things that are in various ways: as realities, presences, potentialities and absences. It establishes and traces relationships and influences, similarities and differences. Whether we think of translation as preserving, transforming, instantiating or creating something, ontological presuppositions guide our perception and understanding. But rather than discuss them in isolation, it may be useful to consider key ontological ideas as forming certain configurations, systems or traditions – which is what we will be turning to now.

Major ontological traditions Substance ontology As we mentioned above in the brief discussion of Aristotle’s Categories, substance takes a privileged position as the conceptual fabric of the entire philosophical system. All other categories somehow depend on substances: qualities can only be attributed to them; quantities refer to their size and amount; relations describe how substances stand to one another, and so on. ‘These various non-substances all owe their existence to substances – each of them, as Aristotle puts it, exists only “in” a subject’ (Cohen & Reeve, 2020). A linguistic focus may be useful here. The philosophical term substance in English and its cognates in many other modern languages can be traced back to the Greek word ousia – one of the most important if notoriously elusive concepts in Aristotle’s thought: One the one hand, he [Aristotle] uses it [ousia] as an abstract noun, speaking of the ousia of the thing, and often equating this with what being is for that thing. Here we could perhaps speak either of the “be-ence” of the “be-ity” of the thing. But he also uses it as a concrete noun, naturally taking a plural, and in this use he will claim that men, horses, and trees are all ousiai. Here, “be-ity” would seem a little less harsh. For example, the claim that “men are be-ities” could be construed on the model of “men are realities”. 40

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Indeed, though it lacks the etymological connection with the verb “to be”, the word “reality” would serve well as a translation. For it has both the grammatical uses just mentioned, and at the same time, reflects another facet of Aristotle’s word: that ousiai are the things that really, genuinely, or fundamentally are. (Bostock, 1994, p. 43) Referring to various, sometimes conflicting aspects of being, the Aristotelian ousia sought to capture what is real, genuine or fundamental – as opposed to illusory, fake, or accidental. Indeed, this has been the ambition of the dominant Western accounts of being for thousands of years, influenced by Plato’s theory of ideal Forms, discussed earlier. From this perspective, the question, for example, ‘what makes a table what it is?’ cannot be answered with reference to any actual tables or their measurable physical properties. Rather, the substance of a table is to be found in the Forms in which it partakes. The Forms are transcendent because they go beyond any material iteration – the ideal form of a table is not the sum or composite of all existing and possible tables but something different altogether. Ways of life may evolve, the language we use may change over time, and different people and cultures may think and behave differently from one another. But, from this perspective, the Forms, and thus substances, remain unchanging and transcend these shifts. It is not difficult to see why these ideas have been at the heart of metaphysical, theological and religious debates. True transcendence and permanence cannot be convincingly predicated on any parts of the human and material world – they belong exclusively to gods. In the Judeo-Christian theological tradition, the questions of being could not have been any more central: after all, the most sacred name of the Jewish God was YHWH, ‘I Am that I AM.’ One of the most pressing philosophical questions in the second and third centuries CE was how to reconcile the belief in one eternal god with the divine sonship of Jesus as a human being. With the increasing dominance of Latin, ontological debates inevitably involved translation between linguistic and conceptual systems. For example, the Greek term hypostasis (literally, ‘that which stands/lies beneath,’ in earlier philosophical discourse used as largely synonymous with ousia), came to correspond to persona (originally designating a mask worn by actors in a Roman theatre), and the Greek ousia was translated into Latin as materia, substantia and essentia, thus laying terminological foundations for dominant ontological discourse in a range of European languages. The enormously influential scholastic philosopher Thomas Aquinas, in his exposition of Aristotle’s Metaphysics (Conway, 1996, pp. 190–192), declared that ‘[s]ubstance is that which truly is, while the remaining type of being, namely, accident, depends upon substance for existence’; moreover, there is no ‘substantial change, but only accidental change in the permanently remaining matter of things.’ At the same time, since Matter has no form of its own … in dealing with composites of matter and form, to know the substance is sufficient to know the form … of material things. This is equivalent to knowing their essence or quiddity or nature or whatness. (ibid.; emphasis added) One can see how the concept of the essence as ‘the universal nature abstracting from singular characteristics’ (ibid.) has a strong appeal. It is tempting to think of a competent translation as simply giving a different accidental expression to ‘the same’ substance, initially captured in the original, which itself remains unchanged. Lawrence Venuti identifies a dominant model of translation that he calls instrumentalism which ‘conceives of translation as the reproduction or transfer of an invariant that 41

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is contained in or caused by the source text, an invariant form, meaning or effect’ (2019, p. 1). The approaches Venuti describes differ in where this invariance is understood to lie but they share the assumption that translation requires the identification of something stable and constant; something that the text “contains.” This container metaphor is a key conceptual element of substance-based ontology. Texts are, effectively, vessels: they contain, carry, convey, and express meanings which remain ontologically independent from them. A similar ontology underlies the familiar distinctions between mind and matter, body and soul, and letter and spirit. Historically, this position was most fully developed by René Descartes who argued that the body and the soul are made from two radically different substances: corporeal (material) and non-corporeal (immaterial) – a view called substance dualism, or Cartesian dualism – which affect each other but are ontologically distinct. The soul is not a member of the body and therefore has no specific location in it – any attempt to locate it would ignore the fact that these are two different kinds of substances – but is nevertheless conjoined with it. In the Christian view, a soul is uniquely connected to a particular body, being created at the same time, but survives its death and exists eternally. In other theological systems, after the death of the body, the immortal soul enters another body (human or non-human) in a cycle of transmigration or rebirth. Whether we call it essence, soul, spirit, mind, intellect, the true person or something else still, that immaterial substance or ‘thing’ (res in Latin) exists in a separate ontic dimension, so to speak. One could expect that substance dualism would discourage the idea of a hierarchical order in which the ‘original’ always prevails over a ‘copy.’ It could be argued that all textual realities, regardless of their chronological arrangement, are effective attempts to give some form to the underlying non-textual essence, without ever capturing it fully. In this sense, the source text would not be in any way ‘more original’ than its translations. Yet, this potentially egalitarian perspective has rarely been able to resist the usual power dynamics: over the centuries, some languages were deemed to be inherently more worthy and divinely inspired (think: religious traditions and their sacred scriptures), accurate and precise (think: scientific or scholarly accounts) or elegant and sublime (think: artistic creations) than others. At the same time, substance ontology invites the dubious notion of fidelity, bolstered by the twin structures of belief and authority. Describing a translation as ‘faithful’ does not attribute to it any verifiable characteristics but simply impresses upon it a seal of approval; it declares its orthodoxy, its satisfactory expression of the ‘true essence,’ as established, guarded and proclaimed by an authority sanctioning issues of faith. In fact, authority needs the concept of substance to justify its own existence. Taking the example of the Roman Catholic Church and its doctrine of supernatural transubstantiation of bread and wine into the flesh and body of Christ during the mass, it is hardly incidental that ‘the same religious organization has claimed to be in exclusive possession of the life-giving substance and have the sole authority to administer it’ (Blumczynski, 2019, p. 177). At the heart of transubstantiation is translation par excellence: one thing actually becomes another even though its accidental properties remain unaffected. At the same time, ‘[t]ransubstantiation is the proverbial exception that proves the rule; the rule itself declares that substance, essence, nature, quiddity, or whatness … is permanent, immutable, and immanent’ (ibid.). Except through a divine intervention declared by the highest authority, the substance cannot be changed – all we can do is try to give it a different accidental expression. In the paradigm of thought founded on substance ontology, ‘translation is largely seen as a process that entails spatial change,’ which depends on ‘the possibility of carrying over meaning from one form to the other’ (Marais, 2019, p. 122). Whatever it is that is the subject 42

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of translation, ‘meaning is too stable to be changed’ or ‘meaning is too unstable to be determined anyway, which means, in practical terms, that it cannot be changed’ (ibid.). Substance ontology, having created this conundrum, does not offer us a way out of it.

Process ontology As we have seen, the central tenet of classical ontology is that the world is constituted of enduring substances and the experience of change is largely illusory or accidental. Even though this view has been dominant in Western philosophical traditions, it has also been challenged, starting with Heraclitus’s insistence that ‘Everything changes and nothing remains still … and … you cannot step twice into the same stream.’ Various emphases on what we could call processuality can be found in the thought of Nietzsche, Bergson, Heidegger, James, Peirce, and many others, but possibly the fullest account of process thought is offered by Alfred North Whitehead in his 1929 book Process and Reality. The book’s subtitle – ‘An Essay in Cosmology’ – signals the extent of its ambition; indeed, Whitehead sought to establish a “systematic descriptive theory of the world” in an attempt to integrate ‘synthesize, scrutinize and make coherent the divergent intuitions gained through ethical, aesthetic, religious, and scientific experience’ (Huswit, 2021). With his dual expertise in mathematics and philosophy, Whitehead was uniquely positioned to offer a comprehensive ontological perspective to inform religion, philosophy, and science. Its central premise is that being is inherently dynamic and therefore may only be meaningfully expressed ‘in terms of energy, activity, and the vibratory differentiations of space-time’ (Whitehead, 1968, pp. 137–138). Even though some aspects of our reality may appear temporally stable or reliably recurrent, the world is in fact composed of events and processes. Consequently, being is best explained not as subsistence – which imposes an a-temporal view of reality as if captured in a frozen photographic frame – but rather as becoming, occurring or emerging. ‘“Existence” (in any of its senses) cannot be abstracted from “process.” The notions of “process” and “existence” presuppose each other’ (Whitehead, 1968, p. 96). The fundamental ontological concepts are therefore not substance, essence, matter, form, identity, quality, quiddity and other familiar notions inherited from the Aristotelian tradition (note that even the adjective fundamental used at the beginning of this very sentence suggests something firm, stable, and unshakable – yet another example of the enduring legacy of substance ontology) but pulsation, occasion, succession, potentiality, actuality, and – above all – process. In Marais’s account of process ontology based on Peirce, [T]ranslation is not the problem of changing one instance of … meaning into another instance of … meaning, but the very process that drives meaning, the process through which meaning emerges. Translation is the very condition for making and taking meaning. … Meaning is created in one way only, and that is by translating signs into signs. … From a semiotic perspective, translation is not a process that takes a structure (text) as its point of departure and then tries to destructure and restructure that structures into a different structure. Rather, translation is a process that creates relationships between existing meanings, thereby creating new meanings. … Meaning entails change, process, being in the process of being created, but never finally created. (Marais, 2019, pp. 122–123) Moreover, process ontology questions the standard distinction between process and product and challenges the view that ‘we can distinguish between translation as an activity and translation as the result of the activity of translating’ (Bühler, 2002, p. 58). In fact, such 43

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distinctions are viewed as mistaken and misleading. ‘They perpetuate the illusion that there exists an objective, stable, self-sustaining text that “contains” certain “content,” easily distinguishable from when, how and by whom it is perceived – in short, from its context’ (Blumczynski, 2016, pp. 68–69). Earlier theoretical accounts tended to view recontextualization in thoroughly substantial terms, simply as ‘taking a text out of its original frame and context and placing it within a new set of relationships and culturally conditioned expectations’ (House, 2006, p. 356). Process ontology, on the other hand, radically problematizes such a view of context, pointing out that [W]hat emerges from a translational process is not only a relatively stable product (after all, some words have been chosen over others) but also another process or rather multiple intertwining processes, constantly evolving through further processes of transmission, reception, interpretation, application, and so on, processed by processual beings. (Blumczynski, 2022, p. 40) If this description of textual entities, mental phenomena and living organisms as processes sounds somewhat unorthodox or confusing, that is likely because we are primed by ‘the standard interpretation of predicate logic in terms of static individuals with properties that are exemplified timelessly or at a temporal instant,’ which from the process-philosophical perspective is ‘an unhelpful theoretical bias’ (Seibt, 2021). According to Whitehead (1968, p. 93), ‘the discovery of mathematics, like all discoveries, both advanced human understanding, and also produced novel modes of error. Its error was the introduction of the doctrine of form, devoid of “life and motion.”’ Against this ‘doctrine of form,’ Piotr Blumczynski argues that ‘translation is not a lifeless, motionless, a-temporal form, but a complex, pulsating event’ (2016, pp. 70–71), and translations should not be conceptualized as abstract, objective facts, but rather as ‘experiences of the perceiving subject, spatiotemporal “occasions”’ (ibid., p. 82). He suggests that the complex, dynamic relationships between the various entities involved in the translational processes may be best understood as energy flow (ibid., p. 83). In Marais’ theorization, the energy flow intuited by Blumczynski takes a more concrete theoretical shape as negentropy. Even though this flow should not be viewed as strictly unidirectional, it is not completely reversible either, any more than cognitive or social processes are: ‘Once you have understood, seen or heard something, you cannot un-understand, un-see or un-hear it … Once something has been translated, it cannot be untranslated’ (Blumczynski, 2016, p. 42); ‘You can rewrite something, but you cannot unwrite it. … You can retranslate something, but you cannot untranslate it’ (Marais, 2019, p. 127). This temporal vector, ‘the arrow of time’ (ibid.) cannot be separated from studying, observing and participating in translational phenomena considered as fundamental semiotic processes occurring within a wide ecology of both the natural and human sciences: If one takes into account the basic arguments in fields such as physics, biology, and semiotics, they all seem to indicate that reality is process, and relational process at that. Einstein’s relativity theory, Gödel’s indeterminacy theory, Schrödinger’s uncertainty principle, the realization that DNA translation into protein is the process underlying the metabolism of life and the implications of the Second Law of Thermodynamics for cultural and social systems, all indicate that reality is not stable with some indeterminacy and instability. Rather, reality is process, moving, emergence with some patches of stability, structure, or form. (Marais, 2019, p. 124) 44

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Viewing translation as a ‘negentropic process’ (Marais, 2019, p. 138) allows us to offer a credible account of lived translational experience. Process ontology enables us to account for translation in terms of living: ‘one has to see meaning-making (i.e., “the stuff” of translation) as a process akin to metabolism’ (Marais 2020, p. 115). The insistence ‘that the translational process is somehow alive, that it is characterized by natural pulsation and processual becoming’ (Blumczynski, 2016, p. 89) is echoed by the parenthesized prefix in Marais’s (bio)semiotic theory of translation (2019). Bios – life – flows through the pulsating heart of the translation process. Whitehead cautions us that ‘[a]part from time, there is no meaning for purpose, hope, fear, energy. If there be no historic process, then everything is what it is, namely, a mere fact. Life and motion are lost’ (1968, pp. 101–102). This realization has far-reaching epistemological and methodological implications. If ‘semiosis is a process, like metabolism, that ends with or in death only’ (Marais, 2020, p. 125), it cannot be meaningfully studied by methods that effectively freeze it into a-temporal frames. In a similar way that one can only experience music as long as it is not paused, translational processes must likewise be studied using processual methods (see Blumczynski, 2021).

Flat ontology (onticology) If process ontology sets us on a path to abandoning a strongly anthropocentric view of reality, Levi Bryant in his book The Democracy of Objects offers us another attempt to ‘think the being of objects unshackled from the gaze of humans in their being for-themselves’ (2011, p. 19). Starting from the position of ontological realism that refuses to treat all objects as human construction, he views the world as composed of beings of only one kind: objects. Some have a human dimension – such as mind, language, and various cultural and social entities – but other objects are independent of humans and include galaxies, stones, quarks, as well as other living organisms. Taking his cue from Bruno Latour (1993) who critiqued the bifurcation into the separate domains of culture and nature – ‘the former treated as the world of freedom, meaning, signs, representations, language, power, and so on’ and the later as ‘being composed on matter governed by mechanistic causality’ (23), Bryant leaves behind the nature/ culture split and proposes an onticology which places the human and the non-human on equal footing. Importantly, Bryant sees translation as a basic world-making process in the sense that ‘all objects translate one another’ by stimulating changes through their interactions – though he also insists that ‘the objects that are translated are irreducible to their translations’ (18) and ‘translation is not unique to how the mind relates to the world’ (26). These translational relations and processes do not proceed by reduction – think of the clichéd image of things ‘lost in translation’ – or grounding one entity in another but rather by entanglement, a term borrowed from the work of Karen Barad (2007), who uses it to describe the relationship that holds between matter and meaning: ‘Entanglements allow us to maintain the irreducibility, heterogeneity, and autonomy of various types of entities while investigating how they influence one another’ (Bryant, 2011, p. 32). To be, therefore, is to be inevitably entangled with other objects. Bryant criticizes many contemporary philosophers for redefining the original remit of ontology – the study of being as such – into the interrogation of human being’s access to being, of being-for-humans, effectively making it ‘transcendental anthropology’ (35–36), founded on the ‘unspoken premise of a necessary correlation between being and thought’ (37). In an attempt to break away from this correlationist view, he proposes a ‘post-humanist, realist ontology … where humans are no longer monarchs of being but are instead among beings, entangled in beings, and implicated in other beings’ (40; original emphasis). When human 45

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perception is not prioritized, open systems, characterized by complex entanglements of objects, are taken as the norm rather than the exception. From this perspective, it makes little sense to attempt to understand open systems by extrapolating from observations of closed systems designed to minimize complexity: ‘Most things are complex objects, in virtue of which they process an ensemble of tendencies, liabilities and powers. It is by reference to the exercise of their tendencies, liabilities and powers that the phenomena of the world are explained’ (Bhaskar, 1998, p. 23). Explanation must be carefully phrased: ‘we must not say that an object has its qualities or that qualities inhere in an object, nor above all that objects are their qualities, but rather … that qualities are something an object does’ (Bryant, 2011, p. 69, original emphasis). This approach has strong parallels with complexity theory (e.g. Marais & Meylaerts, 2019a; 2019b). Open systems are complex in the sense of being nonlinear (causes and effects are viewed as reciprocal; minimal changes may have massive effects), emergent (the qualities of a system are the result of the interaction between its components rather than a sum of their individual properties), and defying binary distinctions. Yet while complexity stresses that ‘analysis should be focused not on parts but on the relationships and connections between parts and between parts and wholes’ (Marais & Meylaerts, 2019b, p. 10), onticology insists that ‘relations cannot ontologically be internal to their terms or the objects that they relate. In other words, objects are not constituted by their relations to the rest of the world’ (Bryant, 2011, p. 68; original emphasis). Objects are self-othering – they alienate themselves: while producing differences in the world, they are never identical in their qualities. In Bryant’s terms, which bring back some aspects of the central Aristotelian concept, ‘the substance of an object is perpetually withdrawn or in excess of any of its manifestations’ and ‘the virtual proper being of an object can only ever be inferred from its local manifestations in the world’ (2011, p. 88; original emphasis). In this sense, objects or substances are close to one another – and yet they can ‘perturb or irritate one another’ (153). An object’s being, according to Slavoj Žižek’s formulation, is manifested in its paradoxical active-passive presence with which it ‘moves, annoys, traumatizes us (subjects): at its most radical the object is that which objects, that which disturbs the smooth running of things’ (2006, p. 17; original emphasis). But since ‘objects are withdrawn in the sense that they are never directly perturbed or “irritated” by other objects,’ they ‘always translate perturbations into information according to their own endo-structure, organization, or distinctions’ (Bryant, 2011, p. 262). Here translation is viewed not as a replication of existing content but as producing something new: ‘no perturbation ever retains its identity or self-sameness when transported from one entity to another, but rather becomes something different as a consequence of being translated into information and then producing a particular local manifestation in the receiving object’ (p. 179). Why is this ontology flat? Because no object is privileged over others: subject-object or human-world relations are no different in kind from other relations between objects. Humans may have unique powers and capacities but there is no reason why they should be presupposed in every relation even as witnesses or observers: Things-in-themselves? But they’re fine, thank you very much. And how are you? You complain about things that have not been honored by your vision? You feel that these things are lacking the illumination of your consciousness? But if you missed the galloping freedom of the zebras in the savannah this morning, then so much the worse for you; the zebras will not be sorry that you were not there, and in any case you would have tamed, killed, photographed, or studied them. (Latour, 1988, p. 193) 46

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In the words of Bryant, ‘flat ontology is not the thesis that all objects contribute equally, but that all objects equally exist. In its ontological egalitarianism, what flat ontology thus refuses is the erasure of any object as the mere construction of another object’ (2011, p. 290). As our planet is moving further into the Anthropocene, this is just the kind of ontology that may be needed.

Concluding thoughts Our aim in this chapter has been to present an accessible introduction to a range of key ontological concepts and approaches useful in thinking about translation. We hope to have demonstrated the basic point that ontology should matter to translation scholars. Tricky as they are to make explicit and critique, assumptions about the nature of being have significant implications for the kinds of questions we ask, the methods we employ and the research that we do. Rather than criticizing previous scholarship for its limited direct engagement with ontology, we hope to have shown that translation scholars have been grappling with being for as long as they have been thinking about translation, even if they have not typically conceptualized their work in those terms. This trend has greatly strengthened over recent decades as the emphasis has moved from established orthodoxies about what translation is toward more speculative approaches which ask instead what it can or might be. To draw on a tired but persistent trope, it is almost as if there has been a stealthy ontological turn. We also hope to have shown that there is scope to turn significantly further. Greater engagement with the long tradition of ontological thought can open new horizons and raise fresh questions. Questions of categories and categorization, sameness and difference, stability and change, and being and non-being all have major implications for translation and can help us greatly deepen our understanding of it. If ontology can help us to think about translation, it is equally true that translation can help us to think about ontology. The broad concept of translation upon which this volume is based provides a powerful lens for thinking about being in terms of constant asymmetrical interactions between beings which are fundamentally different from one another, moving both translation and ontology from the rarefied and abstract to the practical and everyday aspects. Nowhere are the tensions between stability and change which characterize thinking about ontology brought into view more clearly than with translation in both its lingual and non-lingual variants. From this perspective, translation moves from being a peripheral limit case to a model for approaching the most basic and universal of questions. We have begun to see the power of translation in this regard in its status as a central term in the work of Latour, Lotman and Bryant. As Marais’s work shows, translation scholars also have contributions to make. Translation and ontology, then, are linked on a fundamental and highly abstract level. As a final concluding remark, we wish to emphasize that they are also connected on the level of practice. As with anything, interlingual translation is a primary means for engaging with ontological thought beyond the tradition of our own language. Nietzsche and Heidegger wrote in German, Latour and Sartre in French, Plato and Aristotle in Greek – all have hugely influenced anglophone thinking and, without translation, would have remained inaccessible to most readers. Yet even works by major thinkers writing in dominant European languages, for instance, Peter Sloterdijk and Jean-Luc Nancy, remain untranslated. The problem is far worse with less central languages, as seen, for example, in the limited available translations of Roman Ingarden’s work in Polish and Mikhail Bakhtin’s in Russian. From beyond Europe, there is even less. We have argued that Translation Studies need robust, careful, and sustained 47

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ontological reflection. But the reverse seems just as true: our understanding of being, in order to further enlarge and develop, must continue to be stirred, irritated and transformed by translation.

Notes 1 See also the chapter in the same volume titled “On the Grammar and Etymology of the Word ‘Being’” for a detailed exploration of the range of ways in which “being” has been understood in Europe since the time of the Ancient Greeks. 2 We write this from personal experience: when Sadler’s Fragmented Narrative (2021) was first conceived, ontology played a considerable role before ultimately becoming its primary focus. 3 This may also be considered from an individual, existential perspective: Becoming a subject of language, means becoming subjected to a framework of worldliness that language incorporates. By becoming occupied by language, you are unavoidably alienated: What is yours, and yours only – ownmost or authentic as Heidegger would put it – can only be seen and become expressible in a language given to you ready-made, created by others. The subject of language is a split or divided subject. (Tombras 2019, pp. 104–105; original emphasis) 4 The conception of Forms introduced here has been strongly associated with Plato for centuries. It is important to note, however, that these ideas come principally from the middle part of his life and are critiqued in his later works, such as the Sophist and Parmenides. 5 To distinguish between Plato’s understanding of Forms and the way that ‘form’ has traditionally been understood in translation studies in opposition to ‘content,’ the former is capitalized and the latter is not. 6 It bears noting that Derrida’s critique (explicitly aimed at what he terms ‘onto-theology’) is grounded as strongly in faith as it is in reason. From a Christian, Muslim or Jewish viewpoint, God’s status as the origin of all things means that there must be a transcendental signified even if opinions vary as to the possibility of its being comprehended or made present by mortals. 7 This idea becomes particularly complex when taken in the light of ontological positions which do not foreground stability, as discussed above.

References Baker, M., & Saldanha, G. (Eds.) (2020). Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, 3rd edition. London: Routledge. Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the Universe Halfway. Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bhaskar, R. (1998). The Possibility of Naturalism: A Philosophical Critique of Contemporary Human Sciences. New York: Routledge. Blumczynski, P. (2016). Ubiquitous Translation. London: Routledge. Blumczynski, P. (2019). Translational Roots of Western Essentialism. In A. Głaz (Ed.), Languages – Cultures – Worldviews. Focus on Translation (pp. 159–182). Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Blumczynski, P. (2021). Processualizing Process in Cognitive Translation and Interpreting Studies. In S. L. Halverson & Á. M. García (Eds.), Contesting Epistemologies in Cognitive Translation and Interpreting Studies (pp. 32–50). London: Routledge. Blumczynski, P., & Hassani, G. (2019). Towards a Meta-Theoretical Model for Translation: A Multidimensional Approach. Target, 31(3), 328–351. Bostock, D. (Ed.) (1994). Aristotle Metaphysics Books Z and H. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Bryant, L. R. 2011. The Democracy of Objects. Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press. Bühler, A. (2002). Translation as Interpretation. In A. Riccardi (Ed.), Translation Studies: Perspectives on an Emerging Discipline (pp. 56–74). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cohen, S. M. & Reeve, C. D. C. (2020). Aristotle’s Metaphysics. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2020 Edition). https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2020/ entries/aristotle-metaphysics/.

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Conway, P. (1996). Metaphysics of Aquinas. A Summary of Aquinas’s Exposition of Aristotle Metaphysics. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. Deleuze, G. (1994). Difference and Repetition (Paul Patton, Trans.). London: Bloomsbury. Derrida, J. (1974). Of Grammatology (G. C. Spivak, Trans.). Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Gadamer, G. (1989). Truth and Method ( J. Weinsheimer & D. G. Marshall, Trans.) 2nd edition. New York: Sheed and Ward. Griffiths, D. (2017). Martin Heidegger’s Principle of Identity: On Belonging and Ereignis. South African Journal of Philosophy, 36(3), 326–336. Hegel, G. W. F. (2010). The Science of Logic (G. di Giovanni, Trans.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heidegger, M. (1969). Identity and Difference ( J. Stambaugh, Trans.). New York: Harper and Low. Heidegger, M. (1971). The Thing. In Poetry, Language, Thought (A. Hofstadter, Trans.) (pp. 165–182). New York: Harper Colophon. Heidegger, M. (1982). Basic Problems of Phenomenology (A. Hofstadter, Trans.). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Heidegger, M. (2000). Introduction to Metaphysics (G. Fried & R. Polt, Trans.). New Haven: Yale University Press. Heidegger, M. (2010). Being and Time ( J. Stambaugh, Trans.). Albany: SUNY Press. House, J. (2006). Text and Context in Translation. Journal of Pragmatics, 38, 338–358. Huswit, J. R. (2021). Process Philosophy. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ISSN 2161–0002. https://iep.utm.edu/processp/#SH2a. Jäger, S., & Maier, F. (2010). Theoretical and Methodological Aspects of Foucauldian Critical Discourse Analysis and Dispositive Analysis. In R. Wodak & M. Meyer (Eds.), Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis (pp. 34–61, 2nd edition). Los Angeles, CA: Sage. Latour, B. (1988). The Pasteurization of France (A. Sheridan & J. Law, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Latour, B. (1993). We Have Never Been Modern (C. Porter, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lefevere, A. (2000). Mother Courage’s Cucumbers: Text, System and Refraction in a Theory of Literature. In L. Venuti (Eds.), The Translation Studies Reader, 1st edition (pp. 223–249). London: Routledge. Marais, K. (2019). A (Bio)Semiotic Theory of Translation: The Emergence of Social-Cultural Reality. London: Routledge. Marais, K. (2020). Translating Time: Modelling the (Re)processing of Emerging Meaning. Punctum, 6 (1), 109–131. Marais, K., & Meylaerts, R. (Eds.) (2019a). Complexity Thinking in Translation Studies. Methodological Considerations. London: Routledge. Marais, K., & Meylaerts, R. (2019b). Introduction. In K. Marais & R. Meylaerts (Eds.), Complexity Thinking in Translation Studies. Methodological Considerations (pp. 1–18). London: Routledge. Nietzsche, F. (1998). Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future (M. Faber, Trans.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rawling, P., & Wilson, P. (2019). Introduction. In P. Rawling & P. Wilson (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Philosophy (pp. 1–14). London: Routledge. Ricoeur, P. (1976). Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning. Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press. Rosch, E. H. (1973). Natural Categories. Cognitive Psychology, 4(3), 328–350. Rosch, E., Mervis, C. B., Gray, W., Johnson, D., & Boyes-Braem, P. (1976). Basic Objects in Natural Categories. Cognitive Psychology, 8(3), 382–439. Sadler, N. (2021). Fragmented Narrative: Telling and Interpreting Stories in the Twitter Age. London: Routledge. Sapir, E. (1964 [1929]). The Status of Linguistics as a Science. In D. G. Mandelbaum (Ed.), Culture, Language and Personality (pp. 160–166). Berkeley: University of California Press. Sartre, J.-P. (1957). Being and Nothingness (H, Barnes, Trans.). London: Methuen. Seibt, J. (2021). Process Philosophy. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https:// plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2020/entries/process-philosophy/.

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Studtmann, P. (2021). Aristotle’s Categories. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2021 Edition). https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2021/entries/aristotle-categories/. Thomasson, A. (2019). Categories. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2019 Edition). https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2019/entries/categories/. Tombras, C. (2019). Discourse Ontology. Body and the Construction of a World, from Heidegger through Lacan. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Venuti, L. (2019). Contra Instrumentalism: A Translation Polemic. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. White, D. A. (1980). Heidegger on Sameness and Difference. The Southwestern Journal of Philosophy, 11(3), 107–125. Whitehead, A. N. (1929). Process and Reality. New York: Macmillan. Whitehead, A. N. (1968). Modes of Thought. New York: The Free Press. Žižek, S. (2006). The Parallax View. Cambridge: The MIT Press.

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3 Positions in research methodology Gabriela Saldanha

Introduction Positions in research methodologies are understood here as the methodological perspectives researchers adopt in relation to their object of study. As this chapter hopes to show, the way in which we conceptualize our object of study is inextricably linked to the methodologies adopted for its study, and it seems important to retain a critical perspective in relation to how the methods frame our view of the object. As is well known, translation and interpreting studies developed as an academic discipline only in the second half of the twentieth century. At the time, the first machine translation systems were being developed by the United States and the Soviet Union, in the political and intellectual context of the Cold War. Baer (2021) notes that the ‘semiotic ecosystem’ of the Cold War was polarized into two mutually exclusive fields: art and science. Translation Studies (TS) is heavily indebted to the linguistic theories elaborated by scholars such as Nida (Nida & Taber, 1969; Nida & Dil, 1982), Jakobson (1959), Vinay and Darbelnet (1960), Mounin (1976), and Catford (1965), whose concern was with translation as a matter of language and texts, more specifically, written texts. Linguistics positioned itself as a scientific discipline and translation was therefore subjected to the same treatment; theories derived from the translator’s own experience or from literary criticism were dismissed, in Holmes’ famous words, as ‘incidental and desultory’ (1988, p. 68). As noted by D’hulst (1995) and Baer (2021), however, the translation theories of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were not lacking in scholarly rigor, they simply conceptualized translation differently, as an art rather than a science. Research generally involves collecting data about the object of research, in order to describe, analyze, explain it and so on. This chapter is organized around the kinds of data researchers collect, not only drawing on Saldanha and O’Brien’s (2013) distinction between product-, process-, participant- and context-oriented methodologies but also questioning the sustainability of such distinction. The kind of data researchers collect are indicative of what aspects of the phenomenon they are interested in, so Saldanha and O’Brien’s model is quite intuitive and not dissimilar to other models proposed (Chesterman, 2000; Williams & Chesterman, 2002; Marco, 2009; Williams, 2013). TS was initially a discipline concerned almost exclusively with texts, whether translated or interpreted, and this legacy still shapes DOI: 10.4324/9781003161448-5

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the methodological landscape, which explains why the first section below, dealing with product-oriented methodologies, is longer than the other three sections. Despite the convenience of Saldanha and O’Brien’s model, it was devised as a way of mapping the methodological landscape in 2013 and, as this chapter demonstrates, this landscape is continually changing. Methodologies are combined in novel ways, not only because of the well-known benefits of triangulation but also because the types of data available also evolve alongside theories and methods. In the landscape that has emerged since 2013, distinctions between participant, process, context and product are becoming less relevant; I come back to this point in the conclusion. Classifications of research methodologies according to different types of data also risk sidelining conceptual research, where data are concepts rather than people, texts, events, geographical spaces or historical periods. Marais (2015) describes conceptual research as the ‘meta-disciplinary discourse’ on translation and calls for further scrutiny of the concepts and philosophical underpinnings of translation theory. Although philosophers have discussed translation, this has generally been as part of what they saw as larger issues: Schleiermacher, Heidegger, Benjamin, Quine, Davidson, Derrida and Ricoeur, all discussed translation explicitly; others, such as Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Deleuze and Foucault, have influenced translation theory in a more indirect manner (see Rawling & Wilson, 2019). A frequent approach to conceptual research in TS involves the analysis of the metaphors employed to talk and write about translation, questioning the conceptual mappings underlying current uses of the word translation but also discussing alternatives (Chamberlain, 2000; St. André, 2010; Guldin, 2015). Some of the translation theorists that have made important contributions to conceptual research are Hermans (2007), Robinson (2012, 2015), Cronin (2017), Blumczynski (2016; Blumczynski & Hassani, 2019) and Marais (2015, 2020). Hermans’ (2007) provocative suggestion that translation equivalence results from an act of authentication, rather than from any intertextual relations, and his sophisticated conceptualization, based on Luhmann, of translation as intersemiotic metarepresentation, creating, rather than finding, correspondences between languages, shifts the conceptual ground in ways that are still being explored (Baker, 2022). Likewise, Marais’ (2020) proposal to extend the notion of translation as constituting society not only among human beings but among all kinds of living beings may come to redefine the place of TS in the academic field. In fact, TS is arguably leading the way in terms of methodological innovation in relation to conceptual analysis: the Genealogies of Knowledge project builds corpora and analysis tools to study how concepts have evolved over time and across languages in a range of domains such as politics ( Jones, 2019) and religion (Chen, 2018). The methodology, which is based on the analysis of comparable diachronic corpora in several languages, and counter-balances mainstream with contestatory texts, is now being adopted in the medical humanities (Karimullah, 2020; Buts et al., 2021). Arguably, what is missing, rather than more conceptual research, is better communication between this type of self-reflective, critical research and the more industry-friendly discussions of translation, what Venuti (2019) might call ‘instrumental approaches.’ Reductionist understandings of translation and interpreting as linguistic activities are still very much entrenched outside the academic field, with the possible exception of the audiovisual and literary industries, where the creative skills of translators have acquired some prestige of late. The language services industry often distinguishes the process of translating, say, a video game from beginning to end with attention to ‘locale’ (i.e. target culture), also known as localization, from the more specific task of interlingual text translation as part of that process, by explaining that localization is more than ‘just translation, thus reducing 52

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translation to one part of the process, which is presumably done without attention to target culture (Plante, 2017; Harris, 2021). Another term that has become popular in the industry is ‘transcreation,’ described in the blogpost of one language services company as the service that ‘fills in where literal translation does not work’ (Ashley, 2016), which suggests that what, for example, literary translations have done since antiquity is a literal translation and that translating creatively is a new practice. When scholars reproduce the language used in the industry (Mangiron & O’Hagan, 2006), they unwittingly undermine some of the most sophisticated arguments promoted in other corners of the discipline. As Kenny notes, even within academia, the language used to speak about translation technology often makes translators invisible; when linguists refer to human translation as being ‘fed’ to the computer, or to algorithms as ‘harvesting’ translation equivalents, the implication seems to be that translation is something that occurs ‘in nature, and like other natural resources, open to exploitation by those with the appropriate technology and legal rights’ (2011). Theory is another type of data that does not fit neatly within a model based on distinctions between products, processes and participants. Theory can constitute data for historical research. George Steiner’s After Babel, published in 1975, focused on translation theory from a historical perspective, as did Robison’s Western Translation Theories from Herodotus to Nietzsche (1997). Cheung’s Anthology of Chinese Discourse on Translation (2006) represents one of the earliest efforts to internationalize TS beyond West European and North American academic circles. Theory has also been the object of artistic, or art-driven research, as in the work of Connelly (2019), Connelly and Saldanha (http://www.heatherconnelly.co.uk/ translationzones/), Maruyama (2016), Holmkvist (2017, 2019, 2020) and Vidal (http:// translationgames.net/). However, art as research challenges the categories of data in Saldanha and O’Brien’s model in more ways than one; translation can be the method (Maruyama, 2016) as well as the product of the research, and it almost invariably involves the active participation of translators. Summing up, the developments in TS methodologies in the last ten years have led the discipline beyond the categories of product, process, context, and participants; even notions of mixed methods and triangulation are too restrictive to describe the innovative ways in which data are being combined. Despite the diversification of methods and data, however, there are still important gaps, for example in terms of geographical areas that continue to be neglected. Lange and Monticelli (2022) note that there is an important work on Slavic and East-European translation history which remains largely unknown in Englishdominated circles. Thus, despite increased methodological sophistication, there is still a need for expanding the geographical, linguistic, social, and historical range of translation and interpreting studies phenomena under study.

Product-oriented research Reliance on linguistics and, in particular, Chomsky’s generative grammar – the dominant linguistic theory at the time – allowed Nida to label his theory as scientific, something that also contributed to its wide acceptance and dissemination. Generative grammar’s assumption of an innate language faculty has been widely disputed, undermining some of Nida’s arguments in the process. Other aspects of Nida’s approach that came under criticism were the imperialistic and evangelist nature of his premises, which clearly contradicted the supposedly scientific nature of his model (Pym, 2009a). Nida’s simplistic distinction between form and response and the idealized nature of his notion of response, particularly problematic for 53

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a supposedly empiricist theory, were also famously criticized by Meschonnic (1999), who argued that translation required a critical theory of language that paid attention to stylistics, subjectivity and, importantly, the critical and creative role of translators in bringing out the differences as well as similarities across languages and cultures. Meschonnic’s approach, like that of Berman’s (1995), was embedded in the tradition of literary criticism, rather than linguistics, and was more concerned with the particularities of literary style and the intricacies of interpretation rather than generalizable principles of translation. The understanding of literary translation as an exercise in literary criticism had been popular before the advent of scientific approaches to linguistics, for example in the work of I.A. Richards (Xie, 2007), and is becoming popular once again (Woods, 2017). Nida’s focus on readers’ responses opened an important avenue for extra-linguistic considerations and made his theory applicable in a way that those of other, possibly more sophisticated, linguists, such as Jakobson and Catford, were not. Nida drew attention to non-textual and, in particular, social aspects of translation. It was on the basis of Nida’s theory that Reiss (2014) developed a highly influential methodology that attempted to bridge literary criticism with linguistic analysis to produce a model for ‘objective’ translation criticism based on text types. Reiss’s model prioritized communicative function, and combined with Vermeer’s Skopos Theory, went on to offer a theoretical framework that was both highly applicable and sophisticated, making it particularly popular as a training tool. Functionalism moved beyond the notion of equivalence to the source text as formulated by Nida or Newmark (1988), suggesting that translations should be evaluated according to the function the translation itself has to fulfil in its own context. The possibility of ‘objective’ evaluation, however, was soon to attract criticism for ignoring the power asymmetries integral to cross-linguistic communication (Hönig, 1997). Functionalism has also been criticized for prioritizing the client’s view of what the text should communicate and compromising other aspects of the translator’s professional responsibility, such as the author’s intention, which prompted Nord (2006) to add loyalty as another dimension of the model. Furthermore, a functionalist approach does not seem to leave room for considering the translator’s and interpreter’s ethical responsibility. Venuti (2019) contrasts functionalism and other ‘instrumental’ approaches to a hermeneutic approach to translation. Hermeneutics is arguably the oldest methodology in the history of translation theory, rooted in the disciplines of exegesis and philology (Hermans, 2020, p. 228) and particularly prominent in the Romantic period, with the work of Schleiermacher as its most prominent exponent. While instrumental translation prioritizes functional aims, a hermeneutical approach accepts, in principle, that any given translation is one of many possible interpretations. However, as pointed out by Baer (2021a, p. 371), in defending hermeneutics as the best way of approaching translation, Venuti falls into his own trap, by presenting functionalist translations as necessarily ‘bad.’ An important milestone in TS methodologies was the shift from prescription to description. Translation methodologies had been concerned with the quality, rather than the reality of translation. The work of Toury (1995), along with that of Holmes (1988) and Even-Zohar (1990) marked a crucial shift, calling for the empirical study of translation. The suggestion that we should study ‘any target-language utterance which is presented or regarded as [translation] within the target culture, on whatever grounds’ (Toury, 1985, p. 20, in Hermans 1999, p. 49) was, in Herman’s words ‘bold, decisive and liberating’ (1999, p. 49). A descriptive approach meant, among other things, that translation could be studied without being previously defined, and without resorting to overly restrictive understandings of equivalence or instrumental notions of function. Toury’s claim that translations are 54

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facts of the target culture, together with Even-Zohar’s Polysystems Theory, also contributed to a methodological move beyond the text as a unit of analysis and toward considering the context in a more systematic manner. Hermans (1985, 1996, 2007) and Lefevere (1992) developed models for linking the micro-level analysis of translated literature with macrolevel considerations. The influence of cultural studies and the wider scope of artistic forms that it concerned itself with led to a new conceptualization of translations as cultural products and a focus on the translation of ‘culture’ (Bassnett & Lefevere, 1990, 1998; Bassnett, 1998), rather than literature (as either texts or art). Reliance on the notion of ‘culture,’ however, has its own problems in terms of accounting for contextual factors influencing and being influenced by translation and interpreting, as discussed in context-oriented methodologies below. What came to be known as Descriptive Translation Studies or the Manipulation School (Hermans, 1999), was heavily influenced by structuralist literary theory. Although it was Toury’s work that provided the framework for the study of translation norms, the idea had already been sketched by McFarlane (1953), Levý (1967) and Popovič (1976). Having desisted from measuring a mythical equivalence between the source and target texts and embarked on a search for descriptive and probabilistic norms, researchers focused instead on what distinguished translations from other text types, what they shared with texts other than their sources, thereby enabling a discussion of translations beyond measures of good and bad. According to Toury (1995), norms would enable TS to explain and predict translational behavior, as was the role of empirical research. Toury’s proposal was inspired by Hempel’s ‘The function of general laws in history,’ published originally in 1942. Norms represented the first level of abstraction and would be generalized into probabilistic laws. Although the supposedly neutral role of norms in translation research has been called into question (Crisafulli, 2002; Baker, 2007), the impetus that the concept of ‘norms’ and ‘descriptivism’ provided to empirical research is still productive. The centuries-long dismissal of translated texts as second-hand copies and translation as a minor skill in most fields of knowledge and artistic practice (with the possible exception of religion) had important consequences for translation research. From a methodological perspective, the lack of attention to translations resulted in a lack of data concerning the translational status of many publications, which still hampers the accurate mapping of historical translation flows (Sapiro, 2008; Blakesley, 2016). From a historical perspective, the dismissal of translation contributed to the invisibility of much intellectual work done by women, which means historians have a particularly important recovery mission to re-write women in the history of knowledge, science and literature. Susam-Sarajeva (2006) argues that the disregard for the translational nature of traveling theory ‘has implications reaching cultural and linguistic imperialism, since this disregard helps to conceal the fact that the majority of theories travel from “central” systems to “peripheral” ones and shape the latter in accordance to the ideologies of the former’ (Susam-Sarajeva, 2006, p. 210). The role of translation in the shaping of whole fields of knowledge is the focus of the Genealogies of Knowledge network, mentioned above. If Toury provided the theoretical framework for the study of norms, it was Baker’s (1993, 1995, 1996a) suggestion to adopt the newly developed methods in corpus linguistics that enabled their systematic study. Making use of the increased memory capacity of computers, corpus linguistics facilitated the study of patterns across large collections of authentic texts and resulted in a paradigm shift in the field of linguistics. It also changed the way translators worked by facilitating the storage and retrieval of translations using translation memories. Eventually, it was to completely transform the way machine translation operated, which 55

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went from relying on rules and dictionaries, to relying on statistics and probabilities, and to the neural network models that are employed nowadays. The early promoters of corpora for the study of language and translation (Sinclair, 1991; Baker, Francis & Tognini-Bonelli, 1993) were working within the context of Firthian and neo-Firthian traditions that insisted on the use of attested language production and stressed the importance of context understood broadly as the situation within which language is produced. Thus, early corpus-based studies generally entailed a series of methodological principles: the requirement to use authentic language; a focus on patterns, as opposed to individual or exceptional cases; the assumption of interdependence between form and meaning; a comparative approach to the study of texts and text types, and the assumption of a connection between everyday use and cultural transmission (Saldanha, 2009). The connection between texts and their context was to take a back seat as corpora grew larger. Efforts to build representative corpora to model certain languages were, perhaps inevitably, found to be biased toward certain speakers. Representativeness has been a key scientific principle for experimental research: the underlying assumption being that a representative sample is one that allows for generalizations in relation to a larger population, that is, the larger group of people, events and processes that the research seeks to study. This, however, implies that the population is homogenous enough for their characteristics to be replicated in the sample in similar proportions and that such characteristics (independent variables such as gender, level of experience and language competence) are few and stable enough so that the researcher can control their effects. Statistical tests assume that real effects can be observed between dependent and independent variables because otherwise variation would be random. Language use, and most human behavior, however, is never random. As observed by Kilgariff, we use language purposefully and we are ‘not capable of, producing words or sounds or sentences or documents randomly’ (2005, p. 267). Statistical models were built to compensate for the ‘sparsity of data’ but language data is no longer scarce, and ‘the difference between arbitrary and motivated connections is evident in greatly differing relative frequencies’ (Kilgarriff, 2005, p. 272). Kilgarriff’s reasoning explains, at least in part, the popularity of the large corpora that came to dominate the study of languages, such as the TenTen Corpus Family (www.sketchengine.eu, 2022). Statistical research continues to evolve and adapt to the challenges pointed out by Kilgarriff (Gries, 2005), although the link between text and context beyond quantifiable variables, continues to present a challenge for this sort of research. The explosion in data quantity has its advantages but also entails risks, for example in terms of the traceability of data and the concomitant problems of accountability, the tendency to reproduce hegemonical viewpoints and the increased environmental costs (Bender et al., 2021). This is why some researchers still prefer small and carefully curated collections of texts where the sources of any examples are traceable, as in the Genealogies of Knowledge project mentioned above. As well as the study of linguistic norms and patterns, corpora, together with other digital resources within the wider umbrella known as digital humanities, also widened the scope of literary translation research beyond specific authors, periods and genres. Arguably, the digitization of texts enabled ‘world literature’ to become a subject of study in its own right; literature had to be first available digitally and in the form of ‘big’ (statistical) data before the analysis of ‘comparative’ literatures could possibly become that of ‘world’ literature. The study of literature using digital technologies is often known as ‘distant reading,’ although, according to Goldstone (2017), distant reading is nothing other than ‘computational studies of text’ and the term, like that of ‘digital humanities,’ is a misguided label. Underwood makes a similar argument; the real shift, he argues, is conceptual rather than methodological 56

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and consists in treating text, until recently a qualitative type of data, as quantitative, and thereby ‘treat[ing] writing as a field of relations to be modelled, using equations that connect linguistic variables to social ones’ (2016, p. 531). While this is a useful way of studying the circulation of literature from a sociological perspective, its status as ‘literary analysis’ or ‘reading’ remains debatable (Underwood, 2016). Although corpus linguistics first developed as a methodology attached to a particular resource, corpora these days are employed as sources of data to be analyzed with a range of different tools and methods, adopting different theoretical frameworks. Among them, critical discourse analysis stands out as having been particularly productive. Critical discourse analysis deliberately questions the power relations embedded in a text, with a view to challenge them. Corpus linguistics provided critical discourse analysts with a methodological tool to support claims about how power is pervasively constructed in everyday language using evidence of linguistic patterns across corpora. Corpus-based critical discourse analysis has been instrumental, for example, in demonstrating how ideological manipulation can be a pervasive feature of news translation (Kim, 2014, 2017; Pan et al., 2020). Notwithstanding early calls by Shlesinger (1989, 1998) to apply the descriptive TS framework and its associated tools to study interpreting, the development of spoken language corpora took some time to materialize. Corpora of sign language, everyday language, multilingual communication, and other minoritized varieties are still scarce compared to monolingual, written and contemporary languages that are over-represented online. This state of affairs reflects more than technical convenience and could well be said to indicate whose language matters and whose does not. At the time of writing, the Sketch Engine interface offers access to corpora in over a hundred languages; however, the sizes and, therefore, the resources for each language vary widely. Sketch Engine includes parallel corpora but notes the difficulty of accessing them. While parliamentary corpora in European languages are easily accessible, the OPUS2 project, which collects translated texts in forty languages from the web, is ‘currently the only source for non-EU languages and their combinations with many other languages’ (Sketch-Engine, 2021). It contains texts from a variety of genres, from European Central Bank documents to subtitles and transcribed TED talks, compensating with size for the lack of balance in composition, as many corpora do. Critical discourse analysis has also been widely employed on its own, without the support of corpora or computational analysis. It is in fact a very flexible methodology that has also been applied to the study of interpreting (Mason, 2009; Wadensjö, 2014), audiovisual translation (Li, 2020), and advertising (Millán-Varela, 2004). Critical discourse analysis links the text’s surface features with their semiotic function and requires examination of the power relations encoded in the text; going beyond explicit purposes and exposing those that are more subtly encoded. A critical approach suggests it is not sufficient or even useful to describe a state of affairs without asking why it is so, what assumptions are taken for granted and whether they could be challenged. Once critical approaches enter the scene, therefore, we find ourselves outside the domain of descriptive TS. Narrative analysis is another methodology that can also provide a critical perspective and is flexible enough to be applicable to short texts (Baker, 2006). Narrative analysis focuses on specific instances of language use, which can be anything from titles, images and captions in one news report (Baker, 2007), to the language used about a particular event, as in Harding’s study of the 2004 Beslan school siege in Russia (Harding, 2018). The focus is not to reveal patterns but to trace the narratives (about ourselves, the social groups we belong to and the world at large) embedded in texts, with a view to reveal the underlying stories that are being reinforced or challenged every time we use language. Because it does not 57

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rely on the availability of large quantities of text, it is more easily applied to the study of multimodal genres and has been employed successfully for this purpose (see, for example ‘Jones, 2018). Summers (2022) contrasts a narrative approach to logico-scientific reasoning that looks for universal truth conditions, arguing that narrative research recognizes the inherent instability of ‘truth’ as a concept in its search for connections between events and context, showing how truth looks different from different angles. In particular, it offers a framework for reading the texts through the perspective of the teller of the tale, showing how the narrator’s identity, bias, and knowledge (or lack of it) shape the version of events communicated. As well as a critical angle, narrative analysis encourages a high level of reflexivity, given that it positions the researcher as narrator of the stories of others. Genetic criticism is another methodology that adopts texts as its object of research but also makes explicit connections with the process and agents involved. It consists in the analysis of documentary evidence – research notes, letters, drafts, manuscripts, typescripts – from different stages of the genesis of a text, so as to reconstruct the writing or translation process. It has also been employed to study audiovisual translation; Zanotti (2019), using the Stanley Kubrick Archive, for example, traces elements of the genesis of translated versions of Kubrick’s films. Genetic criticism does not take the text itself but the writing or translation process as the focus of research. A similar shift of perspective from texts as a product to texts as a process can be observed in the deployment of conversation analysis as a framework for the study of dialogue interpreting. Although it generally takes the form of textual analysis using transcripts, the focus tends to be on the process – for example, on interpreters’ positioning and orientation strategies (Mason, 2006; Gavioli, 2012; Hirvonen & Tiittula, 2018) – rather than the product of dialogue interpreting. In the age of digital information, efforts to ensure content accessibility, not only for users with different linguistic requirements but also for users with specific needs due to hearing, sight, speech, and other impairments, have resulted in an increasing tendency to combine different modes and means of communication, making it more difficult to study translations as text while leaving aside their dynamic interconnections with other semiotic resources. Multimodal theory has emerged as an overarching framework to study the socially and materially situated nature of semiosis, with translation theorists, being already experts in mediated communication, making important contributions in this area (Pérez-González, 2014). This section has briefly chartered the development of TS as a discipline initially focused on texts and slowly expanding its scope to translating and interpreting events more generally. The following sections describe how the discipline incorporated into its remit the analysis of cognitive processes, human agents and what we have called, for lack of a better term, ‘context’. It is not only, however, the multiplication of types of data that has changed the disciplinary landscape but also advances in the conceptualization of the communication process and how different data work together to facilitate or hinder that process. Multimodality, the study of how we make meaning by combining multiple signifying means or modes (writing, image, music, body movements and so on) (Pérez González, 2020) has led researchers to question the very notion of ‘text’ and ‘product,’ and, in particular, it has blurred the line between what had been traditionally been considered ‘context’ as opposed to ‘text’. The images in a book, the landscape around a street sign, the soundtrack of a film, all aspects which may have well been described as ‘context’ until very recently, can not be considered separate from the meaning potential of the text or utterance. While social semiotics, the branch of semiotics that focuses on the social uses and interrelationships of semiotic modes has been applied to the study of audiovisual translation, for example, in the work of 58

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Pérez-González (2014), we have only started to understand the impact of multimodality for translation and language research more generally.

Process-oriented research In his programmatic map of the discipline, Holmes (1988) argued that descriptive TS should concern itself with the products, the function and the process of translation. He described process-oriented research as studying ‘the problem of what exactly takes place in the “little black box” of the translator’s “mind”’ (1988, p. 73). The black box metaphor has been commonly used to describe cognition as something that happens in the brain; it is a particularly suggestive metaphor for what is considered one of the main challenges of cognitive science, which is direct observation of human cognitive processes. Even neuroimaging, which is as close as anyone can get to studying a live and operating brain and has offered important insights into how the brain functions, does not yet offer sufficient detail to apply the findings to real-life situations (Schleim & Roiser, 2009; Hansen-Schirra, 2017) and, despite important initiatives (Chang, 2009; Hervais-Adelman et al., 2015), attempts to apply such technologies to the study of translation and interpreting are still rare. In the absence of more direct access, researchers have resorted to introspection, for example in the form of think-aloud protocols and records of verbalized thought processes. Despite their potential biases and compromised ecological validity, they have been an important source of hypotheses for further testing (Bernardini, 2001; Li, 2004). Researchers have also recorded behavioral patterns, such as the number and distribution of pauses, corrections, hedges, and so on, on the premise that mental processes are reflected in behavior (Englund Dimitrova, 2005; Dragsted, 2006). The development of tools such as eye-tracking and keystroke logging has expanded the type of data that can be collected and triangulated. With roots in psychology, early cognitive studies often took the form of controlled experiments (Risku, 2020), whereby the behaviors or properties of two groups – of people or other forms of individualized data – are compared when certain variables are manipulated. The appeal of controlled experiments, as noted above, is that, on principle, samples with a relatively small number of participants (randomly selected from a known population), employed in conjunction with statistical tests, allow for generalizations from that sample to the larger population. Like introspective methods, they can suffer from a lack of ecological validity; however, they are increasingly triangulated with results obtained using other techniques, including qualitative data, in other to provide more comprehensive pictures of the translation process (Risku, 2020). It was noted above that the link between text and context beyond quantifiable variables remains a challenge and the same can be said of the link between cognitive processes and context. Most cognitive models represent translation as another form of information processing and consider contextual or subjective factors only in the form of quantifiable variables, such as gender, age, degree of education, and so on. They do not usually take into consideration the physical and affective aspects of the bodies involved, nor the situation in which they are embedded. Since the 1990s, however, the view of cognition as information processing has been challenged by scientists who argue that cognition is not restricted to the individual brain but distributed in sociocultural systems, and that external physical tools, from books to computers, function as extensions to the mind. This view is known under the umbrella term of 4EA, for embodied, embedded, enacted, extended and affective cognition. This broadened view of cognition has widened the scope of process-oriented research considerably. Ehrensberger-Dow, for example, adopts an ergonomic perspective in order 59

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to understand ‘how physical, cognitive, and organisational factors impinge on professional translation’ (Ehrensberger-Dow, 2015, p. 328). Other research has focused on the affective aspects of cognition, including personality traits and emotional intelligence as factors affecting translation performance (Rojo et al., 2014; Hubscher-Davidson, 2017, 2020; Rojo López &Cifuentes Férez, 2021). The translators’ interaction with computational tools is probably the most researched aspect of translation from a cognitive perspective (Kruger, 2012; Suojanen et al., 2014). In an effort to account for the situated and embodied nature of cognition, researchers have diversified their methods, combining quantitative with qualitative data and exploiting the advantages of triangulating data in very different forms (Risku, 2017). Ehrensberger-Dow’s (2018) Capturing Translation Processes Project, for example, combines eight data collection techniques (screen recording, keystroke logging, eye-tracking, retrospective verbal protocols, online surveys, questionnaires and interviews). As the notion of process broadens to embrace environmental and social factors, however, the dividing line between processes, products and participants becomes blurred. Buzelin’s (2007) research on literary translation processes, for instance, places emphasis on the social context and adopts an ethnographic methodology within the framework of Latour’s actornetwork theory. As well as extending the concept of process, this research also questions the distinction between products and participants by positing the role of drafts as ‘actors,’ on the basis of the responses they trigger from translators, reviewers and publishers. As this section has shown, process-oriented research evolved from a narrow understanding of cognition as internal mental process to embracing the affective, situational, technological and socially connected nature of the human mind. At the same time, translators and interpreters’ modes of working have also evolved, making some aspects of the process easier to capture (the interaction with computers) and others more difficult, due to the physical, temporal and spatial distance among translators and interpreters who are increasingly working remotely. As the translation process evolves and adapts to new means and modes of communication, the distinction between participants, processes and contexts of translation becomes a matter of perspective rather than a choice of data.

Participant-oriented research It is surprising that the need to study translators and interpreters, as well as translation and interpreting events, processes and contexts, was not explicitly part of the original enterprise of TS as envisaged by Holmes, Toury, and other proponents of an empirically based discipline. Although scholars such as Berman (1995), Robinson (1991), Hermans (1996) developed models to study the translators’ subjective involvement with the text, their interest was still in the translators’ work rather than the translators themselves. It was not until translation was seen through a sociological lens that translators came to be placed center stage. In 2009, Chesterman, an early advocate of sociological approaches, mapped this branch of the discipline under the title ‘The Name and Nature of Translator Studies’ in a special issue of Hermes entitled ‘Focus on the Translator.’ Sociological approaches have been adopted to study translators’ and interpreters’ interaction with other agents, in networks, systems or fields. Social network theory, for example, has been adopted to study how social connections are established and how they develop (Folaron & Buzelin, 2007). In one of the earliest studies to adopt a sociological approach to translation, Simeoni (1998) employs Bourdieu’s notion of habitus to account for differences in translator’s styles and concludes that translators have ‘willingly assumed their cultural and 60

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socio-economic dependence’(ibid, p. 11), agreeing to their subservience by adherence to norms rather than demonstrating ‘genuine “creation”’ (1998, p. 7). Despite his negative portrayal of translators, Simeoni claims that this may still be the age of translators’ emancipation and calls for more ‘sociographies of single translators’ professional trajectories’ which, he notes, are ‘sorely lacking’ (Simeoni, 1998, p. 31). Research on translators and interpreters has been carried out mainly on the basis of analysis of the product of their work and analysis of their translations or transcripts of interpreting events, i.e. on the product rather than the participants. While these studies are revealing of subjective and individual responses, there is a need to place that research in its biographical context, spatially as well as historically, as argued by Footitt (2022), to fully appreciate its significance. With calls for ‘translator’ studies and the increasing accessibility of documentary evidence, including translators’ drafts and correspondence, it is disappointing that translators’ archives are still lacking the required infrastructure to become fully integrated into academic research. Archival collections built around a translator’s work, including drafts, correspondence with editors, reviews and so on, should be part of our curated digital heritage and made available to researchers. Sociological approaches have contributed to enrich our knowledge about translators and interpreters as professional, fan and activist communities. Such a large-scale, sociological perspective aligns with the large-scale, textual perspective, described above, which has tended to focus on norms and normative contexts. There is reason, however, to caution against the tendency to generalize too quickly at the expense of a detailed and more nuanced picture of individual translators and interpreters. Research that focuses on specific literary translators, rather than on translators at large, presents a rather different picture to that offered by Simeoni, providing evidence of stylistic profiles that reveal a proud and, at times, defiant subjectivity, and suggests that we may be looking for creativity in the wrong place, in the domain of representation rather than that of performance (Saldanha, 2011, 2020, 2022). Brown (2022) also argues against over-generalizing; her in-depth historical study of women translators in Early Modern Europe suggests work done from a feminist perspective presents a neater picture of a feminist tradition than may be justified. The need for this kind of nuanced analysis is one of the reasons why Munday (2014) calls for the adoption of a micro-historical approach to the study of individual translators. Microhistory zooms in on details about a particular period, group or region, focusing on personal experience rather than the larger picture, and therefore can reveal not only how general trends have concrete effects but also how pockets of resistance can survive undetected in the context of larger developments. Research on the product of interpreting, such as dialogue interpreting transcripts analyzed using conversation analysis, have provided important insights on positionality, the role of the interpreter, turn-taking, and the collaborative construction of knowledge during interpreting (Gavioli, 2022) about. As noted above, interpreters have also been investigated by psychologists interested in interpreting as a particularly demanding form of bilingual processing, but cognitive research carried out in experimental settings is not particularly conducive to understanding interpreters as human actors. Despite early calls for the study of interpreters in real-life settings, as situated actors, (Pöchhacker, 1995), research that takes the context of the situation seriously into account is still relatively rare (Diriker, 2004; Duflou, 2016). Such an approach seems particularly important to understand the disjuncture between interpreters’ understandings of their role and their actual ideological positioning in the communication exchange revealed by existing research (Beaton, 2007; Zwischenberger, 2015). In the same issue of Hermes where Chesterman (2009) published ‘The Name and Nature of Translator Studies,’ Pym (2009b) called for the humanization of research in translation 61

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history. Historical studies of translators and interpreters include Pym’s own work, Jean Delisle’s and Judith Woodsworth’s Translators Through History (1995), and is slowly diversifying and adopting different angles and a wider scope in terms of their object of research. The history of audiovisual translation is now being sketched and Leahy (2021) offers an account of the history of sign-language interpreting from the point of view of the interpreters that shows how long it took for the practice to become professionalized. With two new book series recently launched, Translation History by Palgrave Macmillan and Routledge Research on Translation and Interpreting, the former claiming to be ‘the first to take a global and interdisciplinary view of translation and translators across time, place, and cultures,’ and the latter describing its rationale as ‘the treatment of translation and translation practice as social and historical events,’ Pym’s call appears to have been heard. While looking at history from the perspective of what we now see as the agents behind the translation process is a welcome addition to the TS research agenda, researchers should be aware that the notion and the importance of authorship is a relatively recent phenomenon, historically speaking, compared to the practices of writing and translation. As discussed in Bitsué (2011) and Cordingley and Frigau Manning (2017), the notion of the solitary translator emerged as a construct in parallel to notions of single authorship through the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. Jansen and Wegner coin the term ‘multiple translatorship’ ‘to signal the reality that, for better or worse, translation is frequently collaborative in nature’ ( Jansen & Wegener, 2013, p. 5). Multiple translatorship seems a suitable term to describe how translation takes place in contemporary digital spaces as well, although this is a rather different phenomenon from the collaborative work object of historical research. While often discussed as collaborative translation, it does not always involve a joint effort (McDonough Dolmaya & del Mar Sánchez Ramos, 2019). Crowdsourcing and similar practices often take the form of unpaid labor by translators working individually; their work is subsequently appropriated by large companies, such as Facebook or Skype, or employed for the development of machine translation engines and other natural language processing applications ( Jiménez-Crespo, 2016). Some aspects of this work, including motivations, have been studied by adopting traditional participantoriented methods, such as surveys (O’Brien & Schäler, 2010; McDonough Dolmaya, 2012). Actual collaborative work also exists and is notorious in activist contexts or among users and fans. Boéri, for example, offers a rich picture of the Babels network of volunteer translators and interpreters using ethnographic methods and narrative analysis (Boéri, 2008, 2014). The digitalization of the translator’s workspace has had an important effect on methodologies. It has enabled the development of new methodologies, such as netnographies (Afzali & Zahiri, 2021), and facilitated the collection of some types of data. Translators’ interaction with the technological environment, either individually or in networks, has received considerable attention. However, similar to other types of research that make use of existing digital resources, the popularity may be driven by the relative ease with which data can be captured, which also explains why there is more research on translators’ rather than on interpreters’ interaction with their digital environment. Although the development of computer-assisted interpreting tools is still in its infancy (Fantinuoli, 2017), interpreting is increasingly taking place remotely, a phenomenon that requires considerably more investigation, particularly from the interpreter’s perspective (Davitti & Braun, 2020). However, the increased use of technology does not always facilitate the collection of data on interpreters. Accessing interpreting data outside publicly available data, such as press conferences, parliamentary proceedings and presidential debates (Bendazzoli, 2018), is still difficult. Even in the case of translators, researchers who want to capture their perspectives tend to use readily available 62

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sources such as blogs (Olohan, 2014), while other methods, such as interviews, which are more time and resource intensive, are still rare outside studies focusing on very small communities (En & En, 2019). Studies have measured, for example, the degree of satisfaction , the speed, quality and other practical aspects of human-computer interaction that are of interest to developers (Rossetti & O’Brien, 2019). Koskinen and Ruokonen (2017) adopted an innovative approach to the study of translators’ emotional attachment to their tools by asking them to write a ‘love letter’ or a ‘breakup letter’ to the tool of their choice. The employment of such psychological research instruments, including personality tests (Hubscher-Davidson, 2009) and trait emotional intelligence questionnaires (Hubscher-Davidson, 2016) mentioned under processoriented research, points toward a concern with the well-being of translators, adding another dimension to the relationship between theory and practice. Status and visibility have been traditional concerns of translation theory and research, either in the form of calls for minoritizing strategies in an effort to decolonize translation (Venuti, 2019), philosophical theories defending translation as an art (Malmkjær, 2020), or sophisticated analysis of the precarious positioning from where interpreters operate (Inghilleri, 2013). The current scope of research on translators and interpreters also considers the implications of the economic model adopted in the translation profession, as in Moorken’s (2020) discussion of digital Taylorism – a model where large companies break down tasks in order to increase and monitor productivity – in the translation industry, and even the implication of the language adopted in talking about translation (Kenny, 2011). Importantly, Translation Studies also engages with translators and interpreters beyond professional contexts, showing how, in this more deregulated environment, translators and translation users take control by adopting (Pérez González, 2014b) practices (Baker, 2013). Wang (2017) and Wang and Zhang (2017) argue that fansubbers’ practices represent a form of collective activism against government dominance, questioning established practices and encouraging further resistant ones. To sum up, research that adopts translators and interpreters as their object have tended to adopt social science methodologies to frame and interpret participant-oriented research. At a macro-level, quantitative research has facilitated the mapping of translation flows at national and international levels (Sapiro & Heilbron, 2002). At a personal level, the subjective positions of translators and their interactions have been explored with methodologies such as critical discourse analysis, narrative theory, genetic criticism and ethnography. The agency of translators and interpreters has been contextualized in historical and cultural terms, while the materiality and the spatial dimension of their work have received less attention. Footitt (2022) calls for an ethnographic translation history that takes the archive not as a source of evidence but as the subject of enquiry, focusing less on what stories and more on how they were told, from the ground up. Such an approach, whether applied to history or to contemporary translators and interpreters, requires bringing the material and spatial aspects of the contexts into focus.

Context-oriented In 2006, Baker declared that the notion of context had ‘been extensively invoked but rarely critiqued and elaborated in the study of translation and interpreting’ (2006, p. 321). According to Footit (2022), this is still the case. As mentioned above, early research focusing on contexts of translation often resorted to cultural theory. Although cultural studies came to be contrasted with linguistic approaches, the most distinctive characteristic of cultural studies 63

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has been the concern with political agendas (Baker, 1996b). Cultural studies reacted against an elitist notion of culture, bringing popular music, graffiti, comics, crafts and other lessestablished art forms into the realm of academic research, mainly within what had been previously language and literature departments. From the perspective of TS, specifically, the most important contribution of what is known as the cultural turn in TS, apart from the attention to popular culture and the recognition of popular art forms such as comics (Zanettin, 2015) was the introduction of feminist and postcolonial theories, as well as approaches that had clear potential for destabilizing accepted hierarchies of knowledge, such as post-structuralism and deconstruction. The notion of culture, however, is as slippery as that of context. In the process of expanding the knowledge of language and literatures beyond the canon, the cultural studies agenda became associated with the representation of devalued others. The efforts of feminist scholars were concentrated on recovering and giving visibility to women writers and translators; those of postcolonial scholars were on recovering literature that represented and valorized ‘cultures’ so far neglected. In the context of globalization, the understanding of culture came to stand for what was left behind; what needed to be adapted so as to fit the necessities of a particular ‘locale,’ to use the localization terminology. The problem with employing concepts such as context, culture, locale, nation, to denote the environments where translation and interpreting are received, produced and circulated, is that these are constantly shifting realities that look different from different perspectives (Kershaw & Saldanha, 2013). Appadurai (1996, p. 21) argues that the most valuable feature of the concept of culture is the notion of difference, and he privileges the use of the adjectival form ‘cultural’ to refer exclusively to ‘those differences that either express, or set the groundwork for, the mobilization of group identities’ (13). Baker’s solution is to think in terms of contextualization as a verb rather than a noun, so as to underline ‘the fact that it is socially and jointly constructed, partly in advance but also to a great extent at the point of interaction itself ’(2006, p. 335). Saldanha and O’Brien (2015) chose the case study method to illustrate research that focuses on context rather than process, products or participants. The case study does not require the application of particular techniques but does require a clear definition of what makes the case and a comprehensive account of all relevant factors, in such a way that the warrantability of findings can be rigorously assessed in relation to the questions the study purports to address (Saldanha & O’Brien, 2015, p. 207). The fact that a clear demarcation of the case is needed, however, indicates that cases are naturally complex objects of study, involving several types of data and the combination of different perspectives. Case studies can combine sociological, or macro, perspectives with personal, micro ones and are therefore useful to explore the link between agent and society, which scholars such as Meylaerts (2008) and Damrosch (2008) have called for in the fields of TS and world literature, respectively. Case studies have proved productive in a range of areas, from sociological studies of literary translation flows (Brems et al., 2020) to studies of the reception of machine-translated text (Bowker, 2009). Ethnographic methods are also promising in this regard, as demonstrated by Yu (2019) who combines online documents, translation manuscripts and excerpts of communication between participants, to argue for a model of online collaborative translation as a community of practice. The difference between case study and ethnographic research concerns the position of the researcher. The case study does not involve the researcher, it can be conducted at a distance and can, therefore, be historical (Saldanha & O’Brien, 2015, p. 207). Ethnography, on the other hand, offers a first-hand account of life as experienced by people, in context, and requires the involvement of the 64

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researcher who participates in the lives being researched. Ethnography has often been associated with participant observation as a method and with anthropology as a discipline; they are closely interrelated but should not be confused with one another. Ingold (2017) makes some important distinctions in this regard, noting, for example, that while ethnography is limited by a commitment to descriptive fidelity, anthropology tends to be speculative and critical. For Ingold, an anthropological approach means ‘to study with people, not to make studies of them’ (2017, p. 21). It was noted above that, with the creation of larger corpora and the use of more sophisticated digital tools, the study of language (and literature) risks becoming increasingly decontextualized. At the same time, contexts – similar to products, processes, and participation – have become digitalized. Interactions among interpreters, translators and other participants often take place in digital contexts. This presents some advantages in terms of data availability, as already discussed. However, as methodologies are adapted to make use of the increased availability of digital data, it is important to bear in mind how the data and the tools available direct the researcher’s gaze toward certain questions and not others and highlight certain patterns and not others. In relation to context, the involvement of the researcher in the lives and lived processes studied requires a considerable degree of self-reflexivity, a self-questioning gaze as it were, which may provide a much-needed counterpart to large-scale sociological mappings. The direction of the observation is something that the spatial turn in the social sciences has highlighted. Kershaw and Saldanha argue that describing the contexts of production, circulation and reception of translations as landscapes implies a recognition that the same spaces look different from different angles and that there are no stable positions of observation. Buffery (2013, p. 153), in the same volume, warns that even a relative notion such as ‘landscape’ may be biased toward ‘ocularcentrism,’ neglecting other somatic aspects of our research positions. Smirl and Lister (no date) makes this point particularly clear when describing what she calls ‘drive-by development,’ in other words, a development that is promoted from the inside of a climate-controlled sports utility vehicle, such as the white Land Rovers ubiquitous in UN peacekeeping missions, and that depends on the vehicle’s technology to reach certain geographical spaces. Thus, attention to the spaces, whether material or digital, in which our research objects and processes are embedded, has become part and parcel not only of the participant, process and process-oriented research but also of context-oriented research as well. It should be clear by now that the methodological landscape of TS is changing rapidly in response to changes in the nature of translation and interpreting, as products and processes. Previous attempts at charting the methodological landscape (Williams & Chesterman, 2002; Saldanha & O’Brien, 2013) do not capture the richness and complexity of current research. What is more, the increased fluidity of themes and flexibility of methodologies means such models may be too short-lived to be productive any longer. This is, however, a positive development, a sign that translation and interpreting research is embracing a collaborative trans-disciplinary approach. In the concluding section, I consider how this methodological landscape interacts with the theoretical landscape of translation and interpreting studies as conceived in the present volume.

Conclusion The current volume calls for a broad definition of translation as ‘the work performed to constrain a semiosic process’ (Meylaerts and Marais, this volume, p. 3-4) and argues that this extended definition of translation is needed if the discipline ‘wants to stay relevant in the 65

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twenty-first century digital age, characterized by an exponential growth of multimodal and hyper objects.’ This chapter has highlighted the implications of such growth and diversification for the methodologies adopted in translation research, demonstrating how TS researchers have adapted and, arguably, remain relevant to the twenty-first century digital age. The increased heterogeneity and interconnection observed in the methodologies adopted for the study of translation are mirrored in the theoretical landscape, where it can also be interpreted as a healthy sign of the maturity and sophistication of the discipline. Growth, however, is not necessarily a force for good. Discussing the growth of corpus-based translation research, Calzada-Pérez and Laviosa call for self-reflexivity and critical awareness in the use of corpora, in particular toward what they call, after Taylor and Marchi (2018), three ‘potential types of malaise: partiality, dusty corners and blind spots’ (2021, p. 22). They explain the types of malaise as follows: ‘focusing on certain areas while disregarding others brings about an incompleteness (i.e. a partiality) in research that leaves a series of dusty corners or overlooked features,’ for example ‘minoritised topics, text-types and languages that are hidden by dominant voices,’ and ‘creates black holes of undetected or under-analysed components (blind spots)’ (ibid). Buts and Jones (2021) analyze some of those blind spots, focusing on how the means and media of the technology we adopt – such as corpus analysis tools, but also more generally, books, graphs and statistics – and the way in which they are conceptualized, shape the questions we ask as researchers, and how we interpret the results. Digital technology has enabled increased connectivity and the blurring of boundaries between media and modes of communication, resulting in what is known as media convergence. While convergence designates a state whereby things that were previously separate become together and unified, part of the process involves the decoupling of technologies from their traditional media, with phones now being used to write and texts being manipulated on screens. Techniques such as optical character recognition, speech recognition and subtitling extractors (or rippers) have developed in response to that need for decoupling and have called attention to the specificities of modes and the characteristics of media. In relation to distant reading, Klein cautions that the project should extend beyond ‘“representative” samples, which tend to reproduce the same inequities of representation that affect our cultural record as a whole’ (2021). Machine translation illustrates this tendency particularly well, the methods that enable computers to learn language from large corpora, that is, from existing language, reveal gender and racist bias in their output (Bolukbasi et al., 2016; Caliskan, Bryson & Narayanan, 2017; Caliskan & Lewis, 2020). As Klein notes, while racism and sexism are ‘problems of scale,’ they require an ‘increased attention to … subject positions that are too easily (if at times unwittingly) occluded when taking a distant view’ (ibid). Klein suggests that we may want to start with more corpora, more accessible corpora, corpora that perform the work of recovery and resistance. These problems are not exclusive to corpus linguistics or digital humanities, however. As noted above, research-oriented toward participants also tends to prioritize scale and, in an effort to capture the majority of subjects, reinforces the process of minoritizing, creating its own dusty corners. I mentioned above that theories of multimodality, by highlighting how different modes of communication (visual, auditory, tactile) form a networked system of choice, have challenged our understanding of the boundaries between texts, utterances and contexts. Externalist theories of mind have challenged our understanding of the boundaries between people and contexts. Anthropological research has challenged our understanding between participants and researchers. These are some of the many shifts that are reconfiguring TS. As the borders and bridges that have sustained the structure of academic knowledge change 66

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around us, methodologies will need to adapt accordingly. As we moved from prescriptivism to descriptivism and critical approaches, we need to keep adapting not only our methods but also our understanding of what is research.

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Reiss, K. (2014). Translation Criticism- Potentials and Limitations: Categories and Criteria for Translation Quality Assessment. Hoboken: Taylor and Francis. Available at: http://public.ebookcentral.proquest. com/choice/publicfullrecord.aspx?p=1679817 (Accessed: 14 January 2022). Risku, H. (2017). Ethnographies of Translation and Situated Cognition. In The Handbook of Translation and Cognition (pp. 290–310). John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119241485.ch16. Risku, H. (2020). Process Research. In M. Baker & G. Saldanha (Eds.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies (pp. 437–441, 3rd edition). London & New York: Routledge. Robinson, D. (1991). The Translator’s Turn. Baltimore, MD & London: The John Hopkins University Press. Robinson, D. (2012). Rhythm as Knowledge-Translation, Knowledge as Rhythm-Translation. Global Media Journal Canadian Edition. Canadian edition, 5(1), 75–94. Robinson, D. (2015). The Dao of Translation: An East-west Dialogue/Douglas Robinson. London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group (Routledge advances in translation studies, 8). Rojo, A., Ramos, M., & Valenzuela, J. (2014). The Emotional Impact of Translation: A Heart Rate Study. Journal of Pragmatics, 71, 31–44. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2014.07.006. Rojo López, A. M., & Cifuentes Férez, P. (2021). Experimenting with Emotions: Insights into Empirical Emotion Research in Cognitive Translation Studies. Onomazein, (8), 1–15. Rossetti, A. & O’Brien, S. (2019). Helping the Helpers: Evaluating the Impact of a Controlled Language Checker on the Intralingual and Interlingual Translation Tasks Involving Volunteer Health Professionals. Translation Studies, 12(2), 253–271. https://doi.org/10.1080/14781700.2019.1 689161. Saldanha, G. (2009). Principles of Corpus Linguistics and Their Application to Translation Studies Research. Tradumàtica: traducció i tecnologies de la informació i la comunicació, L’aplicació del corpus lingüístics a la traducció (7). Available at: https://raco.cat/index.php/Tradumatica/article/ view/154828 (Accessed: 6 January 2023). Saldanha, G. (2011). Translator Style: Methodological Considerations. The Translator, 17(1), 25–50. https://doi.org/10.1080/13556509.2011.10799478. Saldanha, G. (2020). The Translator: Literary or Performance Artist?. Translation and Interpreting Studies, 16(1), 61–79. [Preprint]. https://doi.org/10.1075/tis.19067.sal. Saldanha, G. (2022). From Voice to Performance, the Artistic Agency of Literary Translations. In M. Baker, (Ed.), Unsettling Translation: Studies in Honour of Theo Hermans (pp. 97–111). London & New York: Routledge. Saldanha, G., & O’Brien, S. (2013). Research Methodologies in Translation Studies. Manchester St. Jerome. Sapiro, G. (2008). Translatio: Le Marché de la Traduction en France à l’heure de la Mondialisation/sous la Direction de Gisèle Sapiro. Paris: CNRS Éditions (Collection ‘Culture & société’ (Paris, France)). Sapiro, G. & Heilbron, J. (2002). La Traduction Littéraire, un Objet Sociologique. Traductions: Les Echanges Littéraires Internationaux. Actes de La Recherche en Sciences Sociales, 144(1). Available at: https://www.persee.fr/issue/arss_0335-5322_2002_num_144_1 (Accessed: 16 December 2021). Schleim, S., & Roiser, J. (2009). fMRI in Translation: The Challenges Facing Real-world Applications. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 3, 63. https://doi.org/10.3389/neuro.09.063.2009. Shlesinger, M. (1989). Extending the Theory of Translation to Interpretation Target, 1(1), 111–115. Shlesinger, M. (1998). Corpus-based Interpreting Studies as an Offshoot of Corpus-based Translation Studies. Meta : Journal des Traducteurs/Meta: Translators’ Journal, 43(4), 486–493. https://doi. org/10.7202/004136ar. Simeoni, D. (1998). Simeoni: The Pivotal Status of the Translator’s Habitus. Target. International Journal of Translation Studies, 10(1), 1–39. Sinclair, J. (1991). Corpus, Concordance, Collocation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Smirl, L. and Lister, B. (no date) Drive-By Development: Thinking Through the Sports Utility Vehicle in Humanitarian Assistance. Available at: https://backdoorbroadcasting.net/2010/12/ lisa-smirl-and-beth-lister-drive-by-development-thinking-through-the-sports-utility-vehiclein-humanitarian-assistance/ (Accessed: 6 January 2023). St. André, J. (Ed.) (2010). Thinking Through Translation with Metaphors (1st edition). Manchester; Kinderhook, NY: Routledge. Summers, C. (2022). Narrative Theory. In C. Rundle & F. Zanettin (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Research Methodologies in Translation Studies (pp. 254–269). London & New York: Routledge. Available at: https://www-taylorfrancis-com.ezproxy.uio.no/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781315158945-19/ narrative-theory-caroline-summers (Accessed: 6 January 2023). 73

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Suojanen, T., Koskinen, K., & Tuominen, T. (2014). User-Centered Translation. London & New York: Routledge. Susam-Sarajeva, Ş. (2006). Theories on the Move: Translation’s Role in the Travels of Literary Theories. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Taylor, C., & Marchi, A. (eds.) (2018). Corpus Approaches To Discourse: A Critical Review, 1st edition. Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon; New York: Routledge. Available at: https://doi.org/10.4324/ 9781315179346. Toury, G. (1995). Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond/Gideon Toury. Amsterdam , Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing (Benjamins translation library; v. 4). Underwood, T. (2016). Distant Reading and Recent Intellectual History. In M. K. Gold & L. F. Klein (Eds.), Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016 (pp. 530–533). University of Minnesota Press. https:// doi.org/10.5749/j.ctt1cn6thb.47. Venuti, L. (2019). Contra Instrumentalism: A Translation Polemic. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Available at: https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&scope=site&db=nlebk&db= nlabk&AN=2110069 (Accessed: 17 November 2020). Vinay, J. P., & Darbelnet, J. (1960). Stylistique Comparée du Français et de L’anglais... Nouvelle édition Corrigée (331 pp.). Paris: Didier. Wadensjö, C. (2014). Interpreting As Interaction. London & New York: Routledge. Wang, D. (2017). Fansubbing in China – With Reference to the Fansubbing Group YYeTs. JoSTrans, July, (28). Available at: https://www.jostrans.org/issue28/art_wang.pdf. Wang, D., & Zhang, X. (2017). Fansubbing in China: Technology-facilitated Activism in Translation. Target, 29(2), 301–318. https://doi.org/10.1075/target.29.2.06wan. Williams, J. (2013). Theories of Translation. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire; New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Williams, J., & Chesterman, A. (2002). The Map: A Beginner’s Guide to Doing Research in Translation Studies. Manchester: St. Jerome. Woods, M. (ed.) (2017). Authorizing Translation. London & New York: Routledge. Xie, M. (2007). Trying to Be on Both Sides of the Mirror at Once: I. A. Richards, Multiple Definitions and Comparative Method. Comparative Literature Studies, 44(3), 279–297. Yu, C. (2019). Negotiating Identity Roles During the Process of Online Collaborative Translation: An Ethnographic Approach. Translation Studies, 12(2), 231–252. https://doi.org/10.1080/14781700 .2019.1692062. Zanettin, F. (2015). Comics in Translation. London & New York: Routledge. Zanotti, S. (2019). Investigating the Genesis of Translated Films: A View from the Stanley Kubrick Archive. Perspectives, 27(2), 201–217. https://doi.org/10.1080/0907676X.2018.1490784. Zwischenberger, C. (2015). Simultaneous Conference Interpreting and a Supernorm that Governs It All. Meta: Journal des Traducteurs/Meta: Translators’ Journal, 60(1), 90–111. https://doi.org/10.7202/ 1032401ar.

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Part III

Object translation

4 Biosemiotic approaches Kalevi Kull

Biosemiotics stands in a rather unique position among the sciences: at the border of language, meaning, and mind. Among those phenomena in human life which presuppose meaning-making, many do not necessarily require the capacity for human language (or the symbolic reference, in the sense of Deacon (1997), or hypostatic abstraction in Charles S. Peirce’s terms), thus belonging to the sphere of biosemiotic research objects. Such phenomena of pre-linguistic origin include simple forms of learning, coding, cognition, perception, action, memory, subjectivity, meaningful communication, intentionality, logic, aesthetic... And, of course, semiosis itself, with interpretation. The analysis of complex symbolic realizations of these aspects of human life obviously remains to be the subject of human sciences, but assuming that the creation of meaning presupposes life (i.e., without the need to delve into prebiotic spheres), these phenomena must be thoroughly explained in the field of prelinguistic meaning creation, which is, by definition, the area of biosemiotics. It is the task of biosemiotics to provide minimal models, the necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of these features that get their expansion and extensive diversification together with and as the result of the conditions of human linguistic capacities. Without forgetting, of course, the taxonomic diversity of meaning-making. We are in a similar situation with the capacity for translation and the phenomenon of translation as such. Translation Studies and translation theory are traditionally dealing with translation problems of various kinds of human-made texts – texts in a broad, Lotmanian sense (Lotman, 1988). But since there exist meanings not made by humans (whereas often rather different from those that humans are capable to make), we also have a task to work out and learn the ways to translate signs or rather sign complexes of other organisms. Moreover, it is reasonable to ask whether organisms of other taxa themselves can translate something, or whether the process of translation as such exists in some other (or in all other) organisms. Biosemiotics is the field for solving these problems. Translation as such stands in a special position also within the methodology of semiotic sciences. In contrast to natural sciences (or phi-sciences), the semiotic sciences (or sigma-sciences), which study meaning creation, can inquire about their objects mainly by the method of communication, or rather by translation as an aspect and form of communication.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003161448-7

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Accordingly, translation from sign systems of other species serves as an important method in biosemiotic studies (Magnus, Tønnessen, 2010, p. 85). The biosemiotic analysis of translation began some decades ago, there exist several works on this topic (e.g., Kull & Torop, 2000; Cariani, 2003; Hoffmeyer, 2003; Wu, 2011; Marais & Kull, 2016; Petrilli, 2016; Marais, 2017, 2019; Sealey, 2019; Regattin, 2020; Sharov, 2020, 2022; etc.), however, these are rather preliminary and the results are yet discussable (see the Section “Some earlier work on biosemiotics of translation”). Principal questions here concern the minimal model of translation, how the pre-linguistic sign systems are organized, and more broadly, how translation works in non-humans. What we aim to do in this chapter is to re-analyze the concepts that are necessary for the studies of biotranslation, providing a brief review of existing studies and formulating some questions that will require further inquiry. This will include a rather difficult theoretical work on how to interrelate the fundamental concepts of semiotics – semiosis, umwelt, interpretation, translation, sign and meaning – in the best, most compatible and productive way.

Some concepts with definitions Development of biosemiotics has been a permanent search for improvement of the conceptual apparatus that would best correspond to semiotic phenomena and processes in the living world (see reviews by Favareau, 2010; Maran et al., 2011; Kull, 2015; Campbell et al., 2019; etc.). As a field responsible also for the fundamentals of general semiotics, the biosemiotic conceptual apparatus and its terminology should be compatible and usable in the semiotic theory as a whole. We should also not forget the applicability of these concepts in biology – for which biosemiotics has been created, at least from the perspective of its CopenhagenTartu nexus. Since the general concepts related to Translation Studies as well as their relationships to the basic concepts of semiotics vary widely between scholars and schools, we should first formulate the definitions of main concepts as we are going to use these below. Semiosis is the process in which meanings and sign relations emerge. There cannot be meanings or signs without semiosis. We use here the terms semiosis and meaning-making as synonyms. A necessary condition for semiosis is at least a minimal indeterminacy, which is provided by the simultaneous existence of possibilities and due to which exists a little freedom of choice. By definition, semiosis is not fully deterministic nor just a stochastic process, because it includes a choice process. In Peircean terms, semiosis always includes an abductive moment that supplies it with a creative aspect (see also Magnani, 2007, about animal abduction). It is important to distinguish between momentary semiosis and sequential semiosis (or consecutive semiosis or semiosic sequence). Since semiosis presupposes multiple simultaneous possibilities (there would be no indeterminacy and accordingly no semiosis if there is only one way to behave in time), it implies that the aspects of semiosis (in the case of its triadic model: the representamen, object, and interpretant) should be simultaneous. Simultaneity, however, is not meant here in physical time, but in semiotic time (which generally corresponds to specious present or subjective time or Now). Semiosis takes place at a moment that may require, for instance, hundred msec, thus there are processes going on in semiosis, while this moment is internally non-sequential from the perspective of the semiotic agent itself. Accordingly, the existence of simultaneous possibilities is equivalent to the semiotic space or momentary umwelt of an agent. Sequential semiosis has three important aspects or features – repetitive, relational and modifying. The repetitive aspect is described as habit, the relational aspect as semiotic fitting, and the 78

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modifying aspect as memory. (a) Habit appears and develops due to repetition of semiosis; it has a tendency, called habituation, toward automatization; nevertheless, since habit is a semiotic process, it always has at least a minimal possibility for deviation, for choosing alternative ways of behavior; it is not mechanic. (b) Semiosis creates relations which form the patterns of correspondence between the components of umwelt (the latter being constrained by the environmental heterogeneity); the stability of these patterns is characterized as semiotic fitting. (c) The traces of semiosis that influence further semiosis are called semiotic memory; memory can be described as constraints that delimit and direct and thus regulate semiotic processes, while these constraints themselves are to a certain extent modifiable by semiosis. Enfolded semiosis is a manyfold semiosis at one and the same moment. It includes two or more elementary, mutually constraining semioses. As different from sequential (unfolded) semiosis which occurs in continuous irreversible time, enfolded semiosis takes place in simultaneity, integrating multiple semiosis into one, at the same time moment. The varieties of enfolding are corresponding to sign types. Complex signs can be described as signs in a sign. Qualisigns are elementary signs. Sinsigns and legisigns are complex signs, which combine in themselves more than one elementary sign. Similarly, Deacon (1997) describes how indexes include icons and symbols include indexes. The relationships of signs in the manyfold semiosis as a whole are not simple hierarchies, but they are rather reciprocal and constraining.1 Enfolded semiosis is the semiosis of semiosis. For instance, eusemiosis is an enfolded semiosis, while protosemiosis is an elementary semiosis (in terms of Sharov & Vehkavaara, 2015). Habit is a repetition of established sign relations. Habit is not the same as sequential semiosis. Sequential semiosis is continuous, while habit reappears after sometimes a long period of absence, as evoked by the appropriate context. Habit is not fully automatic, since sign relations are never completely automatic, by definition. However, the habit can transform into an automatic mechanical process, with which it loses its meaning-making capacity. As a result, the habit may turn into a deterministic code (see Kull, 2020). Umwelt is the semiotic space of an agent, the field of meaning. Sign and meaning cannot be outside of an umwelt. Moreover, sign in the case of eusemiosis is never alone. There are always at least something two to be distinguished in the umwelt,2 two (or usually many more) possibilities between which the association and choice take place. Semiosis both presupposes and creates umwelt. Umwelt is the context, and there cannot be meaning without a context. Therefore, semiotic translation always presupposes umwelt. Umwelt is both momentary and consecutive. Momentary umwelt is the space of momentary semiosis – the semiotic field within the subjective present. Consecutive umwelt is the space of behavior in the continuous and consecutive subjective time. Interpretation is the formation of a sign relation. Interpretation is also the transformation of sign(s) into (an)other sign(s), or the generation of new sign(s) on the basis of other sign(s); this is a general process that occurs in any semiosis. As stated by Fernández (2012, p. 136): In biosemiotics – in contrast to anthroposemiotics – the term ‘interpretation’ [...] should not refer to an agent’s subjective action. Instead, it should refer to the exertion of that peculiar kind of action (semiosis) that the sign itself performs to generate an interpretant. Interpretation is the fundamental semiotic process, which means that interpretation always has alternative possibilities. Interpretation results in interpretant. Thus interpretation is meant very generally, which comes from the Peircean approach to meaning-making. Interpretation is a relation-creating in which structure-preserving may occur but is not necessary. This means, there may be no structural similarity between the aspects of semiosis, or between relata – between 79

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representamen and interpretant, or between object and interpretant, or between representamen and object, or between signs that become related in case of a more complex semiosis. Interpretation is a necessary process in semiosis, it is where choice takes place. The distinction between semiosis and its sequence implies also the distinction between interpretation as a momentary act within semiosis and a sequential interpretation. Translation is a mediated code-based or habit-based transformation of sign(s) which creates a sensible correspondence between source and target pattern. We can use mapping as its synonym. The correspondence usually preserves at least some features of relational structure. The invariant features imply an opportunity for evaluation of the translation in terms of quality or adequacy of the mapping, or for the introduction of some measures characterizing the aspects by which the structure (possibly including the context) is conveyed and transferred. Given the widespread application of the term ‘translation’ for certain processes that do not presume semantics or are carried on by machines, we distinguish between semiotic translation and mechanic translation. Mechanic translation (and its version machine translation) is an algorithmic translation, a transformation based on deterministic or stochastic algorithms. Mechanic translation is different from semiotic translation as no meaning and semiosis are involved in the process of mechanic translation itself. Mechanic translation like any other translation is a code process, and since codes are usually of semiotic origin, we should not forget to include mechanic translation also in the framework of semiotics. Since mechanic translation is not semiosis, it does not include interpretation, it also does not deal with signs but their mechanical substitutes. Mechanic translation is a transformation of patterns without dealing with signs. However, together with human users, mechanic translation turns into a means of semiotic translation. Semiotic translation (or creative translation) is a form of interpretation, and accordingly, of semiosis.3 Semiotic translation is always simultaneous translation, in the sense that a piece of the source text and a piece of target text necessarily coexist in the translator’s subjective present. While there may be interpretation without any piece of structural or relational correspondence between representamen or object and interpretant as we see in the random or completely arbitrary interpretation, in the case of the interpretation which we call semiotic translation such correspondence is necessary. This means we define semiotic translation as the interpretation for which an evaluation makes sense, as it, for instance, carries some (may be minimal) structural or relational identity between source and target (see Figure 4.1). Thus semiotic translation is an interpretation which requires a certain identity. As also Susan Petrilli (2014: 195) formulates: ‘The same sign is always the same other, for in order to become this sign here, in order to be itself and continue being so, it must become other in intersign interpretation processes, or in translation.’ We can also define ‘translation by an agent’ as ‘evaluative interpretation,’ including on the level of the cell and between the various internal systems of the body. Semiotic translation necessarily presupposes semiosis, while mechanic or non-semiotic translation does not include meaning-making.4 However, semiotic translation can be modeled by mechanic translation, in which case the result of the translation may be very similar (while the process is essentially different). Also, mechanic translation is commonly a product of or preceded by semiotic translation. For instance, machine translation uses databases for training the translator, where the formation of these databases included semiotic processes as a human activity. Another example of the origin of mechanic translation is an ultimate state of habituation, in which semiotic relation has completely lost its ambiguity or freedom and turned from a semiotic relation into a deterministic relationship with a deterministic code. 80

Biosemiotic approaches interpreta on, semiosis

non-semiosis mechanic transla on

random or non-transla onal interpreta on

semio c transla on

elementary interpreta on, differen a on

Figure 4.1

upper transla onal threshold transla on lower transla onal threshold

Relationship between interpretation and translation.

Translatability applies to signs. However, translatability may not be a general feature of signs. For instance, qualisigns are non-translatable: as Nöth (2022a) argues, following Peirce, one can translate emotions but not feelings (see about this in the Section “Corollaries and examples”). Communication, if it is defined as information exchange, should also be divided into mechanic communication which is based on deterministic codes or algorithms (like communication between computers, or the exchange of chemical ‘signals’ in systems without semiosis), and semiotic communication which requires some freedom and meaning-making (like much of communication between and within living beings). Information in mechanic communication can precisely be measured in bits, whereas information in semiotic communication is semantic.

The lower and upper thresholds of semiotic translation Based on the descriptions above, we conclude that semiotic translation is a more specific process than semiosis, 5 while mechanic translation is not semiosis. However, the mechanic translation in machines is designed by human semiosis, and the mechanic translation in organisms was probably a product of earlier semiotic processes that took place during the formation of the code. Although it is also possible that in the case of some organic mechanic translation (like genetic code or signal transduction) the translation has no semiosic origin (more about this is discussed in the next section). Drawing a line between semiotic and mechanic translation is sometimes difficult, because translation may be (and often is) habitual, and habit may be almost mechanic. Habit and machine translation can be very similar, so similar that the Turing test does not distinguish between them. However, this does not make them the same. A potential for free choice is a necessary characteristic of habit, and this distinguishes habitual transfer from mechanic transfer. The latter has no freedom. In the case of close-to-mechanic habit, the opportunity for choice may be very minimal. A real ‘conundrum of biocommunication’ appears due to imprecise definitions of fundamental semiotic terms. Thus we should try to be clear in our terms and assumptions. 81

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In order to translate meaning, there should be an agent for whom both the source sign and the target sign are simultaneously accessible, so that it can put these into a correspondence. In the case of complex enough semiosis, both representamen and interpretant can be separate signs, which means that semiosis may indeed carry out the translation. In the case of elementary semiosis, however, representamen and interpretant are just aspects of semiosis and not yet signs, which means that their relation is not yet considered translation. For instance, in a simple functional circle of a protist which recognizes a compound as what can be assimilated, the perception and action may not be different signs, and therefore it is not translation. This (at least partly) explains why some semioticians equate semiosis (which is rather association) and translation, or accept these as co-extensive, while for some others semiotic translation is seen as derivative of complex enough semiosis.6 For instance, according to Eco (2001), translation is a species of interpretation. However, Eco almost does not delve into strictly biological examples in his analysis. Nevertheless, that is he who formulated the difficult problem of lower semiotic threshold, stressing that stereochemical correspondence is not a code-relation, thus not semiotic (Eco, 1976; Rodríguez Higuera & Kull, 2017). Per Aage Brandt (2020, p. 147) describes a minimal model of translation as a move from one signifier to other, while the signified stays the same. In a model that is closer to reality, the signified does not stay just the same. While obviously, the signified still keeps some contextual identity within this process, and this may be enough for transferring a piece of meaning. It is possible to interpret Peirce’s model of semiosis in an analogical way (cf Figure 4.2): representamen (as the first signifier, A) transfers into interpretant (as the second signifier, B), while the object (the signified, C) remains the same. Indeed, not so far from his formulation: ’a sign is something, A, which brings something, B, its interpretant sign determined or created by it, into the same sort of correspondence with something, C, its object, as that in which itself stands to C’ (Peirce, 1976 [1902], pp. 20–21). A contradiction here is clearly uncovered. If signifiers or representamen are themselves signs, then translation may take place between signs, as it is commonly accepted. But in a minimal model of sign, signifiers or representamen are only necessary aspects or parts of a sign, themselves not being signs. In the latter case, the translation would be an intrasign phenomenon. In other words, if Peirce sometimes says that an interpretant is a translation of the sign interpreted (cf Short, 2003, p. 223), then it can certainly be true for complex signs (for enfolded semiosis), while it is not true for elementary signs (as qualisigns or tones). Peirce’s formulation holds if it is not taken as universal. Brandt does not see the Saussurean model of translation to be applicable to animals other than humans. On the contrary, the Peircean model of semiosis has found its applicability widely in other species. Could there exist a test allowing us to choose between these conclusions and to discover the lower threshold of translation as such? There are at least some conditions that add more light. Semiosis requires umwelt (or creates it). In order to do any operation with two signs, these should be available in a momentary umwelt, in the subjective present. That is what distinguishes the semiotic model from simpler rather mechanical sequential models. There cannot be a sign without its momentary surrounding. (The latter can be identified with the field of possibilities as firstness in the Peircean model.) And the sign is never single in the present. Semiotic translation has to take place in the momentary umwelt (Figure 4.2). Source sign A and target sign B exist simultaneously during the translation, while there can be a direction of translation detectable. 82

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U A

C B

Figure 4.2 Translation – formation of new relation (B–C) in a cloud-like umwelt or semiosic landscape (U). Here the relation A–C is translated into the relation B–C. A necessary condition for semiotic translation is the co-presence of the relations shown. See the text for an explanation.

We should also point to the process of emergence or brightening up of signs in the umwelt. This process can be compared or analogized with a phenomenon of primordial attention which takes place in the heterogenous field of possibilities, in the umwelt as the semiosic landscape. Such process should precede the establishment of new relations, thus to translation, and accordingly can be terminologically distinguished. This is unfolding, or rather the formation of a sign through which the relation becomes operative. Until the test for the existence of umwelt is unavailable, we cannot precisely position the lower threshold. Therefore the problem of the necessary complexity of the organic system that can carry semiotic translation remains open. There are although additional criteria for the minimal translation. We define translation as the kind of interpretation in which an error can be made, at least potentially. Translation requires the potentiality of translating wrongly. In the case of simple interpretation – just associating something in umwelt – an error-making is impossible. A single act of elementary semiosis is insufficient for the emergence of the quality of error. An error can be made in case of identification – when identifying wrongly. The relation of identification – for instance, recognition – accordingly, presupposes double relation. Here at last we arrive at a criterium of sign identity, which is also a condition for translation: identity is achieved via reciprocal interpretation. Interpretation can be one-way, and semiotic translation is a two-way process. Semiotic translation is a double interpretation. Otherwise, no valuation, no comparison or check of the correctness of the process is possible. In other words, semiotic translation is an interpretation that can potentially be wrong, i.e., which can be done better or worse, i.e., for which such an assessment makes sense. There is a lower threshold of translation, below which the choices in interpretation do not have criteria – as for instance in the case of qualisigns which mark a difference as such and thus mistake-making does not apply. And there is an upper threshold of translation, beyond which the comparison of target and source text in terms of erring is irrelevant because the aim of interpretation was not translation. Needless to add, the boundaries between translational and non-translational interpretations are blurred – there are threshold zones, not sharp thresholds. 83

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Corollaries and examples In this section, we briefly analyze some biological examples in terms of translation. Genetic code, as the term is used in biology and molecular genetics, is based on the translation (commonly termed so in biology) of mRNA sequence (of nucleotides) to protein sequence (of amino acids).7 In this process, genes are translated into proteins, many of which may work as enzymes. Here the term translation corresponds precisely to its general definition as given above: this is a mediated, code-based process. Another molecular genetic process in cells – termed transcription in cellular biology (building a sequence of RNA on the basis of a sequence of DNA) – is not a translation in the semiotic sense as defined above.8 This is because it is not mediated by a code; the new sequence of RNA is built purely on the basis of direct stereochemical correspondence between nucleotides. It requires a catalyst, but chemical catalysis only increases the rate of the process, it does not determine the correspondence between nucleotides of DNA and RNA. Similarly, DNA replication (building a new DNA sequence on the basis of another DNA sequence) is not a translation for the same reason. There is still a question of whether the cellular translation process is a semiotic translation or is it a mechanic translation. As said, it is certainly a translation. As much as it does not include a true choice process, we should conclude that it is a mechanic translation. Contemporary knowledge about the origin of genetic code also tends to conclude that its evolution has not been mechanization of a habit, but genetic code is rather a product of random transformations – which implies that genetic code, however a true code, has probably no semiotic origin. Signal transduction can be seen as the translation of the outside into the inside of the cell. It is based on a membrane enzyme that reacts to (‘recognizes’) certain changes outside the cell and as a result transfers it into a specific change, often into a cascade of processes, inside the cell. This is a code process since the correspondence between the changes outside and inside are established independently from the physical nature of these processes – these depend instead on the structure of the membrane enzyme, and there is an open number of types of these enzymes. Signal transduction being a translation belongs most probably to mechanic translation because it is too simple in order to include the process of semiosis. Another example is the interpretation of the genome by an organism. It has been stated in biology very often that the genotype-phenotype relationship is that of translation: genotype can be translated into phenotype or some of its features (e.g., Manning & Cooper, 2017; Pothukuchi et al., 2019; etc.). However, this process is viewed and described in radically different ways if to compare the genocentric and the biosemiotic perspectives. According to the genocentric view, the genome is what mostly determines the phenotype by the mechanic translation of genetic information into an organism’s processes and form. Biosemioticians have criticized such understanding and demonstrated that an organism is building itself by active interpretation of its genome, i.e. by a semiotic translation of genotype to phenotype (e.g., Hoffmeyer, 1996), or genotype to envirotype (Hoffmeyer, 1997, p. 370).9 Indeed, there exist several ways of how an organism can read its genome, in the sense that the genome expression pattern of one and the same organism as well as between genetically identical organisms varies. For instance, one and the same genome is interpreted differently in the cells of different tissues of the same organism, which is why these tissues are different. Identifying such a reading of genome as semiosis, one can speak about endosemiosis as semiosis in the body, and accordingly – endotranslation. This is why we may describe a living being as a ‘self-reading text.’ 84

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If the reading of the genome by an organism is translation, then an obvious question arises whether heredity as such is translation. If identifying heredity with translation, a restriction in the concept of heredity will be required. Because heredity which is understood as based on replication, i.e. copying, is not a translation, while heredity if understood or based on interpretation, or on rebuilding via a code, or on imitation, is identifiable with translation (Kull, 2000). The examples above specify this distinction. Recognition of images in perception is somewhat analogical to the example of the interpretation of genome by a cell as analyzed above. If it works as active reading in which mistaking is possible, then it corresponds to the criteria of semiotic translation. If, however, it works on the basis of the algorithmic mechanism of artificial neural nets, then we should identify it as mechanic translation. Perceptual recognition in animal behavior probably corresponds to semiotic translation.10 For instance, consider the recognition of a branch by a bird as suitable for landing. It seems obvious that such recognition requires a model provided by a bird’s memory. Application of this model image allows almost always correct identification, however, the possibility to fail is not excluded. Imitation as it occurs in many vertebrate animals in their social behavior is a process that corresponds very well with the conditions for semiotic translation. Imitation requires that the source (what becomes imitated) is recognized, and then the similar movement is rebuilt with a reference to the features of the source’s form.11 That is not only a recognition or a reference, but making other, other that is similar to the original. Relation that is based on imitation can be described as a particular type of sign relation, called emon. Emonic relation is translational because it can fail. This is in the sense that an emergence of a simple iconic relation or a simple indexical relation may not be a translation (as far as they do not require a test or valuing), while an emergence of an emon (as a sign that requires the capacity of imitation, i.e. of imitational learning) is semiotic translation. Imitation is known almost only from vertebrate animals. It seems to correspond to the existence of emotional states. Which means that we can speak about the biotranslation of emotional states as related to emonic signs. An example of emonic relation is empathy. It does not require symbolic reference and is thus accessible to many vertebrate animals. When translation takes place in animal communication, we can speak about zootranslation. For instance, if through imitation also a function or emotional state is carried over in animal social imitation, it serves as a good example of zootranslation. There are still some examples of imitation which hardly belong under translation because they can be valued exclusively by an external observer. For instance, it is debatable whether the imitation of surrounding sounds in the song of Sturnus vulgaris is indeed intentional (then translational) or happens by chance (then non-translational). It is an interesting question whether feelings and emotions as relations are also translations. For instance, when the pain as interpretant emerges in case of irritation of a receptor, it is a simple interpretation, but not a translation, because pain and irritation may not have any structural or functional correspondence. However, in many cases, there can be some correspondence. First, pain may be located, and the locus of the pain may be related to the locus of irritation. Also, the intensity of pain may have some correspondence with the parameters of irritation, like the size of the wound. In these cases, it is relevant to speak about pain relation as translation. Feelings and emotions can be distinguished using semiotic criteria. Winfried Nöth (2022b) writes about this: ‘The feeling embodied in the sinsign of an emotion is a qualisign. Hence, emotions are nonverbal legisigns insofar as they are habits of feeling and action.’ Emotions 85

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are expressions, while feelings are impressions and accordingly much simpler. Nöth adds: ‘Feelings are not signs of emotions, but emotions are signs of feelings.’ Feelings are qualia, qualisigns or tones (in Peirce’s terms). Qualia are personal and cannot be expressed. Since they cannot be expressed, they are not translatable. Translation processes in non-humans are non-verbal. These may include an image-toimage translation. In the human case, an example of image-to-image translation is the drawing of some object. In animals, imitation of forms of movement is also image-to-image translation. The most common form of non-verbal translation is the translation of perceived forms into movement, which is image-to-action translation. Translation of perception into action is a characteristic feature of functional circles as described by Jakob von Uexküll. Perceptionaction relation corresponds to translation because it is mediated and based on code relation. An important case is a translation of an image into movement. Consider a stairway in the park. A walker who steps along the stairway translates the spatial rhythm of stairs into the movement of the body. The walker, i.e. the translator, can be a human, or for instance a dog, whose interpretation of the rhythm of stairs may be carried out in various degrees. An ant, who is climbing along the same stairway, cannot do such translation, because the ant cannot grasp the rhythm of stairs (which is too large for an ant to integrate into perception). As seen from the given examples in this section, most of these describe translation in the organism and not between organisms, i.e. usually related to autocommunication and not so often to communication between organisms. Accordingly, we may speak about autotranslation as an aspect of autocommunication. This is not limited to biosemiotics. Semiotic translation is a process that requires umwelt and is also taking place within umwelt (note that umwelt by definition includes the signs relations of both perception and action). In order for a translation to take place, both sides of translation (source and target) must be simultaneously present – and this is only possible within an umwelt. Consequently, any semiotic translation is first of all autotranslation. In addition to the analysis of animal communication, a biosemiotic perspective is also required in translating animal messaging into human language. This, again, exists both in the form of mechanic translation, if it is built on using artificial intelligence (based on machine learning, e.g. apps that translate a pet’s sonification into a verbal characteristic of its emotional state), and in the form of semiotic translation, if carried on by humans. Translation of animal messaging into human language provides a particular challenge since this is a translation from a sign system without symbolic reference into a language in which symbolic reference is (almost) unavoidable (cf. Warren, 2016; Leatherland, 2020). For an illustration of this problem, let us use an example of representing (through translating) a cat’s call in human language. Could not we translate a cat’s call using an onomatopoetic word meow? It seems at first obvious and simple, but in this case, we assume that the cat’s call is a word. Indeed, ‘meow’ is a word (and not itself a cat’s call) that belongs to a particular human language (English language; while ‘mjäu’ in Estonian). If expressing a cat’s sign by a word, we strongly anthropomorphize – which is not what a good translation should do. Cats are not using words. Word is an element of (human) language, and cannot exist outside of language. Importantly, cat’s call is a sign, but a sign that is not word. I.e., the question is not how to express in the human language the sound made by a cat, but the sign expressed by a cat. And since the cat’s signs are not words, the problem is how to translate signs that are not words, into a language.12 With meow, there is also another difficulty. If we use the word meow for the expression of the sound of the cat’s call, then this may not be a translation, because various sounds, e.g., of 86

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wind, of sea waves, of a breaking twig, of washing machine and of the train, can be expressed similarly, using certain onomatopoetic words, and it is clear that this is not a translation from the sign system of wind, or sea, or machines that make us do so. Only living systems may use signs (and everybody who uses signs does it within its sign system). In the case of the sound of wind, these are we, humans as interpreters who may turn the sound into a sign. In the case of a cat’s sound, it is already a sign – since cat itself can make and interpret signs. It is helpful to observe that cat’s call is evidently holophrastic, and so it is close to interjections. Also – ‘meow!’ in a text is sometimes identified as interjection. Interjections have been viewed as primary language elements, originating in human prehistory. Moreover, interjections are used by humans as a particular language serving to communicate with other species (in particular, used in ‘dialogues’ with domestic animals) and with human (newborn) babies. Thus human language includes layers that are animal ones. Human language includes signs that are not really words. Accordingly, the question of translation of a cat’s call is a version of the question of translation of our own animal signs into our language (an attempt at this task has been a part of Sigmund Freud’s work).13 Concluding this example, we may distinguish between several ways of how to translate the cat’s call: (a) ‘meow’ – translation as formal correspondence, onomatopoietic; (b) ‘pleasure’ – translation as semantic correspondence; (c) ‘mmm’ – another way of semantic correspondence, using interjection; (d) ‘that there’ – using pronouns; (e) ‘cat’s call’ – using a common description with words; (f ) ‘cat’s sign for relating X with Y’ – using a scientific description. Finally, it may be mentioned that in translational medicine (see, e.g., the Journal of ­Translational Medicine), the transplantation of organs from animal to human is sometimes also called ‘translation.’ Such terminology may include interspecies translation of pieces of the genome. The movement of something (be it a living being or text) from one communicative environment to another seemingly does not meet the conditions for translation as it is defined above. However, if it is a transfer of knowledge from one communicative system to another (and this usage is common in translational medicine), it appears to be a translation in a proper sense.

Some earlier work on biosemiotics of translation The conceptual apparatus and methods developed in classical comparative anatomy, comparative morphology and comparative physiology, the methods and theoretical basis for mapping and analysis of similarities between organic forms, in particular the approach by Richard Owen (see Boyden, 1943), is a remarkable resource once understood as a take in biotranslation. Both the concepts of homology and analogy are applicable in semiotic translation, since these specify the types of relational similarity.14 This was pointed out already by Victoria Welby (see Petrilli, 2007, p. 23). A pioneer of biosemiotics Jakob von Uexküll wrote about translation in the cognitive act (Uexküll, 1926, p. 28, our emphasis): We employ impulse-sequences all the time, and yet they remain concealed, like the impulses to our larynx when we sing; of these we become conscious only when they are translated into sounds, either in reality or in our imagination. [...] What is so tantalising is that we formed the melodies from the impulse-sequences themselves. Erwin Schrödinger (1944) was among the first who used the term ‘code’ for the genetic process. Georgij Gamow (1954) applied the code concept to the inner working of biological 87

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cells and started to use the term ‘translation’ for protein synthesis. It took another decade until the genetic code (as the correspondence between the structures of gene and protein) was described in the 1960s, and even more until the mechanism of protein synthesis based on the sequential pattern of RNA was discovered. Soon after, from the side of linguistics and semiotics, Roman Jakobson (1971, p. 682) paid attention to the analogy between genetic and linguistic translation. However, he also mentioned that ‘the transition from “zoosemiotic” to human speech is a huge qualitative leap, in contradiction to the outdated behaviorist creed that the “language” of animals differs from men’s language in degree but not in kind’ ( Jakobson, 1971, p. 673). This view was shared by Thomas Sebeok who did not allow to use the term ‘language’ for animal (i.e. non-human) sign systems. Nevertheless, the applicability of the concept of translation in non-human communication was not denied, although seemingly with the condition that ‘translation involves two equivalent messages in two different codes’ ( Jakobson, 1959, p. 233). Jakobson’s broadest type of translation – transmutation or intersemiotic translation – was defined as the ‘interpretation of verbal signs by means of signs of nonverbal sign systems’ ( Jakobson, 1959, p. 233) and thus does not apply in the cases where there are no verbal signs (like in intracellular or animal communication). Taking into account the difference in complexity of semiosis between the agents, we distinguished between biotranslation (or protranslation) and logotranslation (or eutranslation), including into the latter only such translation that can transfer symbolic reference (Kull & Torop, 2003, p. 316; Marais & Kull, 2016, p. 175–176).15 Petrilli (2014, p. 196) uses the same classification, just preferring the term ‘prototranslation’ to our ‘protranslation.’ We characterized biotranslation as communication between umwelten (Kull & Torop, 2000), but the translation process takes place also within an umwelt. Modeling and mapping being kinds of translation also occur widely in the prelinguistic realm. Petrilli (2016, §17) concurs when she writes: “Modeling” and “communication” indicate two fundamental types of semiosis and both function in terms of translation, and this is because in both cases it is always a question of relations among signs. Translation here occurs in two senses, according to circumstances: from modeling to communication and from communication to modeling [...]. In other words, we could speak of translational processes both at the phylogenetic level (relation between species and individual) and at the ontogenetic level (all that which concerns the life of the single individual in his relations with the environment and with other individuals of the same or different species). Jesper Hoffmeyer (2003) uses the term ‘natural translation.’ He derives this idea from his and Claus Emmeche’s concept of code duality – from the co-work of digital and analog codes as coexisting and alternating in an organism’s life cycle – which always includes reproduction based on digital information transfer and ontogenesis based on analog information transfer. So Hoffmeyer defines ‘the scene of natural translation: The perpetual transmission down through generations of ontogenetic messages shuffled back and forth between digital and analog codes’ (Hoffmeyer, 2003 p. 334). Then he generalizes: if by natural translation we understand any process whereby a potential message is made accessible to a natural system that would not otherwise be capable of making sense of this message, then nature certainly has developed many other kinds of translation processes at different scales. 88

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[...] ‘by individual entities at many levels from single cells to organisms or even populations and perhaps ecosystems’ (Hoffmeyer, 2003, p. 335, 329). This does not require intentionality, as he emphasizes (Hoffmeyer, 2003, p. 329). And he concludes: ‘Each new habit, whether based on learning or genetic specification, exposes the organisms to new challenges either directly or indirectly through the unending chain of translations’ (Hoffmeyer, 2003, p. 337). He also brings out an important feature of the ‘genotype-environtype’ (Hoffmeyer, 2003, p. 229) natural translation: it can be faked – for instance by viruses or by an experimental setting, etc. (Hoffmeyer, 2003, p. 335). Alexei Sharov (2020, p. 298) provides a general definition: ‘Translation means a semiotic process in which meanings are transferred or transformed between different sign systems.’ Although it depends on how to define meaning as well as sign system at the elementary level. Sharov adds: Translation of signs and messages is performed by agents of each level, and it is aimed at regulating all living functions, such as construction, repair, recruiting, or reprogramming of themselves, their subagents, and/or external agents. Thus, biological translation is a goal-directed process targeted at maintaining the identity of living agents at all levels. (Sharov, 2020, p. 298) The existence of goal-directedness of translation in all these levels is discussable, at least in the light of Hoffmeyer’s account above. Providing some examples, Sharov speaks about immune translation, in which the shape of antigens is translated into the shape of antibodies. This is a multi-step process: ‘In contrast to code-based protein synthesis and scaffold-based embryo development, immune translation is based on random trials and errors’ (Sharov, 2023, p. 73). One can also speak about neural translation: ‘The passage of signals through a synapse from one neuron to another is the lowest-level process of neural translation’; and further, on translation at the level of behavior: ‘The simplest behaviours are reflexes that translate stimuli into specific activities’ (Sharov, 2023, p. 74). Translation Studies that search for a link with neurobiology (García, 2019; Tymoczko, 2021) evidently cannot make it without grounding it in biosemiotics although neurobiology of animal translation has not yet come to focus. Remarkable attempts to include a biosemiotic perspective in Translation Studies has been taken by Kobus Marais (Marais, 2017, 2019; see also reviews by Cronin, 2020; Zanoletti, 2021; Zhao & Zhou, 2021). Together with other recent works in this direction, we can speak about a biosemiotic turn in Translation Studies (see Kwok, 2022, p. 7238). The role of Translation Studies in semiotic ecology should also be noted. Ecosemiotics stems from biosemiotics. Michael Cronin’s book (Cronin, 2017) about eco-translation is in a large part about ecological aspects of translation and translating ecological issues, however in the chapter ‘Translating animals’ he also speaks about inter-species translation where the communicators are non-humans.16 Cronin coins the term ‘tradosphere,’ proposing to speak about the sphere of translation: By tradosphere we mean the sum of all translation systems on the planet, all the ways in which information circulates between living and non-living organisms and is translated into a language or a code that can be processed or understood by the receiving entity. (Cronin, 2017, p. 71)

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Concluding remarks Together with the improvement of understanding of prelinguistic semiotic processes and the development of biosemiotics, the analysis of the applicability of concepts from anthroposemiotics to semiotic phenomena in other species became a remarkable topic of research. In this regard, we provided a review of the concept of translation as used in biosemiotics. Semiotics as a skill is the proficiency to translate – not only between languages, but also between different media, cultures, or species, between very different umwelten and sign systems. The attempts to translate those texts that have not been created by human culture belong to the field of biosemiotics. This includes interspecies translation, including the representation in human propositional language of nonverbal meaning-making in animal sign systems. Understanding the meaning-making and umwelten of other organisms is possible via the tools of biosemiotic translation. The widely used term ‘translation’ in biology has mainly referred to the ribosomal synthesis of proteins, meant as the translation of genes into enzymes, or more generally, genotype into phenotype. Other biological usages of the term ‘translation’ (until the end of the twentieth century) were rather occasional and mostly did not provide any models or classifications that could be used for developing a theory of translation. However, the following decades have shown a rather rapid growth in biosemiotics that introduced a biosemiotic turn in Translation Studies. We conclude: Empirical biosemiotics requires operational concepts. Operationally defined typology of non-linguistic signs – together with a whole set of biosemiotic concepts – is what has to be developed in a practical research that includes both theoretical and empirical work. Once having these tools, a biosemiotician can turn into a translator – making professional translations from the sign systems of other species into the human languages. This is a real challenge, since these signs systems are so very different from human ones. But this is the way to understand other species. (Magnus & Tønnessen, 2010, p. 89–90)

Acknowledgements I thank Kobus Marais and Reine Meylaerts for the initiation of this chapter and for their helpful comments, and my friends in the International Society for Biosemiotic Studies and in the Department of Semiotics of the University of Tartu for insightful discussions. This research was supported by the grant PRG314.

Notes 1 I see in the enfolded semiosis an analogy with implicate order and in the unfolded semiosis an analogy with explicate order, as described by David Bohm, however separating semiosis from the phenomena at the quantum level. See also Koch (1991). 2 The most elementary umwelt (in case of elementary semiosis) consists just of an elementary difference an agent is making. 3 Semiotic translation as defined here is more general than the concept of semio-translation as used by Dinda Gorlée (2015), meaning by it the work of a human translator who is aware of semiosis. 4 Semiotic translation was occasionally called ‘biotranslation,’ in order to just oppose it to machine translation (e.g., Breyel & Grass, 2020). In our usage, biotranslation is defined as any pre-linguistic translation carried on by living beings, including all forms of translation between non-human organisms. 90

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6 See also a discussion in Marais and Kull (2016, pp. 181–182). 7 The process by which proteins, after translation carried out by ribosomes, become folded, transported and modified, is termed by Sharov (2023, p. 68) as ‘extended translation’. 8 Note that in contrary to molecular transcription, transcription of text by humans belongs to translation in semiotic sense, since it is based on mediation including recognition and action by an agent. 9 ‘The evolutionarily relevant fitness concept, semiotic fitness, should ideally measure the semiotic competence or success of natural systems in managing the genotype-envirotype translation processes’ (Hoffmeyer, 1997, p. 370). See Maran’s (2012, p. 147) comment on Hoffmeyer’s formulation, in which he emphasizes the general aspect of fitting in translation. 10 Millikan (2017, pp. 184–188) also considers perception to be translation, while not inference. 11 Thus we do not include here most forms of mimicry. On earlier research of animal imitation, see Galef (1988). 12 On contrasting words for animal sounds, see also Sealey (2019). 13 I thank Ekaterina Velmezova for comments on interjections. 14 It should be mentioned that the Darwinian redefinition of homology on the basis of common evolutionary origin largely destroyed the concept, as not noticing that relational identification has to precede the historical analysis. 15 As Yao and Zhang (2020) see it, in case of eutranslation, the protranslation is functioning on the level of context. 16 On some aspects of ecosemiotic translation, see also e.g. Sánchez Guevara and Cortés Zorrilla (2014), Moe (2018).

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Nöth, W. (2022a). Why Emotions Translate, but Feelings do not: Insights from Peirce. In S. Petrilli & M. Ji (Eds.), Exploring the Translatability of Emotions: Cross-cultural and Transdisciplinary Encounters (pp. 97–118). Cham: Palgrave MacMillan. Nöth, W. (2022b). Semiotic Conceptions of Emotion. In G. L. Schiewer, J. Altarriba & B. C. Ng (Eds.), Handbook on Language and Emotion. Berlin: De Gruyter. (In print). Peirce, C. S. (1976) [1902]. The New Elements of Mathematics by Charles S. Peirce: Volume 4: Mathematical Philosophy. (C. Eisele, Ed.) The Hague: Mouton Publishers. Petrilli, S. (2007). Translation, Interpretation and Common Meaning: Victoria Welby’s Significal ­Perspective. Traduction, Terminologie et Redaction, 20(1), 13–98. Petrilli, S. (2014). Sign Studies and Semioethics: Communication, Translation and Values. (Semiotics, Communication and Cognition 13.) Boston: De Gruyter Mouton. Petrilli, S. (2016). Translation Everywhere. Signata, 7, 23–56. Pothukuchi, P., Agliarulo, I., Russo, D., Rizzo, R., Russo, F., & Parashuraman, S. (2019). Translation of Genome to Glycome, Role of the Golgi Apparatus. FEBS Letters, 593(17), 2390–2411. Regattin, F. (2020). Biologiser la Traduction. Un cas D’évolution Convergente: Les Théories ­“Internes”. Atelier de traduction, 33/34, 125–140. Rodríguez Higuera, C. J., & Kull, K. (2017). The Biosemiotic Glossary Project: The Semiotic ­Threshold. Biosemiotics, 10(1), 109–126. Sánchez Guevara, G., & Cortés Zorrilla, J. (2014). Intersemiotic Translation from Rural/Biological to Urban/Sociocultural/Artistic; The Case of Maguey and other Cacti as Public/Urban Decorative Plants. Comunicación y Ciudadanía, 18(1 [86]), 421–434. Schrödinger, E. (1944). What Is Life? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sealey, A. (2019). Translation: A Biosemiotic/more-than-Human Perspective. Target, 31(3), 305–327. Sharov, A. (2020). Translation in Biology. In L. Lacková, C. J. Rodríguez Higuera & K. Kull (Eds.), Gatherings in Biosemiotics XX (pp. 298–299). (Tartu Semiotics Library 20). Tartu: University of Tartu Press. Sharov, A. (2023). Biology of Translation: The role of agents. In K. Marais (Ed.), Translation Beyond Translation Studies (pp. 63–79). London: Bloomsbury. Sharov, A., & Vehkavaara, T. (2015). Protosemiosis: Agency with Reduced Representation Capacity. Biosemiotics, 8(1), 103–123. Short, T. L. (2003). Peirce on Meaning and Translation. In S. Petrilli (Ed.), Translation Translation (pp. 217–231). Amsterdam: Rodopi. Sonesson, G. (2014). Translation and Other Acts of Meaning: In Between Cognitive Semiotics and Semiotics of Culture. Cognitive Semiotics, 7(2), 249–280. Tymoczko, M. (2021). Neuroscience and Translation. (Tartu Semiotics Library 21). Tartu: University of Tartu Press. Uexküll, J. (1926). Theoretical Biology. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company. Warren, M. J. (2016). “Kek kek”: Translating Birds in Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls. Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 38, 109–132. Wu, S. C. (2011). Autopoiesis and Interpretive Semiosis: Translation as a Biological Phenomenon. Biosemiotics, 4(3), 309–330. Yao, T., & Zhang, C. (2020). Breaking the Boundary of Semiotics: Translation Studies from the Perspective of the Tartu Semiotics School. Chinese Semiotic Studies, 16(2), 229–242. Zanoletti, M. (2021). Expanding Translation Studies: A (bio)Semiotic Approach. Punctum, 7(1), 181–191. Zhao, W., & Zhou, Z. (2021). Review of A (bio)Semiotic Theory of Translation: The Emergence of Social-Cultural Reality. Semiotica, 242, 249–254.

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5 Approaches to the sociology of knowledge Maud Gonne

Translation and knowledge We must explain why science – our surest example of sound knowledge – progresses as it does, and we must first find out how in fact it does progress. (Kuhn 1970, p. 20) Translation is a social practice. But what is meant by ‘social’ and by ‘practice’ may vary depending on whether one is dealing with the sociology of translation or with translation sociology.1 The former studies translation as a socially regulated (human) activity, whose products and agents (translation and translators) are conditioned by a social and historical context, whereas the latter embraces translation not only as an object of study but also as a (research) practice, a process constructing, (re)assembling and (re)connecting the social. The sociology of translation, mostly inspired by Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory, has been successfully applied to Translation Studies in the light of the so-called translator turn, which has shifted the attention previously directed to texts not only toward the translator’s agency and social position but also toward the circulation of (translated) texts and people across borders and within the global market (see, for instance, Heilbron & Sapiro, 2002; Gouanvic, 2005; Wolf & Fukari, 2007). In contrast, translation sociology, associated with authors such as Bruno Latour and Michel Callon, has been much less used in Translation Studies. It was nevertheless introduced in the field about fifteen years ago to acknowledge the materiality of translation networks (Buzelin, 2005, 2007). More recently, a few Translation Studies scholars have again put translation sociologists (among others, Latour) in the foreground in order to broaden the scope of translation toward interconnectedness (both human and non-human) in terms of complex development (Marais 2014, 2018), biosemiotics (Marais, 2019), spatiality (Simon, 2014, 2021), activism (Suchet, 2016) or ecotranslation (Cronin, 2017). The success of this interdisciplinary enterprise was accompanied by critiques that have pointed to the lack of analytical perspectives of such a method and to the loss of meaning of this kind of metaphorization: ‘if one can see anything as a translation or the result of translation – parks, churches, government organizations, etc. – does the concept retain any meaning? Does metaphorization have no limits?’ (Chesterman, 2020, p. 219). Indeed, as Anthony Pym points out, ‘once 94

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you decide that translation is a process rather than a product, you can find evidence of that process virtually everywhere’ (2014, p. 146). It is the sociological-philosophical background of translation sociology – which is nowadays accompanying Translation Studies toward a new paradigm (see Marais & Meylaerts in this volume) – that I would like to investigate. It is true that both the sociology of translation and translation sociology are not incompatible when it comes to empirical practices (see Buzelin’s ‘Unexpected Allies,’ 2005) but their premises are fundamentally different, as illustrated by the radical positions taken and expressed against ‘the other side’ (among others, Latour versus Bourdieu, and Michel Serres versus Gaston Bachelard). The fundamental point of contention might in fact be located in the translation(al) approach adopted by translation sociology. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), Thomas Kuhn’s account of the dynamics of scientific change, has introduced paradoxical thoughts in most scientific fields. Kuhn indeed claims that scientific knowledge is not cumulative but lost when one theory replaces another (Wray, 2011, p. 1). This does not mean that there is no scientific progress, but that it is not linear, and that the acceptance of a new theory constitutes a world change, a revolution. He further calls into question the validity of data to resolve scientific disputes, as well as the objectivity of scientists, who are rather uncritical with respect to the accepted theories (ibidem, pp. 1–2). Besides, Kuhn points out that the success of science (and the elimination of some theories to the benefit of others) depends on the social institutions and structures that are constitutive of modern science (ibidem, 208). This highly criticized break with past scientific views has forced sociologists of science to become more involved in investigating the cognitive dimension of knowledge production and to find new (epistemological) models better fitted to the new challenge, such as the translation(al) one. As a matter of fact, since the 1960s, translation has entered the field of the sociology of knowledge to bring new insights into the process of knowledge production, codification, and circulation. Interdisciplinary scholars and thinkers, at the crossroads of sociology, anthropology, and philosophy, such as Kuhn, Serres, Callon, Latour, Delanda, Povinelli or Deleuze and Guattari, have explicitly or implicitly extended a certain translation(al) model to other fields of knowledge than the textual one, participating in broadening the concept of (linguistic) translation toward an intersemiotic all-encompassing epistemological tool and ontological concept. From different angles (logic, literature, mathematics, and so on), such thinkers have interpreted the emergence and development of (scientific) knowledge as a socially unpredictable, ambiguous, and non-binary process relying on a variety of factors, among others of political, cultural, historical, and economic nature. In doing so, they have taken a stand against positivism, accused of reducing, cutting, and predetermining the complexity of the social to fixed categories, to little parts with no view on wholes. For science to become operational, it was essential to divide the labor. To split it up according to a rational production line, of conditions and complexity. The specialists set about producing like a factory: receiving information, orders and prepared products from upstream, delivering downstream the outcomes to have the finishing touches put on, the frames to fill. […] The workers got used to never looking outside their niche, to no longer understanding the work as a whole. (Serres, 1974/2011, p. 83) In this line of thought, translation appears not only as a (conceptual) object of study but also as a tool for epistemological analysis. This view challenges the traditional distinctions 95

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between the object of study and approach, but not only. As we will see, it also challenges most traditional binaries anchored in scientific disciplines: source versus target, micro versus macro, culture versus nature, human versus non-human, etc. Now, what brings translation and knowledge together? How does the concept of translation shed new light on knowledge? What aspects of translation – in its traditional interlingual, but also intralingual and intersemiotic sense ( Jakobson, 1959/2013) – are worth transferring to the sociology of knowledge? In his stimulating account of the epistemological use of translation in Quinn’s, Serres’s, and Latour’s ‘sociology,’ Bernard Smette recognizes a similar opacity in knowledge production and interlingual translation process (2018, p. 3). Smette’s opacity refers to the subjective and unpredictable part of the translator’s choice between multiple options, without any objective solution. Like the production of knowledge, translation is an opaque process with unpredictable output. For him, what is ‘gained’ in translation (since in translation, something is gained and something is lost) is the production (or construction) of an invariant, i.e., what constitutes it (or comes to constitute it in various materializations) essentially (a certain meaning, form, intention, effect, etc.). If knowledge provides insight into the world and how it works, the process of translation can also be considered a process of knowledge where what is highlighted and constructed through multiple different translations is the meaning or sense of a text, i.e., its invariant. (Smette, 2018, p. 5; my translation) This allows us to better understand the importation of translation into the sociology of knowledge: what is gained in translation would be the comprehension of what is in a certain way ‘conserved across’ (invariant), through a transformative (variant) process. Invariance would thus emerge from variation. It should be noted that ‘emergence’ linked with ‘invariance’ seems quite different from other arguments developed below, among others, Delanda’s vision of emergent properties as not transcendent but contingent (Delanda, 2016, p. 12). In fact, Smette’s invariance (that he relates to Serre’s notion of structure and to Latour’s notion of circulating reference) also relies on contingency since it depends on the decision made by the translator of what is essential for her or him to preserve. In other words, the translation invariant is constructed rather than conserved: knowledge is the product of a contingent process of construction and transformation in which the subjectivity of the researcher intervenes in an irreducible way, that it, is the result of a practice which must not be confused with the discourse that science holds about itself. (Smette, 2018, p. 383; my translation) The invariant does not predate the translator’s decision, or the sociological analysis, but is constructed and selected alongside the translation or the knowledge process. The translation model imported into the field of sociology of knowledge is not limited to linguistic translation, nor to the idea of stable transport of one (source) text into another (target) text but includes in the first place the idea of transformation of any text, object, or agent (human and non-human) involved in a process wherein something is gained. In fact, to grasp the translational dimensions of knowledge, it is necessary to go beyond interlingual translation and embrace a variety of translational activities around and including translation ‘proper.’ In the subfield of translation history, these activities have been assembled under the umbrella concept of ‘transfer.’ Building not only on Even-Zohar’s ‘polysystems’ but also on Werner 96

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and Zimmermann’s ‘entangled history,’ Lieven D’hulst developed the concept of ‘assumed transfers’ to provide a ‘tool to identify and describe the forms, meanings and functions of a broad spectrum of exchange activities taking place both between and within culture’ (D’hulst, 2012, p. 150). This tool would not only do justice to the interaction and reciprocity of (cultural) exchanges and the changes they induce, but it would also take into account as many elements as possible (verbal or not) and include the presence of (human) mediators. While the transfer is largely applied to culture only, it could also become a powerful tool to examine relations (whatever their nature) in the field of knowledge(Gonne & Meylaerts, 2020, p. 11). For our purpose, the broader scope of intersemiotic transfer addresses the transformative relationship between objects and, as such, can bring novelty to the sociology of knowledge. It is already the case for the interdiscipline of Transferwissenschaft – interested in knowledge transfer, labeling, evaluation, and transformation – which ‘investigate[s] the conditions, principles, forms and strategies as well as problems and chances of creating meta-knowledge about knowledge for the purpose of making (specialized) knowledge available in an unrestricted manner to all people who might be interested in it’ (Antos, 2001, p. 15; quoted in Göpferich, 2007, p. 28). In short, there are many convergences between translation and knowledge production processes. However, they are little known, little highlighted, and sometimes unintentionally traced. Interdisciplinary dialogue remains limited. Following Kobus Marais’s observation that ‘translation studies scholars will need to expand the anthropology angle in their methodological array in order to study the emergence of social, economic and political forms as they emerge’ (2018, pp. 296–297), this chapter aims to provide translation scholars with an assemblage of translation(al) theories and concepts from the sociology (or anthropology) of knowledge in order to allow for the more interdisciplinary (intentional) exchange and mutual comprehension. I do not claim to offer an exhaustive comparison of these (heterogeneous, maybe incommensurable) authors’ explicit or implicit interpretations and uses of translation, but I would like to make these authors speak at the same time, connect them, relate them, make routes, and try to translate them into something that, in the best of cases, will resemble an assemblage, and in the worst case, a juxtaposition. In Kuhn’s words: ‘acquiring a new [scientific, theoretical] language is not the same as translating it from one’s own. Success with the first does not imply success with the second’ (Kuhn, 1983, p. 673). The next three sections, entitled ‘Relocating the social,’ ‘Translating the social,’ and ‘Mapping the social’ will bring together a variety of social ontological and epistemological perspectives. The division operated between these three sections is, of course, arbitrary: as mentioned earlier, translation sociology blurs the boundaries between objects and methods. However, this articulation will demonstrate how, by redefining the social as a process, as something ‘in progress,’ this sociology puts translation at the center of its reflection and provides tools and methods to completely reconsider our relationship both to the world and to knowledge.

Relocating the social Like nature, society is a premature assemblage: it should be put ahead of us and not behind. (Latour, 2005, p. 171) In We Have Never Been Modern (1991/1993), French sociologist-anthropologist Latour states that the world is made up of hybrid objects, or ‘actors,’ that are constantly proliferating and that pertain to multiple domains: the political, the literary, the economic, the technical, the scientific, the religious, and so on. How can we understand these strange objects that invade the world? Do they belong to nature or culture? According to Latour, inspired by Serres’s 97

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philosophical work, the ‘modern’ critical discourse fails to account for the hybrid nature of these objects and prefers to split and separate them, to oppose them, thereby making, among other things, the distinction between human and non-human, microstructure and macrostructure, context and content, and, more generally, between nature and culture. This is what Latour calls the ‘Great Divide,’ which opposes and fixes objects instead of associating them and recognizing their heterogeneity, complexity, and multiple interactions. In short, the ‘Great Divide’ is what confuses the network (or translation) with criticism (or purification). Consequently, Latour concludes that ‘we have never been modern’: there is no real independence of knowledge from the social and the political, and the scientific discourse fails to account for these hybrid objects. These thoughts are an extension of Latour’s previous anthropological work in science studies. In Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts (1979), he investigated, together with Steve Woolgar, ‘science in the making,’ that is, the way in which ideas are ‘translated’ into artifacts that participate in technological innovation in society, describing scientific routine through the interaction between objects, individuals, and technical devices involved in laboratory practice in the presence of different factors (scientific and lucrative motives, financial resources, publication strategies, and so on). This anthropological approach, where translation appears as a knowledge tool, capable of describing processes of transformation at every stage of knowledge production (see for example Callon, 1995), would pave the way for the emergence of translation sociology, also called Actor-Network-Theory (or ANT), under the guidance of, among others, Callon, Latour, Madeleine Akrich, and John Law at the École nationale supérieure des mines de Paris. In Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (2005), Latour explains that the goal of ANT is ‘[…] to redefine the notion of social by going back to its original meaning and making it able to trace connections again.’ He wants to provide the social sciences with tools better adjusted to the task and ‘to scrutinize’ the content of ‘what is “assembled” under the umbrella of a society.’ It seems to him to be the only way to be faithful to the ‘old duties of sociology, this “science of the living together”’ (2005, pp. 1–2). These ‘old duties’ are opposed to Bourdieusian conceptions of the social. Latour argues that the social is not what explains (thus a social explanation of the world, as there are economic, religious or cultural explanations of the world) but what is explained by a process of assemblage, of translation. In other words, there is no all-encompassing social ‘standing there’ that serves to explain the world (economic, religious, cultural…), it is, on the contrary, the process of association of heterogeneous elements (of economic, religious, cultural… nature) that serves to explain the social. Connections are not ‘social’ by nature but create, through heterogeneous assemblages, an architecture of unpredictable relations that we understand as social. The actor-network does not refer to something that is there and vaguely shaped as a set of interconnected points, but to a chain of actions. Nothing exists outside of those chains of relationships, outside of this network of translations. The actor is a network, and the network is an actor, just as the researcher reassembling the actor-network is part of it. Thus, Latour does not define the social ‘as a special domain, a specific realm, or a particular sort of thing, but only as a very peculiar movement of re-association and reassembling’ (p. 7). And while epistemologists of social sciences have granted themselves the right to define the type of entities one had to deal with, ANT’s translation model does not define what the reassembled entities are, except maybe, through their relationships with other actors. Although he never refers to ANT, philosopher and architecture professor Delanda comes to similar sociological developments in his materialist social ontology, built on Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus (1980/1987). Delanda starts from Deleuze and Guattari’s 98

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simplest2 definition of assemblage (or agencement), which also involves the dimensions of heterogeneity and alliance: It is a multiplicity which is made up of many heterogeneous terms and which establishes liaisons, relations between them, across ages, sexes and reigns – different natures. Thus, the assemblage’s only unity is that of a co-functioning: it is a symbiosis, a “sympathy.” It is never filiations which are important, but alliances, alloys; these are not successions, lines of descent, but contagions, epidemics, the wind. (Deleuze, 1994, p. 163; quoted in Delanda, 2016, p. 1) For Delanda (2016, pp. 19–21), assemblages are fluid organizations with fully contingent historical identities made of heterogeneous components (a person, an organization, a city, a matter) that connect other assemblages or become component parts of larger assemblages (communities can form alliances). Take a book, we will not wonder what a book means but we will ask what it functions with, in connection with what other things it does or does not transmit intensities, in which other multiplicities its own are inserted and metamorphosed, and with what bodies without organs it makes its own converge. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987, p. 4) Deleuze and Guattari’s social ontology, which contains a plethora of neologisms and deviated terms, is in fact based on the metaphoric concept of rhizome, with its lines, ruptures and lines of flight generating a type of knowledge entirely different from that produced by the metaphor of the tree, on which the classical (Western) metaphysics is based. In A Thousand Plateaus, they argue that our thinking has been governed by the law of reflection and binary thinking, i.e., on an arborescence that pre-exists to the individual and objects, a hierarchical and linear conception. However, nature does not work that way: […] In nature, roots are taproots with a more multiple, lateral, and circular system of ramification, rather than a dichotomous one. Thought lags behind nature. […] Binary logic is the spiritual reality of the root-tree. Even a discipline as “advanced” as linguistics retains the root-tree as its fundamental image, and thus remains wedded to classical reflection (for example, Chomsky and his grammatical trees, which begin at a point S and proceed by dichotomy). This is as much as to say that this system of thought has never reached an understanding of multiplicity: in order to arrive at two following a spiritual method it must assume a strong principal unity. On the side of the object, it is no doubt possible, following the natural method, to go directly from One to three, four, or five, but only if there is a strong principal unity available, that of the pivotal taproot supporting the secondary roots. That doesn’t get us very far. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987, p. 5) With multiplicity, the rhizomatic metaphor thereby distances itself from unity and binarity. There is no multiplicity coming from unity, but multiplicity from the beginning: neither source nor target, only a middle. Just as the translation process is an in-between process, the rhizome is only alliances: A rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo. The tree is filiation, but the rhizome is alliance, uniquely alliance. 99

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The tree imposes the verb “to be” but the fabric of the rhizome is the conjunction, “and... and... and...” This conjunction carries enough force to shake and uproot the verb “to be.” Where are you going? Where are you coming from? What are you heading for? These are totally useless questions. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987, p. 25) The issue of multiplicity prompts Delanda to distinguish part-to-whole relationships of ‘interiority’ (intrinsic) and ‘exteriority’ (extrinsic). Relations of interiority connect parts and constitute the very identity of what is connected. For example, the mother’s identity cannot exist outside of the mutual relationship linking her to the child/ren: ‘if a relation constitutes the very identity of what it relates it cannot respect the heterogeneity of the components, but rather it tends to fuse them together into a homogeneous whole’ (Delanda, 2016, p. 2). Relations of exteriority (which represent the majority of relations) are contingent – the emergent properties are produced by the interaction – while relations of interiority are arbitrarily coded and organized. For Delanda (2011), Deleuze and Guattari’s social ontology is implicitly based on the principle of emergence. An assemblage possesses properties that its (human and non-human) components do not have. The properties of a whole, caused by the interaction between its parts, allow for the emergence of novel properties that cannot be reduced to the sum of its parts, and in which the parts retain their autonomy (relation of exteriority), ‘so that they can be detached from one whole and plugged into another one, entering in new interactions’ (Delanda, 2016, p. 10). Social wholes are thus ‘like interpersonal networks, or institutional organisation, that cannot be reduced to the persons that compose them, but that do not totalise them either, fusing them into a seamless whole in which their individuality is lost’ (p. 10). But the part-to-whole relationship does not stop here. New component parts come into being in a whole that has already constituted itself and whose emergent properties ‘constrain and enable its parts’ (Delanda, 2016, p. 17). In other words, assemblages emerge from the interactions between their parts, but once an assemblage is in place it immediately starts acting as a source of limitations and opportunities for its components (downward causality) […] wholes emerge in a bottom-up way, depending causally on their components, but they have a top-down influence on them. (p. 21) Assemblages are performed, gathered by constraints such as linguistic acts which create a social obligation. In Delanda’s words, then, […] we need to include in a realist ontology not only the processes that produce the identity of a given social whole when it is born, but also the processes that maintain its identity through time. And we must also include the downward causal influence that wholes, once constituted can exert on their parts. (2016, p. 18) Therefore, emergent properties relativize the opposition between micro and macro. The (translation) network designed by Michel Callon also puts this binarity into perspective: The notion of translation network suggests that it is not only the distinction between nature and society that is outdated, but that the conventional opposition between 100

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macro- and microanalysis (between global change and local action) is inappropriate […] Translation networks establish a continuum between these two extremes—extremes that in practice are never reached. (1995, pp. 48–49) For Callon, one should replace the notion of microstructures with the notion of locally framed interactions and substitute the notion of macrostructures for the notion of spaces connected by actants that ensure their framing (2006, p. 274).3 In other words, the interconnectedness of parts implies also constraints. In the field of anthropology, Povinelli also relocates the social, but this time in the shape of woven bags. In ‘Routes/Worlds’ (2011), she draws from Latour, Claude Levi-Strauss, and Peter Sloterdijk to develop an ‘anthropology of the otherwise’ to apprehend forms of life that are at odds with dominant, and dominating, modes of being: One can often tell when or where one of these forms of life [at odds with dominant forms of life] has emerged, because it typically produces an immunological response in the host mode of being. In other words, when a form of life emerges contrary to dominant modes of social being, the dominant mode experiences this form as inside and yet foreign to its body. For some, the dominant image of this mode of interior exteriority is the Mobius strip, for others the rhizome, and still others the parasite. But what if the dominant visual metaphor of the anthropology of the otherwise were a woven bag? (Povinelli, 2011, sp) Povinelli envisions social-cultural emergence within the framework of the gain-loss relationship (which also characterized the translation process), and especially of the gift economy, which relates to the intangible obligations implied by the debit-credit relationship (such as prestige, honor or responsibility). Before banks and currency, valuable things circulated as lines of credit. Their goal was to return to the sender with accumulated surplus value, but it also created moral obligations and social worlds emerging to control the further fabrication and movements of things (sp). Therefore, ‘every gift economy creates simultaneous surplus, excess, deficits, and abscesses in material and memory’ (sp). The prohibition against hoarding and the obligation to enter debt-credit relations is vital to the creation of self-reflexive folds that make social and cultural worlds possible. As mentioned above, Povinelli sees worlds as ‘woven bags,’ i.e., pockets that are never sealed but shaped and connected by networks of strings, or ‘routes.’ Thus, her concept of ‘embagination’ refers to ‘the creation of a flexible receptacle closed in all places except where it can be tied and untied […] this fold […] fabricates a world in which individuals, and competing worlds, attempt to dwell – to their advantage or disadvantage’ (2011, sp). The circulation of things between worlds and along routes implies juxtaposition, collapsing and, what is more, the emergence of life worlds. Finally, ‘things do not simply move. Routes figure space, they create worlds – and are figured by figurated space, by the world through which they move’ (sp). In other words, objects never travel alone but travel together with a set of other objects, values, and practices. Their exchange and circulation create prestige, hierarchy, and work. The things that circulate are diverse (material, affective, psychic, social, discursive) and are transfigured by the route. At the same time, the things transfigure the routes. What is interesting here is that Povinelli offers another conceptualization of the social, not as a rhizome, not as a network but as woven bags, whose content can be sealed and unsealed. This might be linked to Delanda’s claim that social wholes exist in various 101

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phases since they possess variable coefficients of territorialization (homogenization) and deterritorialization (heterogenization), orienting social wholes respectively toward strata (high degree of codification) and toward assemblages (low degree of codification), ‘like the solid and fluid phases of matter’ (Delanda, 2016, p. 19).4 In short, in all these approaches, the social is no longer what explains, what fixes, what structures, but what has to be explained, what transforms, what circulates, but also what imposes constraints, and as such, it holds a translational dimension.

Translating the social Les sciences sociales ne se contentent pas plus de décrire et d’analyser la société que les sciences naturelles ne se contentent de décrire et d’étudier la nature : les unes et les autres contribuent à la mise en forme et de la société et de la nature. (Callon, 2006, pp. 275–276) In their relational philosophical-anthropological view of the social, the above-mentioned thinkers have shifted from a ‘diffusion’ to a ‘translation’ model for both producing and understanding knowledge. The translation metaphor in fact evokes a process of assemblage, of connection and transformation between parts, between actors, between worlds, from which something ‘emerges’ and which might be apprehended as a knowledge process. On the contrary, the ‘diffusion model,’ such as the one designed by Mark Granovetter (1973) to highlight the importance of weak human ties in scientific innovation, apprehends social processes less as the transformation than as the transmission of (scientific) discourses and objects. However, There is no transmission without transformation and, more importantly, […] scientific facts and artefacts do not necessarily answer existing needs, do not simply spread in society but have to create their own space by a concomitant process of network formation. (Buzelin, 2005, p. 197) Therefore, the translation model adopts a relative (not relativistic) point of view on science. The philosophical thoughts of Serres in the Hermes series (1969–1977) relativize the idea of reference, and as a result, put into perspective epistemology as ‘queen science,’ as a science exterior to any science. In Serres’ view, there is no external ‘reference’ able to speak about and to categorize ‘the other sciences.’ The classifications and categorizations that positivist scientists provide are, for him, deterministic, arbitrary, and based on an asymmetric relationship between the observer and what he or she is analyzing. Serres believes that every knowledge formation (i.e. field, domain, ‘region,’ ‘discipline’) possesses its own references and that the only thing we can do to understand these formations is ‘inter-referencing’ them, connecting them, translating them (instead of basing our study on a so-called unique external ‘reference’). For Serres, the translation would be the production of interferences (thus roughly summarized as the production of a dialogue between domains) and this would constitute a new epistemological paradigm. These ideas frame within a (what we today would call interdisciplinary) project of the history of science, against Bachelard and Auguste Comte’s rational view of science as a state of knowledge development. For Serres, indeed, the history of science is less a linear narrative than a network, with undetermined sources, intersections, ruptures and discontinuity. In this sense, Serres’s approach echoes Kuhn’s viewpoint on the dynamic of science. But while 102

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for Kuhn the paradigms are untranslatable, Serres’s model is precisely designed to translate models, disciplines, and theories. Indeed, when the history of science practices interference, it becomes an interdisciplinary and needs translation. Here again, categorization is opposed to translation (see Latour above): knowledge is not beyond the social (transcendence, reference), but a part of it (immanence, interference). If the progress of the sciences is multiplicative, of complication and of application (in the sense of putting into correspondence), the ars inveniendi loses its mystery – and the genius his aura of sacralization – so as to become ars interveniendi: multiplication of interferences and establishment of short-circuits. Inventing is not producing; it is translating. (Serres, 1972/2022, p. 2) Knowledge, invention and novelty are produced by interference, and by translation: ‘the more one moves toward invention, the more one encounters exchange and translation’ (Serres, 1972/2022, pp. 11–12). Serres regards translation as a method that applies to all ‘formations,’ thus to every domain of life including mathematics, literature, and politics. It is no longer a question of describing classifications and their internal coherence but of identifying significations in this flow of knowledge and identifying the repetitive and unperceived constants (invariants) (Smette, 2018, p. 123). Hence the interest in examining the operation of translation. Not in defining it in the abstract, but in making it function the most broadly and in the most diverse fields: inside of canonical knowledge and its history, along the relations of the encyclopedia and the philosophies, on the side of the fine arts and the texts that speak of exploited labor. It is no longer a question of explication, but of application. The transformations of the message are measured. A given law of history speaks of the states of matter, a given presentation of form and color speaks of the industrial revolution. (Serres, 1974/2011, back-cover) However, Serres’s translational method, also called ‘structural analysis’ is in fact close to comparatism. It is indeed through comparison (first in a formal mathematical language, and progressively in a more natural and even poetical language)5 that Serre’s translation highlights invariant structures emerging from sets or groups whose proximity was previously unknown (Smette, 2018, p. 170). This is how, for instance, in ‘Le jeu du loup’ (2019), Serres translates La Fontaine’s L’agneau et le loup into mathematics, making geometry and the fable interfere to highlight an invariant structure. This brings us toward another important aspect of the translation model: symmetry. The symmetry is originated in the fact that there is no metalanguage (exteriority of the reference), and no language has priority over another, thus the language of mathematics can explain poetry and vice-versa. There is thereby no directionality, nor hierarchy between languages and things, neither between things, starting from the principle that ‘Bacteria, mushrooms, whales, sequoias, we don’t know of any living thing that does not emit information, receive it, stockpile it, and process it’ (Serres, 2014). According to Latour, who is greatly inspired by Michel Serres, a symmetrical anthropological discourse, in the form of a network, could manage to treat all actors, human and non-human, in their constitutive hybridity, on an equal footing. This does not mean that all actors are the same, and that translation is exempt from any power relationships, but that they are treated in the same way. For Callon, ANT makes it possible to explain the relation 103

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of power and domination without having to hypothesize the existence of different levels: the more a site is connected to other sites, the more its mobilization capacity is strong. As a method, the actor-network claims to be empirical, realistic and materialistic, and insists on the need to begin any analysis out of chaos, by identifying the actors (human and non-human) of the action, or out of scientific controversy, that one wishes to study, in the presence of their interests, their stakes, their calculations and their degree of convergence. By disregarding any pre-existing social boundary, the method consists of ‘follow[ing] the actors themselves’ (Latour, 2005, p. 12), and what makes them act by ‘reassembling’ the many translations, seen as connections that transform each actor involved in the relationship. In this architecture of relations, some actors act as mediators (or translators) by forking, transforming, speaking on behalf of others, ‘translating’ them, and generating new associations. Latour opposes mediators and intermediaries. The latter transport meaning without modification while mediators, Transform, translate, distort, and modify the meaning or the elements they are supposed to carry […] No matter how apparently simple a mediator may look, it may become complex; it may lead in multiple directions which will modify all the contradictory accounts attributed to its role. (Latour, 2005, p. 39) This is of course a major source of uncertainty. Are the actors in front of us mediators or intermediaries? For instance, ‘a properly functioning computer could be taken as a good case of a complicated intermediary while a banal conversation may become a terribly complex chain of mediators where passions, opinions, and attitudes bifurcate at every turn’ (ibidem). Thus, for Latour the ‘network is a concept, not a thing out there. It is a tool to help describe something, not what is being described’ (Latour, 2005, p. 131) while translation is defined as ‘[…] this thing which is neither one actor among many nor a force behind all the actors transported through some of them but a connection that transports, so to speak, transformations.’ It is ‘a relation that does not transport causality but induces two mediators into coexisting’ (p. 108). Both Serres and Latour have thus developed a translation model, in which translation has become an (epistemological) tool. For Callon, translation is a ‘mode of existence’ (2006, p. 244): All […] actants are brought into play, mobilized in statements, instruments, or embodied skills. Each new translation may modify, transform, contradict, or alternatively strengthen former translations. Each, that is, may modify or stabilize the actants’ universe. To translate is to describe, to organize a whole world filled with entities (actants) whose identities and interactions are thereby defined. In this model the notion of action disappears in favor of that of translation. (Callon, 1995, p. 46) Translation as a mode of existence, thus as an ontological concept, incorporates adjacent concepts, such as transformation, circulation and deviation, but also connection, heterogeneity, multiplicity, and rupture ‒ basically, principles of Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome. Rhizomatic thought implies, among other things, that any point of a rhizome must be connected to every other point, that it has no units of measurement, and that it may be broken and start up again on new or old lines. All these principles might be applied to interlingual translations, certainly when translation is understood through its multiple sources and retranslations. However, for Deleuze and Guattari, the rhizome relates less to linguistics than to semiotics: 104

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‘semiotic chains of every nature are connected to very diverse modes of coding (biological, political, economic, etc.) that bring into play not only different regimes of signs but also states of things of differing status’ (1980/1987, p. 7). In other words, it is ‘not [possible]6 to make a radical break between regimes of signs and their objects’ (p. 7). Collective assemblages of enunciation (the domain of language or the symbolic) function directly within machinic assemblages (the domain of interrelated physical objects) but they are located within the discursive sphere, implying specific modes of assemblage and types of social power (p. 7). Deleuze and Guattari isolate translation as a mode of assemblage, or phenomenon, within the anthropomorphic strata and within a specific semiotic system linked with language (‘all human movements, even the most violent, imply translation’ p. 63). While in genetic code, there is only flux, redundancy and surplus, language implies the presence of a sender, a receptor, comprehension, and thus translation. This does not entail an absence of flux between the different strata (energetic, physicochemical, geological, organic, anthropomorphic) but it means that only language expression can translate the other strata, as an overcoding practice. Due to its intense deterritorialization as a pure line of linear expression, which makes it independent of materiality, language has the capacity to overflow all other strata, which gives it imperialist pretensions (Delanda, 2016, p. 25). Therefore, Deleuze and Guattari associate translation with (scientific) knowledge production: Translation should not be understood simply as the ability of one language to “represent” in some way the givens of another language, but beyond that as the ability of language, with its own givens on its own stratum, to represent all the other strata and thus achieve a scientific conception of the world. The scientific world […] is the translation of all of the flows, particles, codes, and territorialities of the other strata into a sufficiently deterritorialized system of signs, in other words, into an overcoding specific to language. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987, p. 62) Deleuze and Guattari’s interpretation of translation must therefore be understood within the coding-decoding-overcoding triad. ‘Coding refers to the role played by special expressive components in an assemblage [for instance language or chromosomes] in fixing the identity of a whole’ (Delanda, 2016, p. 22). Decoding does not signify that the state of a flow is understood but that it escapes its own code (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987, p. 449). Finally, overcoding is when a dominant code is superimposing on other codes and makes it possible for translation to be creative and form new regimes of pure signs, and to transform a pure (or abstract) semiotic into another (p. 136). Translation is intersemiotic: ‘It is not simply linguistic, lexical, or even syntactic transformations that determine the importance of a true semiotic translation but the opposite’ (p. 138). However, while translation would allow for overcoding, a rhizome ‘never allows itself to be overcoded, never has available a supplementary dimension over and above its number of lines, that is, over and above the multiplicity of numbers attached to those lines’ (p. 9). In short, the rhizome might have a translational dimension (connection, heterogeneity, multiplicity, and so on), but it distinguishes itself from (inter)semiotic translation as an overcoding practice, unknown from strata other than the anthropomorphic one. For Serres as well, translation is only one of the four transformation systems through which we understand things ‒ these four transformation systems being deduction in the logical-mathematical area, induction in the experimental field, production in the practical field and translation in the realm of texts (Serres, 1974, pp. 9–11). In light of these arguments, we can understand that for Serres and Deleuze, and Guattari (and thus for Delanda as well), translation is a human (yet intersemiotic) activity of 105

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knowledge production. Translation serves specific domains, notably the scientific domain, through its capacity to overflow onto other domains and semiotic systems, and this even if overcoding entertains the illusion that everything is translatable. For Kuhn in contrast, not everything is translatable. In his thesis on incommensurability, he distinguishes bilingualism from translation. Bilingualism is in principle always possible: the adherent of one paradigm can understand the rationale and the meaning of what the adherent of another incommensurable paradigm does and says, even if it requires a great effort of communication (Soler, 2007, p. 12). But bilingualism does not equate to translation. If interpenetration is possible, equivalence is not. There are certain units of meaning central to one theory that has no equivalent in the other theory; certain issues can be expressed in one framework but not in the other. However, Kuhn does not deny that points of contact can be established between incommensurable paradigms, from which comparison might be applied (idem): No more in its metaphorical than its literal form does incommensurability imply incomparability. […] The terms that preserve their meanings across a theory change provide a sufficient basis for the discussion of differences and for comparisons relevant to theory choice. (Kuhn, 1983, pp. 670–671, quoted in Soler, 2007, p. 12)

Mapping the social Writing has nothing to do with signifying. It has to do with surveying, mapping, even realms that are yet to come. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987, pp. 4–5) Now that the social has been relocated, and that translation has emerged as a key aspect of knowledge production (yet not the only one), it is time to think of what we can do with this. What is the next step? For ANT scholars, it is clear: nothing exists outside of the network which the researcher should retrace. By using ‘to retrace’ or ‘to map’ – rather than ‘to trace,’ which has the connotation of creating and inventing – Latour distances himself from constructivism and claims a realist approach.7 Deleuze and Guattari also borrow the ‘map’ metaphor from cartography with the slogan ‘make a map, not a tracing’ (1980/1987, p. 12). Tracing is linked to overcoding and is oriented to reproduction, while mapping is oriented to experimentation. What distinguishes the map from the tracing is that it is entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the real (…). The map is open and connectable in all of its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification. It can be torn, reversed, adapted to any kind of mounting, reworked by an individual, group, or social formation. It can be drawn on a wall, conceived as a work of art, constructed as a political action or as a meditation. (Deleuze & Guattari, p. 12) In ANT research, the aim is to continue the work of association by following the actors in their (micro-)networks around (scientific) controversies. The ANT researcher would become a sociologist or anthropologist of the association who ‘deploys’ controversies understood as events that construct facts by confronting heterogeneous elements and involving consensus, compromises, and strategies. They are ‘never posed in terms of pros and cons, as on television, or of guilty/not guilty, as in court. They are posed as a set of questions, to which 106

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different actors provide different answers’ (Latour & Chevassus-au-Louis, 2011, p. 76; my translation). Therefore, mapping a controversy is ‘a matter of listing the positions present, describing for each of them by whom they are held […] and with what arguments’ (idem). The sociologist of association should not restrict her/himself in advance to a specific domain, nor to a specific dimension, but should ‘render the social world as flat as possible in order to ensure that the establishment of any new link is clearly visible’ (Latour, 2005, p. 16). Latour speaks of ‘flattening the global’ and ‘re-dispatching the local’ in a way that is similar to the way Deleuze and Guattari speak of the necessity of flattening all multiplicities onto a single plane of consistency or exteriority, regardless of their number of dimensions (Deleuze & Guattari, p. 9). This would be the most honest way to produce knowledge. But does it entail that there are no borders, no hierarchy and no laws of the world? There are borders, but according to Delanda, they emerge along with degrees of territorialization and deterritorialization, thus along with the processes of coding and decoding,8 and according to Latour, They are not behind the scene, above our heads and before the action, but after the action, below the participants and smack in the foreground. They don’t cover, nor encompass, nor gather, nor explain; they circulate, they format, they standardize, they coordinate, they have to be explained. (2005, p. 246) In this light, translation sociology is truly exceptional ‘in that it tries not to assume any preexisting categories or boundaries. It would simply follow the translations, the budding nodes in networks, in order to observe the actual institution of any boundaries’ (Pym, 2014, p. 50). In ANT, mapping refers concretely to anthropological (ethnographic) written reports. It does not involve fixing a world on paper but adding something to the network (as a mediator) while considering the mediating constraints of writing. A plausible continuity might exist between what the social does and what a (good) text may achieve. What is then mapped on paper? For scientific facts (from nature to laboratory, for instance), Callon claims, we can only map stages, the divergence of translations and the proliferation of entities (equivalence is an exceptional result): To translate a device into an inscription, an inscription into a statement, or a statement into embodied skills, is to create a discrepancy, a betrayal. In short, equivalence is the exception. It is only obtained with difficulty and at great expense. Divergence between translations and the proliferation of entities is the rule, not the exception. The chromatograph traces a curve, the technician draws up charts, the scientist goes from one statement to another, her competence is reinscribed in an experimental device that produces new marks, and so on. Every new translation produces a discrepancy in relation to previous translations, which it then threatens […] It is enough to imagine that even the most modest actant, the humblest electron microscope, the most docile technician, and the least imaginative researcher, all produce slightly differing translations. The proliferation of discrepancies lies in these small betrayals. […] History is an accumulation of such betrayals, and, as the sciences are nothing more than a set of extended translations, their dynamics are no different. This is another way of saying that uncertainty lies at the heart of scientific production. (Callon, 1995, pp. 46–47) So is this it, then? Is scientific knowledge production a process of translation/association? Is nothing ‘gained’ in the translation process other than a new lighting and a multiplication of 107

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scientific reports? As we indicated in the first section of this chapter, for Serres, something is gained during (not all but some) translation processes: a formal invariant, a structure. ‘It is possible that science is the set of messages that are optimally invariant across every translation strategy’ (1974/2011, backcover). Serres’ notion of structure mentioned earlier corresponds to the network of relations existing between the elements, considered only through their relations and not through their content; it is ‘the formal analogon of all the concrete models that it organises’ (Serres, 1968, p. 32, my translation). Two domains sharing the same structure means that elements inherent to these two domains (with their own nature, for example, literature and mathematics) are articulated according to the same type of relations. […] the invariant seems […] to be immediately accessible: it designates, again, a site that is not one, a reference that is not stable but rather the pure movement of translation of one language into another, the pure possibility of transporting forms between layers that overlap, partly or totally, which take each other into account even though they are independent of each other, the pure possibility of exchange, of transfer, without first or final reference, the pure possibility of interference. (Serres, 1979/2022, p. 16) Bernard Smette argues that the notion of invariance also exists in Latour’s thinking, i.e., in the notion of the circulating reference. For Latour, there is neither a correspondence nor an abyss between worlds and words, between language and nature, between ontological domains considered to be different, there is only a different phenomenon: a circulating reference, that ‘does not designate an external referent […] but the quality of the chain of transformation, the viability of its circulation’ (Latour, 1999, p. 310). Something is conserved in the circulation, a small number of relevant features: ‘during the transportation something has been preserved. If I can manage to grasp this invariant, this je ne sais quoi, I believe, I will have understood scientific reference’ (Latour, 1999, p. 36). This means that while the content varies through the knowledge/translation process, the reference does not (Smette, 2018, pp. 214–215; my translation). But as we have said earlier, the invariant does not predate the analysis but is constructed and selected alongside the translation or the knowledge process. Thus, while each stage of scientific knowledge (for example, a new plant that would be discovered in the woods, from which a part would be cut, brought to a laboratory, dissected, reported into graphs, computer programs, drawings and so on) causes the loss of locality, particularity, materiality, multiplicity and continuity, something is also gained: reduction leads to a kind of amplification through compatibility, standardization, text, calculation and circulation (Latour, 1999, p. 71). For Smette, reduction, compatibility, standardization, text and so on, also characterize translation work because these elements are at stake at each stage of the translation process, progressively, and connect each other according to a certain reference. The result of any translation operation takes the place, at each stage and each time, of the situation of departure to which it is linked by a series of transformations. It does not therefore resemble the thing of departure (‘the original’) but allows us to speak of it (2018, pp. 231–232).

To be continued… The work of association of these translational approaches to knowledge is far from over. The work before us is enormous, as these theories are so abundant and rich, and their nuances can offer different perspectives on translation in a broad sense. These theories are also upsetting: how can 108

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one reduce to a scientific chapter a network of concepts and methods that precisely require being treated differently from what the tradition used to do? How can one approach authors that turn everything upside down, right down to the report we have to make of their work? However, we can draw some conclusions from this preliminary work of the association, from which some translational features have emerged. Let me list a few of these here: Translation entertains certain relations with knowledge, the former shedding different and original light on the latter. Translational approaches to knowledge envision translation less as an object of study than as a knowledge process and an epistemological tool: a translation model. The translational features exportable to knowledge are principally connectivity, in-betweenness, transformativeness and opacity. This opacity relies on the contingency and negentropy 9 of the translation process, which appears as a black box to unveil. The translation highlighted in these approaches is intersemiotic. The translation process indeed connects and transforms all kinds of objects, humans and non-humans, groupings and individuals, and scientific domains. As an effect of the previous point, the translation model implies symmetry: all the entities, parts and actors are treated in the same way. No boundaries, hierarchies, or dimensions exist prior to the knowledge and translation process. Translation has neither spatial nor temporal boundary but consists of never-ending chains. In the translation process, something is gained, and something is lost. Translation would thereby be an emergent phenomenon: what emerges from the interaction of the parts would in turn exert a constraint on the parts. A certain invariant might emerge from the translation process, a common operator. Translation could serve as an epistemological model for the search of invariants. Translations are not just unpredictable fluxes of transformation, but they necessitate the presence of mediators (human and non-human) and are characterized by negotiations, strategies and groupings: ‘there is no society, no social realm, and no social ties, but there exist translations between mediators that may generate traceable associations’ (Latour, 2005, p. 108). In short, these approaches encourage us to work with uncertainties. As Marais points out, ‘scholarly thought needs to be able to live with disorder, complexity, paradox, or, as Latour suggests, it should follow reality like an ant, through all the particular, complex labyrinth to and through which it leads’ (Marais, 2014, p. 21). But this does not necessarily indicate that everything is contingent or relative. If the essential criteria (of knowledge production) do not exist prior to the analysis, and if the (epistemological) reference is gone, then one could think that all knowledge productions are equal. This is in fact not what our authors are saying. Kuhn explains that all opinions are not equal in that the researcher (bearer of subjectivity and idiosyncrasy) is an expert, that is to say, a person who has been trained for a given discipline and who develops methods and protocols to identify problems, to formulate relevant answers, and to bring the best possible solutions recognized by the scientific community. As such, the theoretical choices s/he makes and the features s/he selects are not random but are the result of another process, that of his/her initial training as well as of his/her professional experience (Smette, 2018, p. 385). Now, what else should be retained from these approaches? On the one hand, and in Marais’s view (2018, pp. 295–296), translation could and should cover much more than its 109

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traditional interlinguistic application and extend to many domains of knowledge. Marais believes that to remain relevant in the postcolonial, globalized and hyperconnected twenty-first century, Translation Studies should expand its conceptualization of translation, not only beyond the idealism and constructivism that are rife in the discipline but also beyond linguistic and anthropocentric bias, and consider the full scope of intersemiotic translation practices and products. On the other hand, by connecting and reconnecting things (humans, objects and nature) and disciplines, translation in these approaches provide a framework to better apprehend the main challenges of our time. How do we address the exponential growth of hyper-objects, which are of such a spatio-temporal extent, that they can no longer be grasped (even literally) as objects if we do not think in connection, if we do not look at artifacts and nature in the same way and if we do not view ourselves as being part of the picture? As Michael Cronin puts it, It is no longer possible to speak about, the “environment” as something out there, as a negligible and dispensable externality. The environment is not exterior to but constitutive of who we are. Secondly, it is no longer tenable to conceive of humans as a species apart but as one species among many in relationships of increasingly acute interdependency. Therefore, we must think again about what it is to be human and if we think again about what it is to be human then we must inevitably think again about one of the activities that humans engage in, namely, translation. (2017, p. 8) To think again, we need more and different tools. As Latour suggests, ‘when you wish to discover the new unexpected actors that have more recently popped up and which are not yet bona fide members of “society,” you have to travel somewhere else and with very different kinds of gear’ (Latour, 2005, p. 22).

Notes 1 I follow Pym’s preference for the term ‘translation sociology,’ with the ‘translation’ part referring to the method of analysis rather than to the object under analysis (2014, p. 149). It should also be noted that the authors coming from various (inter)disciplinary fields that I reassemble under the umbrella terms of ‘translation sociology,’ or ‘sociologist of association’ do not necessarily define themselves this way. However, I will use these terms as a reference to the translational dimension of their study of the social world. 2 They developed many definitions, according to each aspect of their philosophy. 3 Thus ‘remplacer la notion de microstructures par celle d’interactions localement cadrées entre humains et non humains; de macro-structures par celle de lieux cadrés qui sont connectés par les actants qui assurent leur cadrages’ (2006, p. 274) 4 Assemblage is ‘a stratum that has become decoded, that is, one in which the value of coding parameter is low, as when animal behaviour stops being determined by genes, or when human behaviour ceases to be fully specified by written norms’ (Delanda, 2016, p. 23). The opposition between strata and assemblage might be relativized with the parameter of degree of territorialization; strata and assemblage become phases. As an example, constrained by the temperature parameter, water can exist in various phases, both territorialized in ice, and deterritorialized in gas. 5 Smette observed a shift in Serre’s language, related to the objects under study, which are, with time, less and less characterized by their formal aspect. 6 I rectify here a misinterpretation in the thirteenth printing of Brian Massumi’s translation published by the University of Minnesota Press (1987/2009). 7 As Latour phrases it, ‘if the social is a trace, then it can be retraced; if it’s an assembly then it can be reassembled’ (2005, p. 128).

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Latour, B., & Chevassus-au-Louis, N. (2011). Nous Construisons des Outils Pour Évaluer les Controverses. Entretien. Mensuel, 456,. 76–79. ­ Latour, Bruno., & Woolgar, Steve. (1979). Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications. Marais, K. (2014). Translation Theory and Development Studies: A Complexity Theory Approach. London & New York: Routledge. Marais, K. (2018). Introduction: Translation and Development. The Translator, 24(4), 295–300. https:// doi.org/10.1080/13556509.2019.1602306. Marais, K. (2019). A (Bio)Semiotic Theory of Translation: The Emergence of Social-Cultural Reality. London & New York: Routledge. Povinelli, E. A. (2011). Routes/Worlds. E-flux Journal, 27. Available at: https://www.e-flux.com/ journal/27/67991/routes-worlds/ Pym, A. (2014). Exploring Translation Theories. London: Routledge. Soler, L. (2014). Popper et Kuhn Sur Les Choix Inter-théoriques. Philosophia Scientiæ, 11–1, 99–130. Serres, M. (1969). Hermès I. La Communication. Paris: Éditions de Minuit. Serres, M. (1972). Hermès II. L’Interférence. Paris: Éditions de Minuit. Serres, M. (1974). Hermès III. La Traduction. Paris: Éditions de Minuit. Serres, M. (1976). Le Jeu du Loup. In H. Van Camp (Ed.), Savoir, Faire, Espérer: Les Limites de la Raison (pp. 229–247). Brussels: Presses de l’Université Saint-Louis. Available at: http://books.openedition. org/pusl/9710. Serres, M (1977). Hermes IV. La Distribution. Paris: Editions de Minuit. Serres, M. (2011). Hermes III, Translation. Unpublished (R. Burks, Trans.). Available at: https://www. academia.edu/36390056/Betrayal_The_Thanatocracy_from_Hermes_3_by_Michel_Serres. Serres, M. (2014). L’information et la Pensée. Keynote Address. Philosophy After Nature Conference. Joint Annual Conference of the Society for European Philosophy and Forum for European Philosophy. Utrecht, Netherlands, September 3. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdYRzpzvrRw. Serres, M. (2022). Hermes II, Interference. Unpublished (R. Burks, trans.). Available at: https://www.academia. edu/83937670/Hermes_2_Interference_by_Michel_Serres_translated_by_Randolph_Burks. Simon, S. (2014). Cities in Translation: Intersections of Language and Memory. London & New York: Routledge. Simon, S. (2021) Translation Sites: A Field Guide. London & New York: Routledge. Smette, B. (2018). Usages Épistémologiques de la Traduction: Parcours Comparatiste (W.V.O Quine, M. Serres & B. Latour). [Unpublished Doctoral Thesis, ULiège - Université de Liège]. Suchet, M. (2016). De la Recherche Comme Création Permanente. Revue des Sciences Sociales, 56 (pp. 14-21). Available at: http://journals.openedition.org/revss/422. Wolf, M. et al., Eds. (2007). Constructing a Sociology of Translation. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing. Wray, K. B. (2011). Kuhn’s Evolutionary Social Epistemology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Translators of the tradosphere Since the turn of the century, the remit of Translation Studies could be characterized by the first part of the title in Maria Tymoczko’s 2007 Enlarging Translation, Empowering Translators, with the scope of translation encompassing an ever more inclusive domain than Jakobson’s famous ‘translation proper’ ( Jakobson, 1959) indeed, toward the intersemiotic translation and interpreting (hereafter, translation refers to both) that inspires the conceptualizations centered in this handbook. Meanwhile, the second part of Tymoczko’s title names a ripple effect dramatically symbolized by Michael Cronin’s laying down of a new bedrock for the discipline ten years later with his 2017 Eco-Translation: Translation and Ecology in the Age of the Anthropocene in which Tymoczko’s proposed enlargement would involve an extension and redefinition of translators themselves, moving beyond a field circumscribed by the human into the posthuman. Beyond the invisibility of the translator (Venuti, 1995), the question then becomes: who, or what, is it that translates? As we decenter human privilege in the face of environmental crisis, interrogating the human interlingual and textual foci that have dominated Translation Studies, there is a dawning awareness that translation processes implicate the other species and life forms with whom we share this planet. Indeed, faced with what Timothy Morton names a ‘Quake in Being’ in Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (2013, p. 1), the idea of empowering translators seems quaint – or is it that a global pandemic, the prospect of a new world war in Europe, and, more than anything, omnipresent manifestations of climate crisis provoke a pessimistic outlook? Clearly, the imperative for a radical rethinking is incumbent upon us, one that starts by acknowledging the power of all those excluded from the very realm of translation through the human exceptionalism that may lead ultimately to the demise of the human. The empowerment of human translators is thus qualified by reckoning with vast forces of translation beyond humankind. The scope of this field of translation is what Cronin terms the ‘tradosphere,’ defined initially as ‘the sum of all translation systems on the planet’ (Cronin, 2017, p. 71) and developed in ‘From Translation Zone to Sacrifice Zone: Minor Perspectives on the Tradosphere’ (Cronin, 2021) in which he proposes examples of how the theorization of ecotranslation reconfigures translation practices, including translating outdoors, in indigenous communities and via the amplification of DOI: 10.4324/9781003161448-9

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minority voices. Expanding the category of translators and interpreters (hereafter, translators refers to both) and redistributing power amongst them as we learn to receive new forms of translation, the call to empower translators is, then, far more radical than it even thinks.

Constitutive ecologies Opening ourselves to the Copernican paradigm shift that is ecotranslation, let it be clear that the premise determining this chapter on ecological approaches is not that translation needs to confront the climate crisis, as if it were a discrete object with which we interact, or new challenges to master or mediate, even if this is one of the dominant discourses dictating responses to climate destruction, as well as one of the common ways in which ecotranslation is understood by many scholars in the field. Rather, I wish to think through the implications of the new vision identified by Cronin but warranting further foregrounding: that the changing climate is constitutive of the world – not something simply in the world. Cronin cites Norah Campbell’s statement that ‘the ontologization of climate change means that it is not so much a problem within the world we live in but that it now constitutes the world’ (Cronin, 2020, p. 524, citing Campbell et al., 2018, p. 19). The object of ecotranslation is thus the fact of translation’s constitutional embedding in ecology. This ecology has been transformed so dramatically as to warrant the naming of a new geological era, the Anthropocene. Nobel Prize winners Paul Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer introduced this neologism in the new millennium to signal a ‘human-dominated, geological epoch, supplementing the Holocene,’ (Cronin, 2020, p. 517), one in which human activity produces changes that exceed biology by now impacting geology. While the Anthropocene was initially associated with the industrial revolution of the eighteenth century, Morton explains that it is henceforth dated to a single year in human history: 1945. Developing the earlier argument that the earth ‘now contains throughout its circumference a thin layer of radioactive materials, deposited since 1945’ (Morton, 2013, p. 4), in his 2018 Being Ecological, Morton refers to the recent consensus that ‘The Anthropocene has now officially been dated as starting in 1945’ (Morton, 2018, p. 5). The imperative to attend to the Anthropocene has been noted by other scholars including Dipesh Chakrabarty, author of the influential 2009 article ‘The Climate of History: Four Theses.’ Chakrabarty, too, draws attention to the constitutive nature of ecology; moreover, his analysis of the collapse of the distinction between natural history and human history parallels the move ecotranslation makes in opening translation to the entire natural world. There is evidently much to absorb in the implications of the Anthropocene, but let’s start with the irony of the term. While its first role is to acknowledge the impact of destructive human domination, this new geological era also signals the end of humans, or at least of human exceptionalism. Either way, it’s time for us to approach all the other objects and beings that compose our environment, to seek out their translations – to translate with them and, more importantly, listen to them translate – with a view to reestablishing a translational commons as the grounds of our understandings. As Timo Maran’s ‘Two Decades of Eco-semiotics in Tartu’ demonstrates, there are existing traditions of engagement in these questions (Maran, 2018). Along with ecosemioticians, the insight was named by biosemioticians such as Susan Petrilli at the beginning of the century. We can return to her statement as a starting point for this chapter, for if this line of inquiry did not garner traction widely then, it speaks with increasing urgency to our moment. The effects of climate crisis became ever more evident and imminent back in 2003 when she wrote, and now define our planet: ‘translation does not only concern the human world, anthroposemiosis, but rather is a constitutive modality of semiosis, or, more exactly, of biosemiosis.’ (Petrilli, 2003, p. 17). The relation between ecological and 114

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biosemiotic approaches, discussed in Chapter 4 of the present Handbook, is thus complementary in as much as both acknowledge that translation is a constitutive process within our environment. Kobus Marais puts it succinctly in A (Bio)Semiotic Theory of Translation: ‘humans are not the only meaning-making and meaning-taking organisms on earth’ (2019a, p. 82). In the same way that biosemiotics argue that humans are not the only ones to have language, ecotranslation reminds us that humans are not the only ones to translate.

Ecological vertigo Ecological approaches to translation are a belated and embarrassingly recent addition to the discipline of Translation Studies. Why is this the case? Reactions have been lagging, even to the work of such a globally active scholar as Cronin. His intense series of publications on the theme since publishing his book in 2017 have included a flurry of articles and chapters over the past five years (2018, 2019, 2020a, 2020b, 2021, 2022), to say nothing of his numerous spoken presentations all over the world. There are, therefore, a myriad of ways in which the upheaval could be developed, and yet translation scholars and critics responding to Cronin’s work seem to share a unanimous reaction: dizziness. Even he himself, in 2016, as he must have been working on his book and assessing what lay ahead, cited Rosi Braidotti, commenting that ‘the task for critical thinking is…“momentous,”’ indicating a certain trepidation, if not dizziness (Cronin, 2016, p. 236). Vertigo begins precisely as a disarticulation of body and environment, the expression of dizziness reflecting a distortion of proprioceptive functions, and the difficulty of being embodied in the world. In 2018, two reviewers of Eco-translation echoed this sentiment: ‘These are dizzying times of expansion for the environmental humanities’ (Kato, 2017, p. 827), ‘Michael Cronin’s latest book is a dizzying exploration’ (Strowe, 2019, p. 297). Cronin revived the trope in 2020, in what he translated as Bruno Latour’s reference to ‘a dizzying series of necessary translations’ (Cronin, 2020, p. 527). Why the headiness? Apparently, it is more than a response to Cronin’s own style of cross-pollination, his tendency to draw references across the disciplines in the rapid succession of a synaptic storm, or even to the vertiginous scale to which he is referring. It’s not just, as Strowe suggests, that scholars may have to take up Cronin’s challenge in small doses (2019, p. 298); rather, this dizziness is a somatic reaction to shifting the translation paradigm so dramatically that all the usual orientations are lost. As Kobus Marais and Kalevi Kull point out, quoting Juri Lotman, ‘in interdisciplinary work “we are at the edge of chaos”’ (Marais & Kull, 2016, pp. 19–85, quoting Lotman, 1990, p. 150). Likewise, in the discipline of history, as he engaged with the Anthropocene, Chakrabarty named it ‘a process of probing the limits of historical understanding’ (2019, p. 220). Is it, then, that in this new, entirely unmapped geography, translation itself – the necessity to forge and respond to intersemiotic communication across species and matter – becomes a conceptual hyper-object? Ecotranslation itself is apparently calling for…translation. Despite what could be read as a symptomatic explosion of Routledge Handbooks of Translation and…, an initial answer may not lie in desperately reaching out for further conceptual tools, but rather in attending to the sentiment, addressing the affect, be it the dread at what humans have done, a guilty horror at the inequities of climate change, the ‘solastalgia’ Cronin names,1 an optimism about what translation might do, or an indifference and generalized malaise at the scope of this translation task. Benjamin’s sticky term ‘task’ (Benjamin, 1968) is, however, insufficient here. Ecotranslation is not a task; it’s a new form of life. Ecotranslation starts by challenging our intellectual capacity and emotional resilience, and then calls on a collective exchange – again, more importantly, a listening posture – inconceivable from within the dominant 115

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conceit of the European Renaissance Man and all his heirs. Now that translation is not an optional reaching out but is instead constitutive of our world, there is a practice of hearing that translation has yet to develop.

Ecological plasticity Given dire environmental evidence and even worse forecasts, it might appear outlandish to claim that a translational frame of mind – the translator’s habit of interpreting across and through incomprehension to activate communication and feel where the limits of a mutual understanding lie – is an appropriate response to pessimism, but perhaps it is not. It seems there really is a restorative potential to practicing translation – be it visual, oral, gestural or other. It may be that in addition to the neuroplastic effects on the brain and its cognitive transformations (García, 2019), the act of determining constraints, maintaining continuity, accepting living change as necessary to survival and integral to sustainability processes that include death itself, produces a form of homeopathic healing. These translation effects would presumably benefit not just those translating, but also, the far more significant numbers of those receiving translations. But how do we think this translation ecology beyond our current understandings, drawing as they often do on a default framework derived from interlingual textuality? To translate in the Anthropocene is necessarily to engage materiality. It is, to begin with, the material world as it intersects with embodiment and is affected by epigenetic developments: life forming within the environment. Building on the work of French philosopher Catherine Malabou, her English translator, Carolyn Shread, has discussed the plasticity of translation, which is construed here, from an ecotranslational perspective, as the very pharmakon of the toxin (Malabou, 2010; Shread, 2018). Shread argues that plastic – one of the most ubiquitous hyperobjects, whose scale of persistence in the environment is unimaginable – paradoxically also describes qualities called for given the fact of ecological transformation. Plasticity is a generative philosophical intervention that describes the material processes of bestowing, taking, destroying, and resisting form – processes that are all, variously, translational in nature. Inhabiting our planet translationally leads us away from pessimistic scenarios in as much as the plastic capacities that have polluted Earth also allow for the possibility of a reshaping of our mode of existence into sustainable forms. Translational modes lead us from doom because if plasticity is anything, it is about letting go, and accepting that the human determination to shape and form will itself be exploded (Malabou, 2012). The practice of letting go, as an author sends off a text to generate its translation, is a habit that needs as much development as all the control theories, strategies and tools humans have produced. As Malabou suggested in the postscript added to the English translation of Morphing Intelligence (Malabou, 2019, pp. 145–164), this posture includes our prosthetic interfacing with artificial intelligence. That Artificial Intelligence (AI) is reshaping translation in a communication revolution that humans had hitherto only imagined is evident; what is not clear is whether our theories have caught up with these technological innovations. To tell the truth, they have not, and instead, a generalized paralysis and resignation are combined with a blithe compliance with the tools – and, more significantly, the global multinational structures – on offer. It is not irrelevant to mention the role of multinational corporations in this communicative revolution in as much as ecotranslation is, by definition, a practice rooted in local needs and knowledge. Dominance must cede, but not to another dominance; rather, to what Malabou has diagnosed as an indifference that lies beyond the will to accept responsibility. Translation as it is still widely construed remains just 116

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one more form of mastery and subservience. The hierarchies and binaries that have for so long circumscribed translation, all those definitions with which Translation Studies scholars have wrangled, are rendered obsolete by an ecotranslation approach that forges the conceptualization of more complex and collaborative processes that resonate with the anarchism that is the topic of Malabou’s most recent work, Au voleur! Anarchisme et philosophie (2022). To orient ourselves toward this new future, let us explore the ways in which ecology has emerged and manifests variously in the field, first as a theme, then as a metaphor, then as a concept, which, as always in Translation Studies, binds theory to practice. Ultimately, this chapter suggests that conceptually, beyond activist responses, this constitutive form of ecotranslation opens to a utopian dawning. In Ecotranslation, even as his eye remains on the conceptualization of this type of ecological approach, Cronin touches on many different modes, including what we eat, how we communicate between species, the genre of travel writing, and the all too material effects of virtual technologies. Cronin’s publications in English have sounded the clarion call, asking ‘Earthlings’ to start ‘Paying Attention’ (Cronin, 2017, pp. 1–39) and thus offer the defining vision of this chapter. But, of course, there are innumerable polylingual voices the world over that have also been articulating ecological approaches. Some of these scholars understand ecotranslation as it is defined here; many do not. After surveying these differing ecological interpretations, we shall return to the radical ecotranslation congruent with Cronin’s conception as outlined above and as it might be further developed through discussion of plasticities in Malabou’s philosophy.

Ecology as a theme Alongside the advent of ecocriticism as a newly relevant form of literary criticism, some Translation Studies theorists have recently adopted the theme of ecology as a new research topic. This traditional scholarly approach keeps us firmly in a world that gravitates around humans, even as it addresses the responsibilities of this species to nature and the representation of these relations. To cite an instance that exemplifies this approach, examining a translation of Ulrike Almut Sandig’s German poem ‘so habe ich sagen gehört’ into English, Hannah Bradley writes ‘Ecotranslation can be understood as a translation that recognizes and retains ecological themes from the source text’ (Bradley, 2021, p. 1). Likewise, in the 2020 article ‘Insights into a New Paradigm in Translation: Eco-translation and its Reflections’ Nüzhet Berrin Aksoy explores the ‘recreation of the physical landscape in literary texts and in their translations; to explore in what ways nature is represented’ (Aksoy, 2020, p. 29). In other words, here ecology is the object of study. This is equally the case in Darryl Sterk’s ‘An Ecotranslation Manifesto: On the Translation of Bionyms in Nativist and Nature Writing from Taiwan’ (Sterk, 2019) in which plant and animal names become the focus of translation research with a view to protecting vulnerable ecologies. Likewise, in ‘Multilingual Phytonymy: Ecotranslation and Vernaculars’ (2016) Renato Tomei studies closely the naming of the botanical world of the Caribbean as it intersects with indigenous and colonial legacies. These varied examples – and there are countless others as scholars turn their attention to natural surroundings – suggest the ways that the call to eco-translation has been taken in many contexts in a conventional manner of summoning scholars to a new area of representation and theme of study that understandably garners interest as authors seek to express their disarray and offer narratives of climate disruption, environmental degradation, loss and the desire for conservation. However, to take ecology as an object is entirely distinct from the way the ecotranslation approach is being defined here: a constitutive paradigm removes us from the discussions of representation to instead act on climate crisis through translational means. 117

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Ecology as metaphor On several occasions, Cronin has sought to distinguish his proposal of ecotranslation from one of the most significant metaphorical interpretations: the field of eco-translatology that emerged among Chinese scholars (Cronin, 2018, 2020b). He references Xiaohung Jiang, whose chapter ‘Eco and ‘Adaptation-Selection in Eco-Translatology Explained’ ( Jiang ,2015) offers a useful overview, starting by distinguishing eco-translatology from ecocriticism, showing how both draw on classical Chinese ecological ideas, and describing the origins of eco-translatology dating back to 2001. Hu Gengshen’s recent Eco-Translatology: Towards an Eco-paradigm of Translation Studies (2020) lays out a strategy that consists of ‘metaphorical analogies between the translational ecosystem and the natural ecosystem along with the conceptual borrowings as its methodology’ (p. xvii). In this context, the Darwinian terminology of adaptation, selection and survival of the fittest is used to describe and analyze the environment of the (literary) translated text, essentially offering a renewed version of (poly) systems theory in an ecological metaphor (Toury, 1980; Even-Zohar, 1990). Jianzhong Xu’s earlier Translation Ecology (2009) drew on these tropes along with other ecological principles in a bid to form an interdisciplinary field of study that lies between science and humanities. Together, these scholars’ works show the productive potential of scientific concepts outside their initial discipline and reflect a need to integrate more holistically our approaches to the climate crisis. These initiatives might be part of what Cronin envisages in his frequent calls to imagine a transitional university that would address the need for new forms of knowledge production (Cronin, 2017, p. 112; 2019, pp. 193–196). Rather than interpolating the Anthropocene, however, they remain within it, in continuity with previous human modes of interacting with the surrounding world. This type of metaphorical appeal to the ecological is also found among many scholars outside of China. For instance, in a recent article ‘Translation Ecologies: A Beginner’s Guide,’ the authors apply ‘basic concepts of ecology to the cultural environments of literary translation’ (Beebee et al., 2017), while in ‘The Ecology of Translation, or The Translator as World Author’ Alex Ciorogar argues that ‘Translatorship – understood, here, in terms of an ecosystem – connects the imaginary and fictional world of a text with the real worlds through which it voyages’ (Ciorogar, 2021, p. 317). To cite one other metaphorical appeal, in ‘Translation as a Test of Language Vitality,’ Arturo Tosi examined translation practices in the EU as a ‘linguistic ecosystem’ (Tosi, 2013, p. 13). All these contributions to the field of Translation Studies are useful ways of thinking translation as a complex, global system; they are, however, distinct from the ecotranslation that inspires the ecological approach advocated here and display the linguistic bias that Marais, amongst others, has sought to draw attention to as a significant distortion within the discipline. Cronin’s various overviews of the differing interpretations of ecological approaches also refer to the work of Clive Scott, starting from an acknowledgment that it was Scott who coined the term ecotranslation, and that Cronin’s subsequent reworking is quite different from this originary usage. Scott’s creative intersemiotic translations from the French poets Stéphane Mallarmé and Arthur Rimbaud bridge the thematic and metaphorical uses of ecology by demonstrating the ways in which ‘the text ceases to be an object and becomes an evolving and encompassing ecological event…a new inhabitability’ (Scott, 2015, p. 301). Scott explores the environment of the page through typographical and creolizing experiments that put pressure on textuality. Ultimately, Scott’s approach is ‘Not the translation of texts that eco-criticism might deem to be eco-texts. Rather the translation of any text into ecoconsciousness’ (Scott, 2015, p. 285). To apprehend ecology from within the Anthropocene 118

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we will no doubt need to dwell in these thematic and metaphorical understandings, although if we are to act on climate change, we will have to go beyond them to engage ecotranslation as a constitutive force.

Ecotranslation as radical practice and criticism This chapter argues for an ecological approach to translation according to which it’s not about any object in ecology, or ecology itself as an object, whether real or metaphorical. Instead, it’s all about the fact that, as Morton puts it, ‘there is no edge!’ (2013, p. 17). No edge, and hence no object to master and manipulate from the convenient fiction of distance. The humbling decentering of the human goes beyond any possibility of distinction, certainly any objectification of others. Thus, although there have been many turns in the half-century since Translation Studies as a discipline was named – the cultural, power, sociological, and so forth – we should be clear that this is not an ecological turn, at least when ecotranslation is construed as a concept rather than a theme or a metaphor. This is because ecotranslation is not so much a turn as an overturning, or, as Marais puts it, the formation of a ‘translation complex’ (Marais, 2019b). The ecological approach alters both name and nature of the discipline, and thus, along with it, its practices, ethics, and activist engagements. Let us consider several studies that begin to imagine this reframing of perspectives. In the collected essays, with the bilingual French/English title Traduire les voix de la nature/ Translating the Voices of Nature (2019), Kristiina Taivalkoski-Shilov and Bruno Poncharal gather several strands of new ecological approaches. Suitably for a field now oriented to going beyond its historical privileging of textual bias, many of the contributions highlight aural components, returning translation from textuality to the orality of interpreting – but an interpreting now that goes beyond a human linguistic bias. Taivalkoski-Shilov writes on ‘Increasing Ecological Awareness in Translation Studies: A Voice-based Perspective’ to point to the ways that ‘the voices of nature are erased or misrepresented in translation’ (pp. 3–24), while Lucile Desblache draws on musicology as a resource for going beyond the interactions of human language in ‘Translation, Natural history and Music: Thinking Communication Beyond the Verbal’ (pp. 207–230). The approaches in this anthology are thus aligned with the type of biosemiotic work proposed by Alison Sealey in ‘Translation: A biosemiotic/more-than-human perspective’ in which she analyses the ‘different meanings of the verb HEAR’ (2019, p. 1). Sealey opens a vista to bringing together biosemiotics, Translation Studies, and human-animal studies, all of which serve to decenter the narrow scope of Jakobson’s ‘translation proper.’ Other approaches in this vein work through movement, gesture, and expression as modes of communication more expansive than human linguistics. Ecotranslation invites all of these expressive means to participate in the identification and responses to the climate crisis. The work of these researchers helps expand the repertoire of communicative possibilities. Cronin offers a caveat, however, as we move into unchartered modalities of exchange. Discussing Rosi Braidotti’s theorizations of decentered, posthuman subjectivities, he notes that ‘Though Braidotti does not state this anywhere, this transversal subjectivity obviously demands translation if the relatedness is to be anything other than simple contiguity’ (Cronin, 2019, p. 197; 2020b, p. 525). This is the crucial point: the Anthropocene needs translation more than ever if it is to be anything other than proximity with an ever more deafening silence. And silence there is, since ‘according to Elizabeth Kolbert we are now living through the sixth mass extinction of species on planet Earth’ (Kolbert, 2014, cited by Cronin in 2020a, p. 89). How do you translate a song silenced? A bird song that will no longer be heard or learned by others in its species? To cite one of too many examples, researchers have shown how the male Australian 119

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Regent Honeyeater is losing its ability to learn its song, and hence to find mates due to the decrease in numbers, spread across vast expanses, as their natural habit is destroyed (Crates et al., 2021). These male birds can no longer learn the songs from mature birds of their own species; instead, they are learning other songs, which fail to attract the attention of females. Like the many minoritized human languages faced with extinction, the bird song is dying out. Another poignant instance: the Hawaiian Kauai’o’o bird is now extinct. We are left with the haunting replica of a digital recording.2 Rendering these silences are part of the great translation project that is ecotranslation. The tragic aspect is that the species themselves will never be part of an ‘intralingual’ translation since that possibility expired with them and their ‘tongue.’ In Contra-instrumentalism: A Translation Polemic (2019), Lawrence Venuti made a cogent argument for why translation is a hermeneutic rather than an instrumental or utilitarian practice. His point is well-taken, but his analysis remains determined by the field of human cognition. The hermeneutics required by ecotranslation take the interpretative project of translation to a scale unimagined by Venuti. How does translation engage not that old chestnut of the untranslatable, but instead with the inaudible, or the invisible? These are spaces where the work of critical race thinkers and art practitioners such as Yinka Esi Graves, whose explorations via Flamenco dance translating its lost African roots through embodied memory of enslavement and ancestral connection, may help develop ecotranslational modalities.3 The feminist tradition in Translation Studies has other practices that may prove to be resources. For instance, in a dissertation entitled (E)co-Translation: Toward a Collective Task (2020a) whose ideas are further developed in a blog post Dreaming the Collective: (E)coTranslation in the Era of Climate Crisis (2020b), Meg Berkobien draws on the tradition of care theory dating back to Carol Gilligan’s 1982 In a Different Voice, arguing that translation ‘emerges as a form of care work’ whose goal is to ‘cultivate community as well as broader ecological refuge.’ Expanding posthuman theories of care is also the ambition of Dawn M. Cornelio, who proposes ‘New Possibilities for Translation: Care Theory as criteria for Negotiation’ (2017). Restoring an earth inhabitable for all can only be premised on the care that orients ecotranslation and the generosity of attention Cronin invites upon initiating this collective, collaborative, and wholly inclusive, undertaking. What, then, of translating the material world itself? In discussions of ecotranslation, Cronin never misses the opportunity to emphasize the oft-overlooked fact that the technological imbrications of the digital age are deeply material and that ‘there is nothing virtual about the ecological impact of the virtual’ (Cronin, 2017, p. 96). He demands that we acknowledge and think through the implications of the toll of extractivist practices for the material supports presumed by the task of extracting meaning, pointing to ‘the other “black box” of translation in a globalized world, not so much what goes on in the translator’s head, as what happens when their fingers touch the screen or hit the keyboard, the long tail of resource extraction’ (Cronin, 2020a, p. 95). It turns out that both forms of extraction – materials and meaning – are toxic, built as they are on careless and unsustainable forms of engagement. No doubt extracting is not the modus operandi of ecotranslation; there are other ways to engage starting with the touch that Malabou analyzed in her unpublished lecture on translation and violence given in Paris at the Séminaire Elsa Dorlin Travailler la violence, ‘Il ne faut pas toucher à tout / Rien n’est intouchable’ [don’t touch everything/nothing is untouchable]. Of course, one of the premises of touch is proximity; hence the unsustainable distances across which we habitually engage through both digital and transport technologies are contrasted to the proximate contact that is our immediate environment. Beyond the multitude of species in the natural world, it is therefore equally important to consider ‘non-organic constituent elements’ (Cronin, 2018, p. 483). Anthropology 120

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researchers Giminiani and Haines address these issues in their collection of essays on Translating Environments: Translation and Indeterminacy in the Making of Natural Resources in which they argue that ‘Far from being inert materials activated by human ingenuity, natural resources come to be made and unmade through ongoing processes of translation, through which they acquire new potentialities and meaning’ (Giminiani & Haines, 2020, p. 1). This foray across the disciplines is indicative of the type of transitional thinking required in the tradosphere. While ecotranslation practices new forms of access to invisible histories and develops innovative modes of care for our ecology, it must also evolve a renewed relation to technology, imbricated as it is with a history of domination. In ‘Biotranslation: Translation between Umwelten,’ biosemioticians Kalevi Kull and Peeter Torop emphasize this doleful heritage: ‘Since the modern age, nature mastered by technology has become the instrument of science. For living systems, it is a very destructive technology’ (Kull & Torop, 2011, p. 317). It is on this note of fundamentally questioning domination that this chapter on ecotranslation will close, bringing us, as it does, to the heart of ecotranslation. To do so, I return to the work of Malabou, whose insights into the possibilities afforded by our plasticity may be an uncomfortable, but necessary, starting point for our retooling. Indeed, her recent foray into anarchism as a mode of reordering that is unlike any other existing ordering systems suggests surprising modalities of engagement that alone might be adequate to the existential threat of climate crisis.

The dawning of Utopia: Ecologies of indifference, or a new libidinal economy In 2017, the same year that Cronin’s Eco-Translation appeared, Malabou published her sole work as yet addressing environmental questions, a dense and visionary article, ‘The Brain in History, or, The Mentality of the Anthropocene.’ In it, she interrogates Chakrabarty’s positions on climate (2009, 2012), arguing that a human ‘cannot appear to itself as a geological force, because being a geological force is a mode of disappearance’ (Malabou, 2017, p. 41) while calling for an engagement with the French historians École des Annales concepts of ‘“mentality” and “slow” or “long term” temporality’ (Malabou, 2017, p. 40). For present purposes, the most important aspect of Malabou’s article is her discussion of indifference, which may be the flip side of the dizziness diagnosed by critics responding to Cronin’s work. Indifference appears to be precisely the opposite of the attention Cronin has called for as an ethically oriented bulwark against the dizzying consequences of the climate crisis (Cronin, 2017, pp. 8–39). How, then, might an indifferent practice be inherent to ecotranslation? The indifference Malabou recognizes as a necessity given our environmental crisis is not a reworking of Derrida’s différance, nor any of the ethical positions that may have been built on a recognized deferral of meaning or identity. Rather, for Malabou, indifference is an epigenetic adaptation to the Anthropocene. Malabou digs into that conceptual hyperobject we are trying to grasp by arguing that ‘The subject of the Anthropocene cannot but become addicted to its own indifference’ (Malabou, 2017, p. 48). What does she mean here by addicted? Malabou’s argument about addiction derives from her engagement with the work of Daniel Lord Smail’s theory of addiction, which describes how Constant interaction between the brain and the environment is essentially based on brain-body state alterations. The brain maintains itself in its changing environment by 121

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becoming addicted to it, understanding “addiction” in the proper sense as a ‘psychotropy’, a significant transformation or alternation of the psyche. (Malabou, 2017, p. 45) Malabou’s theory of plasticity drew originally on her desire to bring neuroscience and, specifically brain plasticity, into conversation with continental philosophy. She subsequently developed this interest in Before Tomorrow: Epigenesis and Rationality (2016) by arguing that the Kantian transcendental was also subject to epigenetic transformations. The relevance to the present context is that Malabou was engaging the brain in its environment: faced with the Anthropocene, she extends this line of analysis, developing a theory of indifference that is an anathema to the human-centered definitions of the subject within the continental tradition, thereby offering a highly original response to the climate crisis. As we seek to construe ecotranslation, Malabou’s innovation is to move beyond a voluntarist discourse in Translation Studies that defines translation as a form of action for which one must take responsibility, the type of activist empowerment assumed in the rallying call in the title of Tymoczko’s book with which this chapter opened. The questions Translation Studies have been asking with regard to rights and responsibilities, in politics and ethics, are profoundly destabilized by the implications of the indifference Malabou diagnoses and the addiction she identifies as a solution to climate catastrophe. Seemingly, diagnosing a need for indifference would disempower translators. How are the decisions and constraints of a translation to be determined in the face of indifference? Isn’t it our very partiality that allows us to translate? Malabou pursues her line of thinking, implacable, naming a frame that Cronin only dares gesture toward: Such an indifference, this interruption of consciousness or awareness directly challenges the concept of responsibility…How can we feel genuinely responsible for what we have done to the earth if such a deed is the result of an addicted and addictive slumber of responsibility itself?…Ecology has to become the new libidinal economy. (Malabou, 2017, p. 49) Recognizing that one of the hallmarks of the Anthropocene is precisely the fact that humans have lost control, that they are no longer able to propose adequate action for the destruction they have wreaked on the planet, Malabou’s courageous move is to jettison the activist reflex that we need to act differently. Instead, she searches for an alternative motor for action. She finds this motor in a libidinal economy, recognizing that our existing practices, even when motivated by sustainable ideals, are ineffective. Malabou’s indifference recognizes our inadequacies and proven incapacity to act. The solution that draws on indifference is, instead, a new habit, an ecological addiction. She names this ecological addiction on the grounds that ‘only new addictions will help us to lessen the effects of climate change (eating differently, travelling differently, dressing differently)’ (Malabou, 2017, p. 47). The action that comes with an addiction is that much more powerful and compulsive than any rational grounds. Clearly, humans have failed to find reasons to act to avert climate crisis; as we cede the ambition of mastery and control, we build faith in what we must do despite ourselves, through new habituations. In indifference, we engage the profound implications of an affect seemingly entirely foreign to the world of translation. The fundamental call is for translation to confront indifference since the new translators – and we recall that translators here include all forms of life – are not the translators of the prior epoch. To take biosemiotics seriously is to acknowledge that 122

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the premises, goals, and modes of translation are fundamentally foreign; the most powerful tool humans have to engage with them are only the very timid forays we have made so far into a foreign that, in this new light, appears increasingly familiar in as much as it belongs to the world of human. This was just a warmup for the truly foreign, the radical leap that ecotranslation must make for the future.

Notes 1 Cronin’s keynote lecture at a conference ‘Eco-Translation: Responding to the Work of Michael Cronin’ held in honor of his pathbreaking work held at the British Center for Literary Translation in May 2021 was entitled ‘Losing Our Way? Translation and Solastalgia,’ https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=cErFQ Jhu7ME&ab_channel=BritishCentreforLiteraryTranslation Accessed 5/5/22. 2 ‘How a YouTube video brought an extinct bird back from the dead’ S. Magazine @silicamag May 25th, 2018 https://www.engadget.com/2018-05-25-kauai-oo-honeyeater-youtube-memorialghost-media.html Accessed 5/13/2022. 3 https://skindeepmag.com/articles/skin-deep-meets-yinka-esi-graves Accessed 5/13/2022.

References Aksoy, N. B. (2020). Insights into a New Paradigm in Translation Eco-Translation and its Reflections. Babel-Revue Internationale De La Traduction-International Journal of Translation, 66(1), 29–45. https:// doi-org.proxy.mtholyoke.edu:2443/10.1075/babel.00136.aks Beebee, T., Childress, D., & Weidman, S. (2017). Translation Ecologies: A Beginner’s Guide. Interdisciplinary Studies of Literature, 1(4), 1–14. Benjamin, W. [1923] (1968). The Task of the Translator. In Illuminations (H. Zohn, trans.) (H. Arendt, Ed. & intro.) (pp. 69–82). NewYork: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Berkobien, M. (2020a). (E)co-Translation: Toward a Collective Task. Ann Arbor, MI: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses. Berkobien, M. (2020b). Dreaming the Collective: (E)co-Translation in the Era of Climate Crisis. Available at: https://mmberkobien.medium.com/dreaming-the-collective-cfa8c02f8e2f (Accessed: 5 August 2022). Bradley, H. (2021). Rumors of Nature: An Ecotranslation of Ulrike Almut Sandig’s “so Habe ich Sagen Gehört.” Humanities, 10(1), 1–14. MDPI AG. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/h10010014 Campbell, N., McHugh, G., & Dylan-Ennis, P. (2018). Climate Change Is Not a Problem: Speculative Realism at the End of Organization. Organization Studies, 40(5), 725–744. https://doi. org/10.1177/0170840618765553 Chakrabarty, D. (2009). The Climate of History: Four Theses. Critical Inquiry, 35, Winter, 197–222. Ciorogar, A. (2021). The Ecology of Translation, or, the Translator as World Author. Philobiblon. Transylvanian Journal of Multidisciplinary Research in the Humanities, 26(2), 309–318. Cornelio, D. M. (2017). New Possibilities for Translation: Care Theory as Criteria for Negotiation. Translation and Translanguaging in Multilingual Contexts, 3(3), 291–303. Crates, R. et al. (2021). Loss of Vocal Culture and Fitness Costs in a Critically Endangered Songbird. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 288(1947), March, 1–9.doi: 10.1098/ rspb.2021.0225 Cronin, M. (2016). A New Ecology for Translation? Collaboration and Resilience. In A. Cordingley & C. Frigau Manning (Eds.), Collaborative Translation: From the Renaissance to the Digital Age (pp. 233–246). London: Bloomsbury. Cronin, M. (2017). Eco-Translation: Translation and Ecology in the Age of the Anthropocene. Abingdon, Oxon and New York: Routledge. Cronin, M. (2018). Eco-Translation. In K. Washbourne & B. Van Wyck (Eds.), Routledge Handbook of Literary Translation (pp. 482–494). London and New York: Routledge. Cronin, M. (2019). The (in)Humanity of Translation. The Translator, 25(3), 189–203. Cronin, M. (2020a). Translation and Climate Change. In E. Bielsa & D. Kapsaskis (Eds.), Routledge Handbook of Translation and Globalization (pp. 85–98). London & New York: Routledge. Cronin, M. (2020b). Translation, Technology and Climate Change. In M. O’Hagan (Ed.), Routledge Handbook of Translation and Technology (pp. 516–530). London & New York: Routledge. 123

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Cronin, M. (2021). From Translation Zone to Sacrifice Zone: Minor Perspectives on the Tradosphere. Translation in Society, 1(1), 1–20. Cronin, M. (2022). Eco-Travel: Journeying in the Age of the Anthropocene. Cambridge: Cambridge ­University Press. Di Giminiani, P., & Haines, S. (Eds.) (2020). Translating Environments: Translation and Indeterminacy in the Making of Natural Resources. Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology, 85(1), 1–16. Even-Zohar, I. (1990). Polysystem Studies. Special Issue of Poetics Today, XI(I), 9–26. García, A. (2019). The Neurocognition of Translation and Interpreting. Amsterdam & Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins. Gilligan, C. (1982). In a Different Voice. Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hu, G. (2020). Eco-Translatology: Towards an Eco-paradigm of Translation Studies. Singapore: Springer Verlag. Jakobson, R. (1959). On Linguistic Aspects of Translation. In L. Venuti (Ed.), The Translation Studies Reader (pp. 113–118). London: Routledge . http://dx.doi.org/10.4159/harvard.9780674731615.c18 Jiang, X. (2015). ‘Eco’ and ‘Adaptation-Selection in Eco-Translatology Explained. In S. Yifeng (Ed.), Translation and Academic Journals: The Evolving Landscape of Scholarly Publishing (pp. 135–148). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Kato, D. (2017). Eco-Translation: Translation and Ecology in the Age of the Anthropocene. ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature & Environment, 24(4), 827–829. https://doi.org/10.1093/isle/ isy015 Kolbert, E. (2014). The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History. London: Bloomsbury. Kull, K., & Torop, P. (2011). Biotranslation: Translation between Umwelten. In T. Maran, D. Martinelli & A. Turovski (Eds.), Readings in Zoosemiotics (pp. 411–426). Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110253436.411 Lotman, J. (1990). Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture. London: I. B. Tauris. Malabou, C. (2010). Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing: Dialectic, Destruction, Deconstruction (Carolyn Shread, Trans.). New York: Columbia University Press. Malabou, C. (2012). Ontology of the Accident: An Essay on Destructive Plasticity (C. Shread, Trans.). Cambridge: Polity Press. Malabou, C. (2016). Before Tomorrow: Epigenesis and Rationality (C. Shread Trans.). Cambridge: Polity Press. Malabou, C. (2017). The Brain in History, or, the Mentality of the Anthropocene. The South Atlantic Quarterly, 116(1), 39–53. Malabou, C. (2019). Morphing Intelligence: From IQ Measurement to Artificial Brains (C. Shread, Trans.). New York: Columbia University Press. Malabou, C. (2022). Au Voleur! Anarchisme et Philosophie. Paris: Presses universitaires de France. Marais, K. (2019a). A (Bio)Semiotic Theory of Translation: The Emergence of Social-Cultural Reality. New York; London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315142319 Marais, K. (2019b). Translation Complex Rather than Translation Turns? Considering the Complexity of Translation. Syn-Thèses: Interdisciplinarity and Translation Studies, 9–10, 43–55. https://doi. org/10.26262/st.v0i9.7626 Marais, K., & Kull, K. (2016). Biosemiotics and Translation Studies Challenging ‘Translation.’ In Y. Gambier & L. Van Doorslaer (Eds.), Bordercrossings: Translation Studies and other Disciplines (pp. 169–188). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Maran, T. (2018). Two Decades of Ecosemiotics in Tartu. Sign Systems Studies, 46(4), 630–639. https:// doi.org/10.12697/SSS.2018.46.4.11 Masiola, R., & Tomei, R. (2016). Descriptions, Translations and the Caribbean: From Fruits to Rastafarians. Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. Morton, T. (2013). Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Morton, T. (2018). Being Ecological. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Petrilli, S. (2003). Translation and Semiosis. Introduction. In S. Petrilli (Ed.), Translation Translation (pp. 17–37). Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi. Scott, C. (2015). Translating the Nineteenth Century: A Poetics of Eco-Translation. Dix-Neuf, 19(3), 285–302. https://doi.org/10.1179/1478731815Z.00000000083 Sealey, A. (2019). Translation: A Biosemiotic/More-than-Human Perspective. Target, 31(11), 1–23.

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Shread, C. (2018). Watching Thinking Move: Malabou in Translation. In T. Wormald & I. Dahms (Eds.), Thinking Catherine Malabou: Passionate Detachments (pp. 11–20). London: Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd. Sterk, D. C. (2019). An Ecotranslation Manifesto: On the Translation of Bionyms in Nativist and Nature Writing from Taiwan. Chinese Environmental Humanities, XXIX, 119–140. Strowe, A. (2019). Review of Eco-Translation: Translation and Ecology in the Age of the Anthropocene. The Translator, 25(3), 297–300. https://doi.org/10.1080/13556509.2018.1448173 Taivalkoski-Shilov, K., & Poncharal, B. (2019). Traduire les Voix de la Nature / Translating the Voices of Nature. Montréal, Canada: Éditions québécoises de l’œuvre. Tosi, A. (2013). Translation as a Test of Language Vitality. International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 23(1), 1–14. Toury, G. (1980). In Search of a Theory of Translation. Tel Tel-Aviv: The Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics (Meaning and Art, 2). Tymoczko, M. (2007). Enlarging Translation, Empowering Translators. Manchester: St. Jerome Publications. Venuti, L. (1995). The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation. London: Routledge. Venuti, L. (2019). Contra Instrumentalism: A Translation Polemic. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvgc62bf Xu, J. (2009). Translation Ecology. Beijing: Three Gorges Publishing House.

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7 Philosophical approaches1 Salah Basalamah

Introduction Before describing the philosophical approaches that inform concepts and theory in Translation Studies, it should be asked, what is the difference between theory and philosophy?2 While a theory is a scientific explanation or a hypothesis empirically verified and continuously modified, philosophy is concerned with more fundamental issues, such as the existence and nature of things and beings (ontology), the possibility and extent of knowing them (epistemology), as well as the very method of rigorous rational thinking (logics) and the question of how to conduct oneself in relation to others (ethics). A theory is specific, applicable thanks to a method, and can include principles and strategies if it is prescriptive, whereas a philosophy is broader in scope and can combine several theories. In Translation Studies, it is common to discuss the various theories of translation that would either guide the activity of translation in a strategic manner or explain translational phenomena in various contexts, but it is less common to discuss the relationship of philosophy to translation (studies) unless one discusses the translation of philosophy. Suffice it to say at this stage that if the function of theories of translation in the study of translational phenomena has been clear and relevant, this may not be the case when it comes to the function of philosophy in relation to translation (studies). Philosophy is no stranger to the literature of Translation Studies. Since the linguistic turn in the humanities and social sciences, and as a corollary of the newly acquired dimension of language in philosophy, translation has become a philosophical metaphor for hermeneutics (e.g., Heidegger, 1996, 1998b; Gadamer, 2004) and a rich example of reversing established western norms between voice and writing (Derrida, 2011) or between original/author and translation/translator (e.g., Derrida, 1985a; Benjamin, 1996). Here, translation is the topic or sometimes the pretext of a philosophical reflection and becomes part and parcel of the philosophical system thereof. However, translation in philosophy is never conceived of as a study of translational phenomena but is often regarded as one conceptual tool among others in the philosopher’s toolbox that helps explain or highlight other philosophical concepts, namely language and its correlatives.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003161448-11

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Since the inception and continuing advancement of Translation Studies as an interdisciplinary field, scholarship in the field of translation in connection to philosophy has become a growing area of interest for a number of researchers from within the discipline. These authors have developed a body of research on translation, its history and its disciplinary territory by introducing either philosophical reflections, philosophical concepts or philosophy itself as an object of study for Translation Studies. In this category, where translation and philosophy intersect and enlighten each other, translation and philosophy seem to be regarded as equal topics of scholarly investigations to be undertaken together. Finally, another category has been starting to make its way into the discipline. Though still far from being fully recognized, this new emerging trend aims to think about the concept of translation philosophically. This means that Translation Studies as a discipline could develop a philosophy of its own that would function as a meta-theoretical reflection on the concept of translation and its occurrences in the disciplines of all three knowledge cultures (humanities, social sciences and natural sciences). My intention here is to carve out a subdisciplinary space within Translation Studies that may be called the philosophy of translation and that will be dedicated to the inter- and transdisciplinary study of the concept of translation in all fields of knowledge in light of the linguistic, discursive, pragmatic and rhetoric wisdom that has been collected over the discipline’s half-century of existence.

Translation in philosophy While not questioning the depths philosophy has enabled human thinking to embrace and how far it has pushed its limits, it may be reasonable to venture that for a topic such as translation, as investigated in philosophy, the range of fields should probably be more limited in scope. However, it appears that even for a concept such as translation, philosophy does in fact touch upon more than one of its major fields. Although it is not the purpose of this chapter to review all fields of philosophy that have tackled translation, I will attempt a synthesis of the major works on translation and reduce and organize them into five – partially overlapping – philosophical themes that will each be introduced and explained in the sections below: philosophy of language and hermeneutics, philosophy of meaning, philosophy of existence, philosophy of modes and philosophy of relations.

Philosophy of language and hermeneutics When it comes to theories of Translation Studies, Friedrich Schleiermacher is one of the most influential philosophers. His 1813 lecture ‘On the Different Methods of Translating’ (Schleiermacher, 2012) has permeated the theoretical discourse on translation until the present (Berman, 1992; Steiner, 1998; Venuti, 1998). While commonly read as an isolated theoretical alternative between two methods of translation, Schleiermacher’s theory has been demonstrated to be intimately connected to his Dialectics (cited in Justo, 2016) and his Ethics (cited in Hermans, 2015), which are two of his major series of lectures about his philosophy of knowledge and his philosophy of history and culture, respectively (Vial, 2013). Both philosophies inform his hermeneutics, as he considers human beings to be born into language, with their concepts depending on language (dialectics). Also, because the acquisition of language is communal (ethics), all interactions require interpretation, and hence hermeneutics (Vial, 2013, pp. 33–59). Therefore, as the most extreme form of difference, the ‘irrationality of languages’ follows that of thinking and is bound to rely on interpretation and 130

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translation to overcome it through understanding ( Justo, 2016, pp. 6–7). In this sense, despite its precedence and influence, ‘rigorously speaking, there is in Schleiermacher no autonomous “theory of translation,” since all the theoretical effort on the central problem of translation is an integral part of the task of dialectics’ ( Justo, 2016, p. 13), which in turn subsumes that of ethics (Vial, 2013, p. 34). Drawing on Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Husserl and Heidegger (who will be discussed later), Hans-Georg Gadamer, in his foundational work Truth and Method (2004), which initiated philosophical hermeneutics, conceives of language as the natural environment that allows human knowledge and understanding. For Gadamer, the development of human knowledge and understanding occurs through language, but more importantly through the key notions of ‘dialogue’ and ‘conversation’ because ‘conversation is a process of coming to an understanding’ (2004, p. 387). Human consciousness and understanding are constituted through the continuous dialogue of humanity across space and time. However, in order to explain how understanding occurs, it is crucial to show how in a conversation there can be no understanding if one is not aware of the context (‘tradition’ or ‘historicity’) of the other. In Truth and Method, Gadamer uses translation as an exemplary extreme situation to illustrate the conditions of understanding the other, and ultimately the interpretive experience translation entails. In line with the intersubjectivity, Gadamer observes in the human project of selfunderstanding through the interpretive experience of conversation with/translation of one another – notably using the notion of Bildung3 – Paul Ricœur also conceives of translation as a social process of mediation between the self, the familiar, and the other, the unfamiliar. Behind the opacity of texts, we must interpret in order to understand, there are lives, contexts and histories that need to be mediated/integrated to enlarge our horizons. Translation is, then, for Ricœur, more than a simple interlinguistic operation; it amounts to a ‘paradigm’ (2006) by virtue of which the plurality of humanity – its cultures, memories and histories – is mediated to express its universal unity (‘the principle of universal translatability’ 1996, p. 4), albeit imperfectly (‘melancholia’ and ‘mourning’) (2006, p. 8). By including the relationships among individuals and among entire societies, the ‘model of translation’ (1996, p. 4) allows to extend the scope of translation so that translation would become instrumental in instilling a measure of ethics, as Ricœur moves from a linguistic to an ‘ontological paradigm’ (Kearney, 2007, p. 148). For Ricœur, to translate is to open up one’s own language to the foreign, the unfamiliar, and to allow one’s own transformation by attempting to understand and include the other. Ricœur contends that translation creates an ‘ethical problem’ by ‘[b]ringing the reader to the author, bringing the author to the reader, at the risk of serving and of betraying two masters: this is to practise what [he likes] to call linguistic hospitality’ (original emphasis, 2006, p. 23). This paradigmatic status of translation was taken up by some of Ricœur’s followers, such as Richard Kearney, Domenico Jervolino and Angelo Bottone, who states that ‘translation is not only a linguistic, but also turns into a philosophical issue, especially insofar as it impinges on questions of identity and otherness’ (Bottone, 2008, p. 73). If translation is the vehicle of hermeneutical ethics of the human subject’s understanding of themselves through the detour of history and culture, it is more precisely a vehicle for the coexistence of people with their heterogeneity. Acknowledging the depletion of the political paradigm, Jervolino draws on Ricœur’s Course of Recognition (2005) to point out that mutual recognition comes from the practice of a ‘gift economy’ whereby the exchange of the double gift of the mother tongue and that of languages occurs, ‘which is realized in translation, thanks to the practice of the linguistic hospitality’ ( Jervolino, 2006, p. 236, [original emphasis] my translation). Translation 131

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here is conceived of as the ‘non-violent foundation of the social bond’ (234) and becomes, as demonstrated in Ricœur’s ‘Reflections on a New Ethos for Europe’ (1996), The ground for a communal coexistence, and in this particular case, a model for a European citizenship… [implying] on the broader spiritual level, the extension of the spirit of translation to the relationship between cultures themselves. (Bottone, 2008, p. 85) This hermeneutical ethics of translation shows that, behind the philosophy of language and the interpretation of texts, a social philosophy is at play. More generally, the tradition of hermeneutic philosophy of translation from Schleiermacher to Ricœur can be explained through an anthropological philosophy of human relations and the ethics it involves. This means that even within the hermeneutic tradition, translation was originally conceived of as a relational operator among societies, not simply a linguistic-based instrument of meaning production.

Philosophy of meaning Although the philosophy of meaning could apparently be conflated with the philosophy of language in that they share intersecting areas of interest, the premises from which the philosophy of meaning devises its tenets are grounded in a very different philosophical tradition than hermeneutics – so much so that it has become customary to identify the latter as ‘Continental’ and the former as ‘Anglo-American’ or ‘analytic’ philosophy. The two even stand on opposite sides of the question of the understanding of what language is and what its function is. For the continental tradition, language is literally the all-encompassing context of what there is and in which all knowledge and understanding can occur. For the analytic tradition, on the contrary, language is suspected to be fraught with possible errors of reasoning to the point that mathematics and natural science are considered to be the most reliable sources of methods and language to solve philosophical problems. Starting from Gottlob Frege (1848–1925) to Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) and his pupil Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951), and continuing through the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle (1924–1936), what I called the ‘philosophy of meaning’ stems, among other ideas, from a reaction to the belief of hermeneuticians that there is no disconnect between the world and the word, and that the latter needs to be interpreted and embraced as the only conduit to the former. Philosophers of this analytical strand are grounded in naturalism in that, for them, it is science and its standards (e.g., detached objective observation) that are the reference point for philosophy. One of the heirs of this philosophical tradition is Willard Van Orman Quine (1908–2000), whose ‘ontological relativism’ (1968) led him to believe that we cannot really know what is out there or the meaning words refer to because there is no way to determine these with absolute certainty. This idea was demonstrated through the situation of an ethnolinguist who fails to pinpoint the meaning of the word ‘Gavagai’ his indigenous informant utters at the sight of a rabbit. From this example of ‘radical translation,’ Quine establishes his thesis of the ‘indeterminacy of translation’ (1960) as an extreme example of the relativity of understanding. For the philosopher, there is no access to the world through language, nor is there any access to any meaning (Quine, 1987, p. 5). Access is then founded on the meager resources of the stimuli of our senses and the observation of the native’s behavior. The argument is naturalistic in the sense that it relies on the observable circumstances (or ‘reference’) that 132

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accompany the informant’s utterances, which could be translated in different ways, hence the indeterminacy of translation (Quine, 1987, p. 9). Building on the work of Quine, Donald Davidson (1917–2003) has argued for the thesis of ‘radical interpretation’ (1984), in which he widens the scope of the interpersonal constitution of meaning from the specific case of translation to the more encompassing one of interpretation. For Davidson, one can translate a sentence without knowing its meaning, i.e., interpretation and appeal to social convention. For what is at stake in interpretation is the ethnolinguist’s ‘systematic connections between the other’s language [i.e., the native’s] and the world’ (Dresner, 2006) through the interpreter’s assignment of not only truth conditions to the native’s meaningful utterances but also beliefs and desires within the confines of the local, contextual interaction (ibid.). These latter points show how remote this philosophical position is from that of hermeneutics. One can discern a similar kind of skepticism about the relativity of meanings, cultures, and systems of reference in the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of untranslatability (Whorf, 1956). This ethnolinguistic thesis of the first half of the twentieth century states that human thought and representations are reflections of the languages in which they are expressed. Therefore, world languages would be so incommensurably different that translation would be impossible, insofar as these languages developed in different cultural and geographical contexts. The ‘philosophy of meaning’ is only one example (albeit apparently extreme, as was illustrated in relation to hermeneutic philosophy) where translation is instrumentalized for the purposes of philosophical demonstrations that aim to make a concept more explicit or to lead to objects of study other than translation itself. In that sense, translation would be viewed as only a metaphorical tool devised toward a purely philosophical agenda (Quine, 1987, p. 9).

Philosophy of existence While the reactions to the phenomenological philosophy of the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have isolated the concept of translation into the confines of a local thought experiment proposed by the ontological relativism of analytical philosophy, there was yet another reaction to the underlying scientific commitment of Husserl’s philosophy – this time from the continent. This reaction was represented mainly by the influential Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), whose thought began as a result of the influence of his mentor Husserl, the founder of phenomenology before he later distanced himself from him. Whereas Husserl conceived of epistemology as the primary task of philosophy, Heidegger contended – in rupture with most of the western philosophical tradition – that the question of being (ontology) should be the leading question of philosophical investigation. Heidegger’s emphasis on existence is an addition to the phenomenological understanding of language as a privileged path to the interpretation and the subjective experience of another’s thought: ‘Language is the house of Being’ (1998a, p. 239). More radically speaking, even before the cognitive understanding-interpreting of thought as recovered from language, there is for Heidegger a more fundamental, i.e., existential, level of understanding, which is the pre-reflective understanding of the world (Wrathall, 2005, p. 41). Heidegger distinguishes in Being and Time (1962) two types of interpretation: Auslegung and Interpretierung. While both terms are translated in English as ‘interpretation,’ they convey different contexts, where interpretation intervenes as ‘an uncovering which considers something as something. The “as-what” in which something is taken is the crucial 133

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feature of interpretation’ (1985, p. 270). Auslegung is the pre-reflective ability to understand how to move around the world of things and cope skillfully with the environment, which is ‘the “working-out” of the possibilities projected in the understanding’ (Wrathall, 2021, p. 426). Interpretierung is a more cognitive disposition, which derives from Auslegung and enables reflection and theorization, such as in philosophy (Guignon, 2006). In Heidegger’s words, interpretation is ‘the mode of enactment of understanding … specifically as the cultivation, appropriation, and preservation of what is discovered in understanding’ (1985, p. 265). If, for Heidegger, a basic element of his ‘philosophy of translation’ (Groth, 2017, p. 122) is that every translation is already an interpretation, then, according to the former distinction, translation falls under the category of Interpretierung. More importantly, translation is about unveiling the thinking, which is the energy, of the translated language in order to ‘find words for the thinking newly experienced by a reader, speaker or writer’ (p. 128). However, a philosophy of translation emphasizes that ‘what is at stake in translating is thinking, not words’ and that ‘in translating, the reader or listener is transported in the spirit of a language to a way of thinking’ (ibid.) would seem to be somehow naïve. Furthermore, the idea that translation is ‘an unsettling procedure,’ which Heidegger compares to ‘the breaking open (défrichement) of compacted earth’ (pp. 128–129), amounts more to the revisiting of philosophical concepts across and through mirroring languages than to a philosophy of translation. But this is precisely where the task of philosophy and that of translation intersect for Heidegger: both reveal The underlying ‘infrastructure or skeleton (Gliederung)’ of the utterance… The open spaces between the words, says Heidegger, point to what is ‘unspoken’ or ‘unthought’ in the fragment… In other words, the author’s thought lies in the silences (the Sagen) between words. (Groth, 2017, p. 142) For Heidegger, once more, we observe the intertwining of the works of translation and interpretation, as well as the role of the translator/philosopher in uncovering the thought of the Greek thinker. Nevertheless, in the tradition of philosophical hermeneutics of the German Romantics, similarly to the way Heidegger compares the act of interpreting to that of an actor or a musician (Wrathall, 2005, p. 45), he contends that a translation is about transposing the key of his own thinking to that of the thought of the translated author – Aristotle in this case – which is ‘to be in a position to think as the author of those words once thought’ (Groth, 2017, p. 129). In line with the previously alluded concept of Bildung that connects the self to the other, Heidegger seems to perpetuate the hermeneutic tradition not only of moving away from one’s thought to be enlightened by the thinking of the other and of taking into account the widest context of the interpretation but also of portraying translation as a dialogue that participates in all dialogues (Heidegger, 1998b, p. 12). The German translational tradition appears even in the apparent literalism Heidegger fosters in his Parmenides (1998b) when defining how a thoughtful translation should proceed ‘not sentence by sentence, but rather word by word, using the entirety of the thinker’s thought as its context’ (Groth, 2017, p. 134). While this may give the impression that Heidegger favors literalism or word-for-word translation, this is only because when translating from the ancient Greek, he literally peels off each word and proceeds with a ‘word-by-word analysis’ to connect to the original thinking of the translated author (Seidel, 1978, p. 77). 134

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Philosophy of modes Heidegger’s deep revisiting of western metaphysics was repeated by one of his most prominent students, Jacques Derrida (1930–2004). While in his earlier work Heidegger described the main undertaking of his philosophy as a ‘destruction’ (2003) of western metaphysics, Derrida attempted to uphold the same objective, although by showing that a complete reversal or negation of metaphysics would result in returning to the same starting point (Chin-Yi, 2009). Therefore, Derrida proposed to mitigate this reversal by demonstrating that any apparently stable structure is always bound to be displaced from its center. Derrida set about ‘deconstructing’ what constitutes the center of gravity of western thought: the origin, the center. The major criticism he addressed to western philosophy is that it is ‘logocentric,’ which means that it has traditionally assumed that language is conducive to absolute truth and meaning. Derrida believes, on the contrary, that language is not only unstable and dynamic (1998), but that it is also inhabited by a plurality of meanings and ‘traces’ of other languages (1985b). Taking the theory of the sign by De Saussure (2011), the founder of structuralism, further, Derrida contends that meaning can only be found in the interstices between signs, in their systematic play of ‘difference’ (space) and in the way meaning is ‘deferred’ (time) from one sign to other signs. This idea was compounded in one single term, which Derrida coined in French: différance (2001). Similar to the notion of ‘arche-writing’ (1982, 1998), ‘différance’ is the awareness that the binary, which has given priority to speech over writing, can be deconstructed in favor of the possibility of the reversal of this hierarchy, but more importantly the need to show that the boundaries between these two forms of expression are blurred. However, one would argue that, as long as they are distinguishable, speech and writing remain different, and the latter ought to be better recognized in response to western metaphysics. Derrida, however, contends that paradoxically these concepts should neither be radically opposed nor confused. According to Derrida, the value that is traditionally given to the signified (meaning) is such that it ‘inherently leaves open the possibility of thinking a concept signified in and of itself, a concept simply present for thought, independent of a relationship to language, that is of a relationship to a system of signifiers’ (1981, p. 19, [original emphasis]). This classical conception of the signified was called by Derrida the ‘transcendental signified’ in that it does not refer to a signifier, becomes independent of language and embodies meaning from a Platonist perspective as a stable transportable commodity. While not confusing the signifier and the signified, he nevertheless points out that their ‘opposition or difference cannot be radical or absolute’ (20). To demonstrate this nuance, Derrida gives the example of translation. For him, if there is no measure of distinction between the signified and the signifier, there would be no translation possible (Derrida, 1981, p. 20). Translation not only epitomizes one of the tenets of Derrida’s philosophy, that is, the undecidability between binaries; it also represents one of its deconstructed aporias by yielding the paradox of the possibility and the impossibility of translating at the same time (1979, 1985b). Putting together pairs of terms-concepts ‘under erasure’ (a typographical practice inherited from Heidegger) reflects Derrida’s dismissal of their duality and even their presence. As such, deconstruction is set to dismantle the asymmetrical relationship between binaries or the assumption that each term could exist without the other. In line with the previous example of translation that was drawn from the deconstruction of the classical conceptualization of language and the relationship between the ideational value of a sign and its materiality, ‘Des tours de Babel’ (1985a), a key text dedicated to the rereading of Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Task 135

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of the Translator’ (1996), demonstrates that there is yet another aporia between the original and its translation. For Benjamin, the relationship between original and translation is one of filiation – translation being the extension of its original – given that a translation constitutes the ‘after-life’ of its original and henceforth showing the value of its secondarity against the grain of common beliefs. Derrida pushes further the plea in favor of translation to the extent that he reverses the assumed secondarity of translation and the primacy of the original into an undecidable interdependent relationship, based on ‘indebtedness’ (Derrida, 1985a, p. 176). At first, translation is conceived of as the receiving end of a transmission process, as if a gift was passed down for which translation should be grateful and feel the weight of responsibility, a debt that cannot be paid. The debt is also conceived of as an inheritance, but one that is more about a state of being than about the reception of an object of value. This means that the debt that weighs on the translator, as far as Derrida understands Benjamin, confirms the primacy of the original over translation (Derrida, 1985a, pp. 180–181). But as Derrida continues his reading of Benjamin, he becomes less satisfied with this traditional asymmetrical relationship. In line with the hermeneutic tradition, despite his apparent distance from it, Derrida depicts the original counter-intuitively as an incomplete entity that longs to be complemented by the extended life that translation imposes as a requisite ‘filling.’ This means that both the translation and the original are no more in the classic unilateral relationship where the latter is self-sufficient and the former a dispensable luxury; rather, the original and the translation are almost intertwined and interdependent and come to assume an equal value. Moreover, whereas hermeneutics has been celebrating the multiplicity of meanings with regard to the multiplicity of (historical/social) contexts in which a text appears, a poststructuralist approach such as Derrida’s vouches for the multiplicity of meanings primarily because of the key statement that ‘there is nothing outside of the text’ (1998, p. 158), keeping in mind that the text subsumes all possible contexts that inform its potential multiplicity of interpretations waiting to be discovered. Furthermore, as demonstrated in Of Grammatology (1998) and other works by Derrida, the practice of deconstruction, then, being the re-reading of other philosophers and the dismantling of their cohesion into aporias and deadlocks, was accused by Derrida’s critics of acting as a parasite, an entity that sustains itself from the bodies of others. This is yet another example where the performance of deconstruction echoes that of translation. On the one hand, to translate is at the very same time the production of a new and different text and the reproduction of the same text; on the other hand, a translation is a text that cannot exist without the pre-existence of the text that is being translated. Finally, similar to analytic philosophy, which considered ordinary language as flawed and unreliable, poststructuralism does as well, but for other reasons, among which is the fact that language carries ambivalent and inherently undecidable meanings, no matter how much one attempts to clarify it. While analytic philosophy tended toward the logic and rationality of truth and the exigent benchmark of unambiguity and monosemy of meaning despite the flaws of language, the deconstructionist approach not only seems to dispense with such requisites but also engages only with the materiality of texts in such a way that their modes of signifying remain simultaneously multiple.

Philosophy of relations In this last subsection of translation in philosophy, I introduce a new category in which philosophy has included translation, not so much in the traditional meaning of translation than 136

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in an extended one, which has not always been explored explicitly as ‘translation’ and has not always been studied as an exclusive object of philosophical investigation. On the one hand, the concept of translation may be conceived of as a cluster paradigm, that is, a paradigm of connections and transformations among neighboring paradigms, such as those found throughout the works of French philosopher Michel Serres (1930–2019). On the other hand, the concept of translation may also be conceived of as a sociological articulation of human and non-human actors in a network such as the one conceptualized by Bruno Latour – among others ( John Law, Michel Callon, etc.). In both cases, the notion of translation represents the bedrock of a philosophy that could be characterized as one of relations, in that translation is both a comprehensive model of mediation between people, ideas and objects, and a conceptual tool to designate the circumstantial convergence and complementarity of heterogeneous social actors. To set the stage for the present category of philosophy, it may be helpful to delineate its epistemological background and show how it departs from the previous ones. As the precursor practitioner of this strand of philosophy, Serres has dramatically distanced himself from the more famous heirs of Heidegger in France, such as Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Ricœur, Derrida and even his friend Foucault. But if there is one philosopher whose thought he was the closest to, it is Deleuze (Serres & Latour, 1995; Serres, 2014; Watkin, 2020). Although Serres is ‘antipathetic to the method of critique’ (Watkin, 2019, p. 33), which puts him outside of the general trend of mainstream philosophy since Kant, he has developed a distinct philosophy in both substance and style (Latour, 1987a). Not only has he moved away from the overpowering language turn since its heyday (Watkin, 2020, p. 13), Serres also went so far in his distinction from the mainstream critical trend that he dismissed altogether the fundamental divide in western philosophy since Descartes between subject and object (Watkin, 2020). Furthermore, Serres has developed an ontology of relations – whereby what lies between substances is deemed more important than the connected substances themselves – that has inspired a full strand of sociologies, in continuation with those of George Simmel, Gabriel Tarde and Marcel Mauss (Dépelteau, 2018). This development is significant in that the ongoing sociological turn of Translation Studies has been increasingly influenced by the Latourian Actor Network Theory (ANT), whereby the concept of translation is reconceptualized away from language and discourse and recast as an operator of the spatio-temporal association of people, ideas, resources and things. Also inspired by Serres’s five-volume series on Hermes (1968–1980) and other works relevant to communication such as The Parasite (1982b) and L’art des ponts [The Art of Bridges] (2007), Latour’s sociology of networks has conceived of the social as a combination of differences, a crossbreeding, and a bricolage (1993), that is, a series of translations between human and non-human actors (1987b). Although translation-studies research has not focused specifically on the significance of the expanded meaning of the translation concept as found in ANT sociology, it has so far limited itself to applying the articulation of the heterogeneous (human and non-human) actors within a linguistic translation network (Buzelin, 2005, 2007; Luo, 2020) without reaching conclusions about the potential value of including the sociological definition of translation within the wider spectrum of the concept (Basalamah, 2012, 2021b; Marais, 2019a). Therefore, it is worthwhile to examine Serres’s significance for translation-studies research by emphasizing the distinctiveness of his thought compared to the fashionable but declining Marxist trends in the French intellectual landscape of the twentieth century – so much so that Serres has announced early the demise of the Marxist paradigm of production, as symbolized by Prometheus, in favor of that of information and communication, as symbolized by Hermes (1982a, 2003). The required conceptual apparatus for our age is 137

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one that relies not so much on the exchange of goods, but rather on the communication and proliferation of information (Serres, 2014; Watkin, 2020, p. 325). As in Paul Ricœur who viewed translation as a crucial ‘remedy’ to overcome the challenges of the heterogeneity and plurality of contemporary societies (2007, p. 28), Serres’s communication paradigm implies that translation – which is by definition a communicational concept – is a primary operator in the Serresean conceptual realm. This hypothesis is verifiable to the extent that in almost every instance of Serres’s works pertaining to communication, Hermes – who is representative of the very paradigmatic change that was observed in the twentieth century – is invoked as the messenger of the gods, the god of travelers and traders, the guardian of roads and crossroads, and the god of translation and communication (1974). In L’art des Ponts: Homo Pontifex (2006), Serres uses the symbol of the bridge – a common metaphor to designate the work of translation – to illustrate the processes of connection between disparate and sometimes opposing positions, people or objects, but he also deems the symbol to be a bridge (1–2). Among the ‘figures of thought’ (Watkin, 2020) in Serres’s symbolic characters, ‘the parasite’ (Serres, 1982b) appears as another central ‘conceptual character’ (Serres, 2014) to illustrate not only the necessity, challenges, and conditions of communication, but also the importance of the foundational triadic relation that is specific to the age of communication and that has been demonstrated since the monadology of Leibniz (2003). The character of the parasite is introduced by La Fontaine’s fable of ‘The town mouse and the country mouse’ (1668), where the dinner at the host’s parasitic home (the town mouse’s) is itself disrupted by the parasitic knock on the wall of the human occupant of the house. Relying on one of the French meanings of ‘parasite,’ Serres establishes the principle of the noise as the condition of existence of any communication. The noise, the parasitic interference or the blank, represents the potential space or crossroads of all possibilities of connections, relations, transfers and displacements. In that sense, it may be possible to conceive of the remainder or the untranslatable, which appears as an impediment to the transmission of meaning, as the prerequisite for translation to actually happen, not to mention that miscommunication, misunderstanding or even the lack of communication altogether may well be the origin of convergence, relationship or even ultimately communion. Thus, the parasite shares with translation the paradox of communication: the presence of the parasite, which is a repressed mediation, could mean the inevitable failure of communication, whereas, according to Serres, it is in fact because of the existence of a parasite that communication can occur: To understand the communication between A and B we need a form of mediation, a third space or as Serres (1982a) sometimes calls it a ‘third man’. The ‘third man’ is the space that is automatically required to make communication possible – ‘a third exists before the other… There is always a mediate, a middle, and intermediary’ (Serres, 1982b, p. 57) …The introduction of the third is the point of exchange, the crossroads through which communication happens. Serres calls the third ‘the parasite’ (Brown, 2013, p. 87). Not only does the notion of the ‘third man’ point to translation as the tertium comparationis of the communication process, it also implies – although somehow negatively on the one hand – that translation is a parasitic activity in that it exists by relying on the activity of others; on the other hand, according to the more positive interpretation of Serres, whereby the parasite is the very condition of communication, translation may be considered as the condition and origin of authorship because there is no such thing as creation ex-nihilo: ‘No text can be completely original, because language itself, in its very essence, is already a translation’ (Paz, 1992, p. 154). By including the third – the parasite – Serres extends to the social and the political determining role of mediation/translation, which entails transformation and 138

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disequilibrium that in turn redistributes relations and ultimately reshuffles social ordering (Brown, 2013, pp. 96–97). It can also be inferred that the parasite/translation is a means to infuse ethics into relationships between social actors (including objects and subjects) in that the third allows for them to be contractual, punctual and continually reshaped. Although applying Serres’s thought to more recent Translation Studies could be pursued further, suffice it to conclude this section by mentioning the potential transdisciplinary role of the concept of translation between the ‘three cultures’ of knowledge (Kagan, 2009). As opposed to Gadamer’s attempt to emphasize the hermeneutical specificity of the humanities to distinguish them from the pervasiveness of the methods of the natural sciences and their encroachment on other fields of knowledge (2004), Serres’s agenda throughout his works is to bring together the humanities, the social sciences, and the natural sciences. In the fifth volume of Hermès, Le Passage du Nord-Ouest [Hermes, The North-West Passage] (1980), Serres famously illustrates this continuous effort through his eclectic writing style, explaining language with references from literature, history, art, sciences, craftsmanship and philosophy. One of his richest figures of speech is the ‘Infamous North-West passage’… that notoriously difficult and hazardous sea route connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, which ‘opens closes, twists across the immense, fractal arctic archipelago, along an extravagantly complicated maze of gulfs, channels, basins, and sounds, between Baffin Bay and Banks Island’. (Watkin, 2020, p. 118) According to Watkin, Each navigation from one domain of knowledge to another is local and unique. Icebergs move, ice floes break, grow and shrink, sometimes blocking the passage altogether; currents reverse, flowing now more slowly, now faster; shallows and land masses frustrate navigation. (ibid.) This means that in his general paradigm of communication and ‘science of relations,’ (2003a) Serres’s metaphor of the North-West passage seems to point again to what we already know about linguistic translation, which not only takes a unique path to convey and transform the meaning of the translated text at each instance of its occurrences but also broadens its scope by becoming the inter-/transdisciplinary agent that connects disparate fields of knowledge (Marais, 2014; Blumczynski, 2016). In this latter sense, to translate is to find the intersecting or tangential point by which a concept or idea may be invented. Akin to the mission of Deleuze’s philosophy, which is to create concepts (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994), Serres considers that the characters he has created are the representations of new paths of knowledge, whereby he discovers more than just new passages, but rather ‘singularities’ (Serres, 2014), through the archipelagos of thought or concepts. Serres explains this by suggesting that traditional philosophy is used to practice the economy of generalizing and short-circuiting thought with concepts, while the ‘algorithmic thought’ of computers allows to move through all the singularities and examples of knowledge and the world (ibid.). This is another common defining feature of the concept of translation, as it does not allow for the generalization of all its instances and iterations but works according to a ‘case-by-case’ logic of singularities (Lacour & Campos, 2005; Passeron & Revel, 2005; Basalamah, 2018). Like Cronin’s ‘tradosphere’ that captures ‘the different forms of translation implied by the multiple connections 139

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between the organic and the inorganic’ (Cronin, 2017, p. 5), Pantope (pan meaning all and topos meaning space=everywhere) incarnates the Serresean philosopher who has to move between all possible fields of knowledge and speak all their idioms like a universal translator/ mediator of all existing disciplines (Serres, 2014). At this juncture of the chapter, it may be useful to note that while the philosophy of relations seems to allow for some connections with Translation Studies and vice-versa, this does not mean that there is a convergence between these fields to the extent that one can speak of a real conversation and even to a lesser extent of cooperation between them. While Translation Studies and philosophy have been encroaching on each other – especially philosophy by using translation as an operative concept – it remains the case that properly philosophical thinking has not yet taken place within Translation Studies in order to pursue the philosophical broadening and deepening of the discipline’s scope. For this reason, this chapter will now move to the next category of the philosophical approach to translation. In the next section, as we leave philosophy and turn to our discipline, we will identify several instances in the literature of Translation Studies where a connection can be found between translation and philosophy. While this can be verified by the occurrence of the expression ‘philosophy of translation’ in articles and some of their titles in Translation Studies (e.g., Ladmiral, 1989, 1992, 2010; Tymoczko, 2007; Weissbrod, 2009; Malmkjær, 2010; Blumczynski, 2016), there is nothing approaching an actual or recognized ‘philosophy of translation’ as such in the field, although Marais claims to have produced one through the enlargement of translation to include Peircean semiotics (2014, 2019).

Translation and philosophy In the introduction to his last published and still untranslated monography, La traduction et la lettre ou l’auberge du lointain (1999), Antoine Berman (1942–1991) attempts to define the discourse on translation, that is, Translation Studies, which he referred to by the French term traductologie, by stating that Translation Studies, without in any way being a ‘philosophy of translation,’ must necessarily root itself in philosophical thought. This is done by means of self-elucidation, a naïve phenomenology of the translating act. It is founded on the unclarified fact, although alluded to by Benjamin and Heidegger, that there exists between the philosophies and translation a proximity of essence… There is an old link between ‘philosophizing’ and ‘translating.’ (Berman, 1999, p. 18, my translation) Sathya Rao, in an article inspired by his doctoral thesis, remarks that the ‘enlightening ambitions of the philosophies (of translation) by invoking their “kinship” or “proximity of essence” with translation … seem to compromise all attempts at clarifying this relationship to translation through philosophy’ (Rao, 2011, p. 84, my translation). For Rao, the affinity of origin between translation and philosophy according to Berman does not allow for their mutual explanation. Although apparently demarcating Translation Studies in such a way that excludes it from being a ‘philosophy of translation,’ Berman is nonetheless a brilliant example among the earliest translation-studies scholars who relied on philosophical thought. In a posthumous text co-edited by his wife, Isabelle Berman, and his translator, Chantal Wright (Berman et al., 2019), Berman explains why ‘for philosophy… translation has become a central question where what is at stake is philosophy itself and its own development [devenir]’ (19). He then enumerates ‘the six obvious areas within which philosophy has to contend with the fact that translation constitutes its most urgent fate’ (ibid.). 140

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The focus of the book is the translation by Wright of the notes [cahiers] of the lectures he delivered at the Paris Collège international de philosophie, which are a series of ten commentaries on ‘The Task of the Translator’ by Benjamin (1996). Berman discusses Benjamin’s article by situating it in ‘a greater whole, a metaphysics of language in which translation would occupy a pivotal position – more so than in conventional philosophies of language’ (Berman et al., 2019, p. 30). One example is the notion of ‘pure language,’ which Berman considers as ‘the ultimate object of philosophical reflection, the language of truth… The task of philosophy is to discover it – and that is also the task of translation… This, for Benjamin, is how philosophy and translation relate to one another’ (31). Despite this apparently specific aim to the linguistic perspective in philosophy, Berman’s commentary on Benjamin’s text tries nonetheless to remain within a more encompassing and general understanding of philosophy. While it was noted earlier that translation determines philosophy’s fate more generally, Berman points out, in his reading of Benjamin’s notion of ‘survival’ [Überleben] and ‘development/unfolding’ [Entfaltung] of the literary text through translation, to a ‘digression [that] is of a philosophical nature and deals with the essence of life’ (101). This opens the scope of translation to participate in ‘the philosopher[‘s] task of understanding all-natural life in terms of the more extended (or more vast) life of history’ (102). As a result of translation’s contribution to the development of a philosophical consciousness of the historicity of texts as lifeforms, Berman concludes that ‘philosophy and translation are related in the sense that both are governed by the law of the task’ (ibid.). Although translation is associated with philosophy by being entrusted with the responsibility of life and history, these considerations remain restricted to Benjamin’s philosophy of language. Interestingly, though, while Ladmiral and Berman rely on some notions of philosophy and have been described as having only a ‘regional’ interest in contemporary philosophy (Rao, 2011, p. 77), their work still seems to be subject to the pitfall of ‘philosophical impressionism’ (78) and ‘theoretism’ (79), that is, the risk of losing contact with the reality of translation as linguistic transfer (Le Blanc, 2009). Taking up Ladmiral’s term ‘traductosophie’ [trans-philosophy] to describe this strand of ‘regional’ use of philosophy to reflect on instances of translation as historicity and as a practice, Rao contends that there is only a difference of degree between trans-philosophers – such as Ladmiral and Berman – and philosophers who ‘inscribe their reflection on translation within the framework of wider questioning about language, science or metaphysics’ (Rao, 2011, p. 79, my translation). On the one hand, Berman resists the danger of theoretism by criticizing the ‘Platonic essence of translation’ as traditionally presented, that is, separating the signifier from the signified and being prepared to discard the former for the sake of finding a common universal meaning (Berman, 1986). On the other hand, however, Ladmiral criticizes theoretism and excessive abstraction by emphasizing that translation is ‘a praxeology’ and ‘is opposed by definition to the discourse of theory and to the fantasy of supposed techniques’ (Ladmiral, 1994, p. 211, my translation), as ‘praxeology is bound to verbalize the reflection that is implicit in it’ (Ladmiral, 1980, pp. 28–29, cited by Rao (2011, p. 81), my translation). This means that, despite their recourse to philosophical concepts and translational reflections, trans-philosophers aspire to remain resolutely grounded in the ‘practice’ (Ladmiral) and ‘experience’ (Berman) of translation. It remains necessary, however, to briefly add to Rao’s assessment of Berman’s transphilosophy that if it does not amount to a ‘philosophy of translation’ – as he believes Quine’s, Heidegger’s and Derrida’s are to be considered – Berman’s ethics of translation is not only inspired by the German Romantic philosophy; it is also a major branch of philosophy that Paul Ricœur took stock of in his On Translation opus (2006), in which he figures translation as hospitality. 141

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For this group of translation-studies scholars, philosophy was then restricted to being the provider of concepts and reflexivity that allowed for, if not the philosophizing and critiquing of translated concepts, then at least the distance that helped to delimit the then nascent field of Translation Studies as an independent discipline.

Toward a philosophy of translation It may be helpful to divide the newer strand of philosophical approach to translation discussed here into two broad, but in several respects overlapping, categories. The first category, which may be described as a pan-philosophy of translation, includes authors who have developed a body of conceptual works that have either used major philosophical categories and current objects of philosophical investigations – such as ethics, time, history, Anthropocene, anthropocentrism, ecology, interspecies relations – to elaborate their reflections or produced reflections that would possibly lead to the articulation of a full-fledged philosophy of translation. The second category, which I call a transdisciplinary philosophy of translation, is concerned mainly with emphasizing the potential of conceiving translation metatheoretically and as an operative concept of transdisciplinary displacements through various epistemic cultures, including the humanities, social sciences and natural sciences. This categorization is perhaps too new for this possibility to become a subfield of Translation Studies. It is therefore proposed here only tentatively.

Pan-philosophy of translation The choice of calling this category ‘pan-philosophy of translation’ stems from the idea that the works that will be succinctly presented here themselves all deal with philosophical notions, through which some large portions of reality are conceived of. While not claiming to reflect all relevant representatives in the domain, this category includes, for the purposes of this overview, the works of Kobus Marais (2014, 2019a; 2019b, 2021), Cronin (2017) and Robinson (1991, 2001, 2011, 2017). Responding to the call of ‘enlarging translation’ (Tymoczko, 2007), Marais ventures into a two-pronged criticism of translation-studies research. The first criticism is of a conceptual nature. Marais addresses it to the scholars of the discipline by refuting the restricted linguistic-oriented conceptualization of translation. For Marais, the concept of translation should be studied within the wider framework of Peircean semiotics instead of the verbo-centric one that reduces it to its ‘narrow interlingual’ aspect (2019a, p. 45). Marais finds that even the ‘sociological approaches are actually sociological approaches to interlingual translation only, and do not enlarge the concept of translation itself ’ (p. 31). The second criticism is an epistemological one that sets the stage for the paradigm of ‘complexity thinking’ as the one most suitable to conceive of translation, as opposed to the ‘paradigm of simplification’ (Morin, 2008, p. 3 cited in Marais and Meylaerts [2019b, p. 1]), which is reductionist in that it believes in order and determinism’ (ibid.). In line with most complexity theorists, Marais emphasizes that in order to deal with uncertainty and ambiguity, Translation Studies should adopt a model that allows the handling of complexity, paradox, non-linearity (p. 3), and emergence (p. 6) and move beyond ‘binary oppositions’ (p. 8) toward a ‘triadic semiotic process’ (Marais, 2021, pp. 7–29). In addressing these two major critiques, Marais shows that all ‘“inter” and “trans” process-phenomena (and others) … are semiotic process-phenomena called “translation” by Peirce’ (2019a, p. 4). As a working definition of this wide net-casting translation-like 142

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phenomena, Marais proposes a ‘deductive conceptualization’: ‘Translation entails negentropic work to create meaning by means of imposing constraints on the semiotic process’ (ibid.). By approaching translation from this all-encompassing perspective, Marais depicts the ontological-processual realm in which translation should be studied. Instead of being limited to interlingual communication between human beings, he argues that Translation Studies should be open to deal with ‘the ubiquity of intentionality and communication in [all] living organisms’ (115), which is the definition of biosemiotics. As a result, Marais makes a postanthropocentric argument in favor of A (Bio)Semiotic Theory of Translation (2019a, p. 115) In this sense, Marais sheds a philosophical light on the extent of the ontology that should be explored to accommodate the breadth and variety of the translational processes that occur within and among all living organisms (121). The awareness of the necessity to live by a way of thinking that is suitable to a post-anthropocentric world is also shared by Cronin in Eco-translation: Translation and Ecology in the Age of the Anthropocene (2017). Although not overtly philosophical in his terminology and conceptual categories, Cronin takes a resolutely wide-angled perspective to deal with translation to the extent that its implications presuppose some philosophical reflections on the status and situation of the human being in the contemporary world as (should be) experienced on planet earth. To address the notion of translation in a wider spatial and temporal framework, Cronin develops an argument about the breadth of the reality within which humanity needs to reframe itself in order to minimize the impact of the environmental challenges it is facing. Not only does Cronin agree with Marais that Translation Studies’ scholarship should embrace a posthuman paradigm, whereby the work of translation would extend to and permeate the entire natural world, but he also situates his ‘formulation of a new political ecology of translation’ (2017, p. 3) within the broad backgrounds of ‘deep history’ (Smail, 2008; Zalasiewicz, 2010; Chakrabarty, 2021) and ‘deep ecology’ (Sessions, 1995; Rothenberg, 2000; Devall & Sessions, 2001). These philosophies, whether environmental or historical, extend the scope of the operational context of translation and decenter the narrative about human beings toward a Version of ecosemiotics, the world in which humans find themselves … always and everywhere in what might be termed a tradosphere. By tradosphere we mean the sum of all translation systems on the planet, all the ways in which information circulates between living and non-living organisms and is translated into a language or a code that can be processed or understood by the receiving entity. (Cronin, 2017, p. 71) Although approached from a different epistemological perspective than Marais’s, Cronin’s enlargement of the concept of translation and the scope of its application converges with Marais’s in that they both rethink translation in light of the whole spatiotemporal reality known to humanity instead of within the confines of its traditional parochial human language-based dimension. It may be argued that even though Cronin’s scholarship in his latest work does not claim or aspire to be a philosophical inquiry on translation,4 it is nonetheless a ground-breaking proposition in the field of ethics, which is a major chapter of philosophy. In the same vein as the literature on deep ecology (Naess, 1989; Drengson & Delvall, 2008) and “ecosophy” (Guattari, 2000), Cronin expands the responsibility of translatorship to encompass all living and non-living beings, working toward a ‘post-human ethics,’ following that of Braidotti (2013), that ‘implies an end to forms of “anthropolatry” which not only obscure emergent 143

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forms of species thinking but consign all other species to dangerous, destructive and ecologically untenable forms of subordination’ (cited in Cronin, 2017, p. 13). For Cronin, this repositioning of human beings in their rightful place, on an equal footing with the rest of the earthlings, and asking them to embrace their ethical responsibilities toward all parts of their environment, should ultimately lead to ‘the rise of geo-centrism, the notion that the planetary must now be figured into all our thinking’ (ibid.). This means that ethical thinking in Cronin’s terms implies that the enlargement of translation to all animate and non-animate beings and the reinforcement of communication and harmonious coexistence with/among them is, by the same token, considered as what may be termed ethical translational thinking. The integration of humanity within the broader framework of its environment is no less philosophically challenging for the traditional empirical strand of research in Translation Studies than the integration of the individual’s mind and body with those of society, as Douglas Robinson has proposed since The Translator’s Turn (1991). Because it is widely informed by his practice as a professional translator, Robinson’s theoretical core is founded mainly on the phenomenological experience of the translation practitioner. In fact, his ‘innovative studies of translation have initiated two new paradigms in translation research – the somatic paradigm and the performative paradigm’ (Zhu, 2012, p. 34, original emphasis). Robinson’s somatic conceptualization of translation is a phenomenological proposition about the integration of both body and mind, as well as of the individual and social dimensions of meaning, in producing translations. While the latter binary seems to intersect Toury’s theory of norms (2012), Robinson’s notion of ‘sway’ (2011) is deepened with his fundamental reliance on the neuroscientific works of Damasio (1994, 1999, 2003). In his performative linguistic explanatory model, Robinson widens the framework of the translation process to include the more complex interactive realities that exist between the social and the psychological. In addition to the social-constructivist and phenomenological epistemological underpinnings of his approach to translation, Robinson is philosophically influenced by deconstructionism because similar to Derrida’s questioning of western metaphysics, ‘Robinson questions the metaphysical translation theory in the West’ (ibid.) by critiquing the structuralist and dualist thinking of the linguistic paradigm as found in Translation Studies (Zhu, 2012, p. 74, 76). Despite the inspiration that Robinson takes from Derrida’s deconstructive philosophy, it appears that he does not fully follow Derrida when it comes to the uncertainty of reality, as he ‘believes in the constructedness of our knowledge and thus of reality … and has been interested in exploring the ways in which construction occurs’ (p. 78) – hence his phenomenological somatic-based theorization of translation. When it comes to other philosophical influences, Robinson also draws on empiricism through his somatic theory, which aspires to ‘offer an alternative paradigm for the study of translation – one that is not mentalist but explicitly and complexly physicalist’ (Robinson, 1991, pp. ix–x). What is remarkable in Robinson’s philosophy of translation is the steadily developed phenomenological direction he has taken since his first major work. Moreover, this post-Kantian subjectivist perspective is complemented by other related philosophical approaches. For lack of space, I will discuss only two additional examples. First, following the Kantian tradition of self-aware subjectivity, hermeneutics is a key methodology in the humanities, whose philosophical brand lies at the heart of Robinson’s epistemology of translation. In line with Gadamer’s dialogical use of translation as a metaphor of interpretation – even ‘a culmination of translation’ (Gadamer, 2004, p. 386) – Robinson integrates Gadamer’s ontological hermeneutics and conceives of translation as the dialectical building of meaning that 144

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engages the mind-body idiosomatics of the individual in an iterative process of communication with the ideosomatics of the environing society (Robinson, 1991). Second, Robinson contends that in his work he set out To counteract the idealized mentalism of Western linguistics since Augustine … [and his] point is only that the Western insistence on the deprivileging the body—intuition, emotion somatic signals—in the study of linguistic communication has had a debilitating effect on our understanding of what happens when we speak. (Robinson, 1991, p. xiii) For Robinson, western rationality as developed since the Enlightenment has reduced its scope to the mental faculty of reasoning, which post-Kantian sociologists and philosophers such as Max Weber (see Kalberg, 1980 for his typology) and Habermas (1992) have revisited and critiqued through their respective socio-historical and post-metaphysical grids of analysis. ‘Pure’ or ‘substantive’ reason represents the work of translation as purely mental and separated from ‘practical reason,’ whereas rationality according to Robinson cannot be conceived of without including the intuitive and bodily aspects that make up his somatic theory of translation. Robinson calls this rationality pre- and post-rationalist in that it moves away from the purely rationalistic mentalist paradigm and constructs a new epistemology by integrating the sensory/bodily dimension with the translator’s subjectivity (Robinson, 2001, p. 13). This pluralistic and postmodernist integrative view of the nature and extent of human knowledge is an indication of the epistemological positioning of Robinson on the continuum of perceived reality ‘between mysticism and rationalism’ (p. 14). To put it in pre-rationalist terms, translation is a hybridizing spirit-channeling of both ‘those aspects of translation that have never been successfully controlled by reason’ and those of ‘the bivalent framework’ of the rationalist regime (ibid.). Robinson’s phenomenology is, then, the philosophical exploration of translation as the epitome of studied objects belonging to the uncharted territories of hybrid reason or of those beyond Enlightenment reason. This last insight in Robinson’s epistemological framework brings us to one of his latest theoretical constructs of translation, which he calls ‘translationality’ (2017). In his book of the same title, Robinson defines ‘translationality as change, force, impact, motion, energy’ (p. ix), ‘as transformationality: the constant emergingness of everything, through embodied, situated, performative interactions’ (x). After illustrating his concept, Robinson connects the threads of his book in his conclusion by elaborating a continuity from Roman Jakobson’s tripartite types of translation through the medical humanities (MH)5 to translational medicine (TM). He ‘nam[es] the sort of translation at work in TM interepistemic translation: translation from one epistemic system … to another’ (200, [original emphasis]). This means that in addition to the traditional forms of translation identified by Jakobson, Robinson extends the meaning of translation to include transmissive and transformational processes among somatic feelings of pain, literary transpositions, dramatic interpretations and epistemic systems of ethe 6 or characters. Translationality is, then, a phenomenological experience conceived of ‘as transformationality: the constructivist/periperformativist realization (making real) of our experience, which always changes things’ (201). Robinson’s philosophy of translation consists of this multi-dimensional conceptual elaboration, spanning over thirty years and almost twenty books, which indicates that it is not a limited or an occasional philosophical undertaking, but is rather one that seems apparently programmed, deepened along the way and increasingly extending its sources and fields of 145

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investigation beyond the humanities and social sciences to include even the natural sciences (neuroscience, medicine, etc.).

Transdisciplinary philosophy of translation This section is dedicated to the works of Piotr Blumzcynski and to my own works. The reason these authors’ research is categorized as “transdisciplinary” is that both have envisioned the advancement of translation studies in terms of its liberation from the confines of its disciplinary and epistemic origins and in terms of opening the scope of its research to all domains of knowledge. While it may be argued that interdisciplinarity would amount to such a program, these scholars insist on the fact that transdisciplinarity is not merely the connection and cooperation of translation studies to and with other disciplines. Rather, transdisciplinarity entails not only the search for translation or translation-like phenomena but also the movement of translation-studies scholars into other disciplinary and epistemic cultures in order to enrich their understanding of the conceptual nebula or the “cluster concept” (Tymoczko, 2007) of translation and to develop a metatheoretical conceptualization of the object of study and a broader mapping of its field of investigation. As a result, it should be noted that this attempt at abstraction is considered philosophical in that it reframes the concept of translation within various epistemic cultures, rethinks the scope of its applications and meanings, as well as contributes to the refoundation of the discipline as a whole. In Ubiquitous Translation (2016), Blumczynski parallels the travelling notion of narrative in the Humanities by Bal (2002) with that of translation. Blumczynski suggests that “it is not so much the concept of translation that travels through various disciplines of the humanities. It is rather us, both as translators and translation researchers, who travel through these disciplines” (Blumczynski, 2016, p. 2). This conceptualization of translation not only seeks to “demonstrate its ubiquity” but also vouches for the promise of “a new transdisciplinary research paradigm” (x). Although Blumczynski endeavors “to demonstrate the epistemological potential of translation… [to make] connections to various disciplines” (ix–x) and to encourage “transdisciplinary thinking” (22), he seems to remain within the divide between the “multiple WHAT-ness” of the “arborescent epistemological paradigm” of interdisciplinarity, and the “idea of a certain HOW” of transdisciplinarity, which “tolerates and invites paradoxes and ambiguities, tensions, overlaps and discontinuities, and recognizes fuzzy borders” – so much so that “transdisciplinarity views knowledge as rhizomatic” (29). While this reductive overview undoubtedly has some pedagogical merit, it obscures and sidelines the existing literature that distinguishes between interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity beyond the substantive objects of research and their methods (for example, Finkenthal, 2000; Nicolescu, 2002; Thompson Klein, 2004, 2014). According to Thompson Klein, following Jantsch (1970), transdisciplinarity is a matter of epistemologies, “the interconnectedness of all aspects of reality, transcending the dynamics of a dialectical synthesis to grasp the total dynamics of reality as a whole… penetrating the entire system of science” (Thompson Klein, 1990, p. 66). If this is true, then transdisciplinarity is distinct from interdisciplinarity not only in its focus on method (“HOW-ness”) and its ability to connect ideas rhizomatically, as suggested by Blumczynski (2016); transdisciplinarity is even more distinct from interdisciplinarity in its acknowledgement of “multidimensionality”, which, according to Basarab Nicolescu (2002), “is capable of describing coherence among different levels of reality, inducing an open structure of unity” (Thompson Klein, 2004, p. 516), and relies on the “logic of the included middle” – a concept from Serres 146

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(1982b). Such an “open-minded rationality” (Nicolescu, 2002, p. 149) reaches far beyond the horizon of Blumczynski’s epistemological model. The other issue with Blumczynski’s theorization is that if “translation is ubiquitous, somehow ‘already there’, ready to be discovered at multiple entry and exit points of the epistemological map” (30), then a “rhizomatic epistemological model” favoring a “processual knowledge and transferability of qualitative insights across the humanities” (1, [emphases added]) will fall short of at least three key components in order to amount to a philosophy of translation. First, an “epistemology” requires an epistemological awareness of one’s position, which means that there must be clarity in the way translation is defined prior to travelling across disciplines. If it is not only a “philological or textual operation” but more of “translational phenomena” or a “translational thought” (xiii), then one should perhaps undertake a transdisciplinary philosophical conceptualization of what all these definitional threads may lead to. Second, the “transdisciplinary” travelling of translators and researchers, if rhizomatic, should not be limited to the humanities but be extended to other knowledge cultures, especially if conceptualized within the framework of an integrative philosophy of translation. And third, in the case where translation is conceived of as a phenomenological experience of moving through various disciplinary epistemologies (in addition to being a travelling concept), it would be paradoxical to confine the conceptualization of translation into a model of “transfer” instead of one of transformation, whereby the transdisciplinary subject would experience and perform a process of Bildung (Berman, 1992). As a second and final example of scholarship that has set out to develop a philosophy of translation within translation studies, this author cannot avoid discussing his own work. Since his first book, Le droit de traduire: une politique culturelle pour la mondialisation [The Right to Translate: A Cultural Politics for Globalization, my translation] (2009), Basalamah sought to conceptualize translation and the status of the translator in relation to the concepts of the original and of authorship. While this first body of research has already taken a philosophical bent by applying a Foucauldian archeology to translation and copyright law, the body of research that followed delved into philosophy even further over three stages: first, by identifying the early seeds in translation studies that may lead to the development of a philosophy of translation from within; second, by investigating the applicability of a philosophical approach to the concept of translation to the field of the social, and third, by pursuing the intuition according to which translation is a conceptual template that would amount to a philosophical transdisciplinary paradigm. First, in “De la cultural translation à la philosophie de la traduction” [“From Cultural Translation to the Philosophy of Translation”] (2013), Basalamah shows that it is a natural, inevitable, and even salutary development for translation studies to extend its interdisciplinary scope through the metaphor of “cultural translation” to the sociopolitical realm – and beyond by following the works of postcolonial studies scholars (Rushdie, 1992; Bhabha, 2004; Buden et al., 2009). This extension also follows Henri Meschonnic’s notion of “generalized translation” (1978), which finds its philosophical elaboration in the Serresian conceptualization of translation as a multidimensional and transdisciplinary transformational operator (Basalamah, 2010a; see also the previous section “Philosophy of Relations”). Second, Basalamah also conducted a philosophical investigation of the various occurrences of the concept of translation, especially those in social and political philosophy, by elaborating the notions of “citizen translation” (2005, 2021a) and “inter-referential translation” (2010b; 2012; 2014, 2021b) as processes of dialogical interpretations, mutual comprehension, and the ensuing transformations of distinct social, political, or religious groups within the same linguistic and social space. This strand of studies, conducted over fifteen 147

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years, demonstrates Basalamah’s ongoing effort to develop a research program that he calls “social translation” – as distinct from the existing sociologies of translation, which study the sociological movements of texts and agents between languages and social contexts. It also reflects his resolve to implement his conceptualization of translation to understand the social unrests and tensions that have been occurring among social groups (e.g., religious and non-religious) within western secular majority societies (North America and western Europe; Basalamah, 2021b, p. 1). Third, besides the creation of a philosophy of translation within translation studies as a subdiscipline dedicated to the conceptualization of translation in all its actual and potential instances (Basalamah, 2021c), Basalamah (2018) has argued for the coinage of a metaconcept that “when defined at a higher level of abstraction, demonstrates the capability of conceptually unifying the disparate instances into an ‘archetype’” (Basalamah, 2018, p. 483, original emphasis). Conceived of as such, this meta-concept, which the author calls “archtranslation”,7 allows for the inclusion of the epistemological and phenomenological posture of “thinking translationally”, which is, according to Basalamah, “the ability to associate an awareness of the permanence of change to the capacity of connecting and articulating apparently disparate and heterogeneous objects of knowledge and the world”.8 As a final note to this broad and selective overview of transdisciplinary philosophies of translation, it may be useful to observe that not only are Deleuze’s (1994) and Serres’s (2014) are conceptions of philosophy as tasked with the creation of concepts fulfilled, but also that a broader horizon of transdisciplinary research can open up for the discipline if it avails itself of a subdisciplinary space dedicated to the philosophy of translation.

Conclusion This chapter sought to review the philosophical approaches of translation in relation to philosophy through three different types of relationships: the concept of translation as conceived of in various philosophies; the intersection of translation and philosophy in translation studies; and the construction of the new subfield of philosophy of translation. Aside from the impressive number of works that connect translation to philosophy and the thorny task of mapping them — sometimes in a schematic, unintentionally reductionist fashion — one can observe, even since before the cultural turn, the growing concern of translation-studies scholarship for the world and the need to contribute to its improvement. It is my hope that the conceptual research reviewed in this chapter will allow for easier dialogues among translation-studies scholars themselves and with scholars from other fields. This discussion can also help to diversify the concerns of scholars and encourage them to explore new disciplinary horizons and objects of study, and most of all, to fulfill the interdisciplinary nature of translation studies (Snell-Hornby et al., 1994). If translation studies does not limit itself to the study of textual transfers or semiotic transformations, it could open up to investigating research domains as diverse as, for example, social-change strategies for more justice in democratic states, the activities and communication of grassroots and peripheral media networks working for more equity in news broadcasting, cultural transformations in the transmission of identity among generations of immigrants, the transformative processes occurring in education (in both learners and instructors), and the mutual understanding and the making visible of diverse minor or repressed epistemologies (Santos, 2006; de Sousa Santos, 2016). To take up Blumczynski on his proposal regarding “the ubiquity of translation” (2016), if the concept of translation is indeed ubiquitous, then translation studies should demonstrate this by developing, within its confines and across its borders, an all-embracing philosophical 148

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approach, such as a philosophy of translation to be devoted to the conceptual investigation of translation in all its actual or possible occurrences in all fields of knowledge. However, to do that, conceptual research should no longer be treated as an outsider in translation-studies research and, most of all, in translation-studies graduate programs. With its ever-increasing extensions and disparities (van Doorslaer, 2007), translation studies should allow, as a corollary to the proposed philosophy of translation, to develop a metatheoretical overview (Basalamah, 2016), such as the one undertaken, for example, in sociology by Ritzer (1981, 1991). When sociology developed in a surge of multiple and diverse paradigmatic directions in the 1960s–1970s (Ritzer, 1975), Ritzer undertook a second-order level of reflexive examination of the way in which existing competing trends within the first-order level have given rise to theories. This strand of studies has brought to light what will be called “metasociology” (Ritzer, 1991), or “sociology of sociology” (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992), or “reflexive sociology” (Wacquant, 1996). The same can be done within translation studies. However, despite the similarity in the development of different paradigms and the subdisciplinary disparities between sociology and translation studies, there are some limitations to the comparison. Because translation studies is an interdiscipline and its key concept – translation – has transdisciplinary potential, its research methodologies need not be primarily empirical. This means that the overarching metalevel of study that would be appropriate for translation studies should not simply be “metatheoretical” but should rather be wider in scope, that is – be philosophical.

Notes 1 I would like to acknowledge and thank Gefen Bar On-Santor who helped me to edit and make this chapter more readable in English. 2 One could add ‘paradigm,’ but this chapter will include it in the notion of philosophy. 3 Which means ‘self-formation, cultivation and education’ (original emphasis, 2004: 8). 4 As he has indicated to me in a personal communication. 5 ‘History of medicine, bioethics, narrative medicine, medicine in literature, creative writing, disability studies, and various social sciences (for example, medical anthropology and sociology) can all be part of medical humanities programs or curricula’ (Dolan, 2015, p. 1). 6 Plural of ethos. 7 “What is Arch-Translation?” is a paper delivered at the 2021 TransPhil Symposium “Philosophy in/ on Translation” organized by the University of Vienna and the University of East Anglia. Available at: https://transphil.univie.ac.at/symposium-2021/biographies-abstracts-talks/abstracts-talks/ 8 “Thinking Translationally” is a paper-dialogue with Sherry Simon at the Nida Center of Advanced Research on Translation (NCART) Summer School of July 2021. Available at: https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=Q92yOjRkPf k

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Thompson Klein, J. (2014). Discourses of Transdisciplinarity: Looking Back to the Future. Futures, 63, 68–74. http://doi:10.1016/j.futures.2014.08.008 Toury, G. (2012). Descriptive Translation Studies: And Beyond (revised ed.). Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company Publishing. Tymoczko, M. (2007). Enlarging Translation, Empowring Translators. Manchester: St Jerome publishing. van Doorslaer, L. (2007). Risking Conceptual Maps: Mapping as a Keywords-Related Tool Underlying the Online Translation Studies Bibliography. Target. International Journal of Translation Studies, 19(2), 217–233. http://doi:10.1075/target.19.2.04van Venuti, L. (1998). The Scandals of Translation. For an Ethics of Difference. London & New York: Routledge. Vial, T. (2013). Schleiermacher. London & New York: Bloomsbury Publishing. Wacquant, L. 1996. “Toward a reflexive sociology: A workshop with Pierre Bourdieu”, in Stephen P. Turner (Ed.), Social theory and sociology: The classics and beyond (pp. 213–228). Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Watkin, C. (2019). Why Michel Serres?. Substance no. 150 (Homage to Michel Serres), 48(3), 30–40. Watkin, C. (2020). Michel Serres: Figures of Thought. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Weissbrod, R. (2009). Philosophy of Translation Meets Translation Studies. Target. International Journal of Translation Studies, 21(1), 58–73. http://doi:10.1075/target.21.1.03wei Whorf, B. L. (1956). Science and Linguistics. In J. B. Carrol (Ed.), Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writing of Benjamin Lee Whorf (pp. 207–219). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Wrathall, M. (2005). How to Read Heidegger. London & New York: W. W. Norton, and Co. Wrathall M. (ed.) (2021). The Cambridge Heidegger Lexicon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zalasiewicz. ( January 2010). The Planet in a Pebble: A Journey into Earth’s Deep History. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zhu, L. (2012). The Translator-Centered Multidisciplinary Construction: Douglas Robinson’s Theories Explained. Bern: Peter Lang AG. Philosophical approaches 71.

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Introduction According to Deely (2006, p. 216), ‘Semiotics is the body of knowledge that arises from the thematic or systematized study of the action of signs, called “semiosis.”’ Linguistics distinguishes itself from semiotics in concentrating primarily on the linguistic sign and on how humans communicate with each other by means of language. Explicitly linguistic approaches to translation are generally grounded in European linguistic theory, which, in turn, is to a considerable degree influenced – either by agreement or by dissent, by the Saussurean conception of signs and of language, and many approaches to translation that may be termed linguistic follow suit, usually implicitly and often by way of reliance on approaches that may more accurately be termed neo-Saussurean than Saussurean. However, the ‘methodology for translation’ presented by Jean-Paul Vinay and Jean Darbelnet (1958/1995) draws explicitly and directly on Saussure (1916). The fact that this publication appeared in English 40 years or so after its publication in French is a testament to its lasting influence, even though scholars who employ terms that derive from it may not be aware of the origin of the terms. I will therefore begin this chapter by outlining Saussure’s understanding of the linguistic sign, and Vinay and Darbelnet’s ‘methodology for translation’ which takes the Saussurean approach as its linguistic foundation. Next, I will discuss Catford’s and Nida’s approaches, which owed their inspirations, to a significant degree, to linguistic approaches which became influential in the 1960s, and which remain so among many contemporary linguists. I will end this chapter with a critique of the kinds of linguistic theories that inspired these approaches, and by presenting an alternative view of human communicative interaction which is well attuned to a Peircean view of signs and their objects.

Saussure’s theory of the sign What is known as Saussure’s theory of the sign derives, as Koerner (2006, p. 755) remarks, from a book Saussure did not write. The Cours de linguistique générale was based on student notes by Albert Riedlinger and compiled by Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, although it is published as Saussure (1916). The Cours directly influenced Jean-Paul Vinay and Jean DOI: 10.4324/9781003161448-12

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Darbelnet’s (1958/1995) Stylistique comparée du français et de l’anglais. Méthode de traduction (Paris & Montréal, 1958) published in English as Comparative Stylistics of French and English, a Methodology for Translation in Juan C. Sager and M.-J. Hamel’s translation (Amsterdam/ Philadelphia, 1995). I shall refer to the English translation. According to Saussure (as published; opinions vary about how accurately his views as published reflect his actual opinions; see Cobley, 2006, p. 757), language is ‘a system of interrelated terms’ (langue) which ‘is embedded in the brain of everyone who has learned a given language,’ and it is the purpose of linguistics to analyze this system (Körner, 2006, p. 756). The notion of the system has retained a secure place in European linguistic theories, first in the work of John Rupert Firth and subsequently in that of his one-time pupil Michael Halliday, as witnessed by appellations such as for example ‘systemic functional grammar.’ The functional aspect referenced in that appellation is not present in Saussure’s structuralist approach, however. The interrelated terms in the Saussurean system that is language and in the subsystems of the overall system – the linguistic signs – do not link things and names, but concepts and sound patterns (not physical sounds). The sound pattern is called the significant and the concept the signifié, and the relationship between the two is arbitrary: there is no necessary connection between a term and what it denotes, even though obviously once the connection is established, it is to a great extent fixed; if the relationship were not arbitrary, then languages could not have different vocabularies. Also, no individual sign has a meaning. Rather ‘[a] language is a system in which all the elements fit together, and in which the value of any one element depends on the simultaneous coexistence of all the other elements,’ (Cobley, 2006, p. 759; Saussure, 2013, p. 134). According to Cobley (ibid), ‘this is the crux of Saussure’s sign theory.’ It takes but a moment’s thought to see that this view of language implies that because there is no one-to-one correspondence between the terms and (sub-)systems (e.g. grammatical systems like the number or tense systems) in different languages, no values in one language can be shared exactly by another language; and that translation must therefore always be approximate. Saussure himself, though, made no clear pronouncements on translation.

Vinay and Darbelnet According to Vinay and Darbelnet, not only is ‘a place within the framework of linguistics’ an intrinsic property of translation (1995, p. 7); in addition, ‘translation is an auxiliary discipline to linguistics’ because ‘translation allows us to clarify certain linguistic phenomena which otherwise would remain undiscovered’ (1995, p. 9). Here, Vinay and Darbelnet not only echo Sapir (1921, Chapter 5), who uses translations of a sentence in English (‘The farmer kills the duckling’) into twelve languages belonging to diverse language families to show that they all express certain ‘absolutely essential concepts … that must be expressed if language is to be a satisfactory means of communication’; they are also in agreement with their contemporary Roman Jakobson (1959, pp. 233–234) who insists that No linguistic specimen may be interpreted by the science of language without a translation of its signs into signs of the same system or into signs of another system … the widespread practice of interlingual communication, particularly translating activities, must be kept under constant scrutiny by linguistic science. So Vinay and Darbelnet are in good, traditional company when they insist on the usefulness of a translational approach to linguistics. But further, they claim that by way of contrastive 156

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analysis, translators will be able to identify and classify difficulties and find systematic solutions to translation problems (1995, p. 11). They take their starting point in Saussurean linguistics, counting among the basic concepts that they will draw on throughout their book the Saussurean sign, which they define as ‘the inseparable union of a concept and its written or spoken linguistic form’ (Vinay & Darbelnet, 1995, p. 12). In addition to the language system as such, langue, which, as mentioned in the section headed “Saussure’s theory of the sign”, is the object of linguistic analysis, language has of course the important function of enabling people to communicate with one another, which they do via the manifest realizations of langue, namely parole (speech and writing), a term that also derives from Saussure (1916). According to Vinay and Darbelnet (1995, p. 15) ‘one recognizes immediately that numerous translation difficulties result from parole rather than langue,’; unfortunately, they do not elaborate, although they remark that meaning is ‘the sense of the sign in a given context,’ while sense ‘is what contrasts one sign with another in language and not in an utterance’ (Vinay & Darbelnet, 1995, pp. 14–15). This posited difference implies that while terms have a stable sense, as members of a language system, their meaning can vary with variation in their context of use. Well-known terms and concepts in Translation Studies that derive from the work of Vinay and Darbelnet include the concept of the translation unit, a notion which, as they point out, is preferable to the notion of the word, which, for one thing, is very ill-defined and, for another, is not what translators translate; what translators translate, they insist, are ‘ideas and feelings’ (op. cit.: 21). Nebulous though this may seem, it does free translators from the kind of slavish adherence (which Vinay & Darbelnet call servitude (op. cit.: p. 15)) to the form of the source text that can lead to what they term overtranslation: ‘If, for example, we translate “aller chercher” by “to go and look for” instead of “to fetch,” we act as if “aller chercher” were an accidental combination of two independent words, whereas it is a fixed expression.’ Vinay and Darbelnet’s recommended methodology for translation subsumes a number of methods the terms for which also remain within the vocabulary of contemporary Translation Studies. They draw a basic distinction, for example, between what they term direct and oblique translation (op. cit., p. 31). In direct translation, the elements of the source language text can be transposed literally one by one into the target language; and when that is not possible, borrowing a term from the source language (e.g. ‘pizza’ borrowed into English) can be employed. When a borrowed term is translated into the borrowing language, Vinay and Darbelnet call the process calque. For example, the Danish term, ‘ fjernsyn’ is a calque of ‘television.’ Oblique forms of translation include transposition, modulation, equivalence, and adaptation. Transposition ‘involves replacing one word class with another without changing the meaning of the message’ (op. cit.: p. 36). For example, the Danish exclamation Velbekomme (may it become you well), when used to express a wish that someone will enjoy what they are eating or are going to eat, is usually rendered into German as ‘Mahlzeit’ which, in the identical function, is a noun meaning ‘mealtime.’ In modulation (a concept Vinay & Darbelnet attribute to G. Panneton (1946) (op. cit.: p. 37)), the point of view differs between the two expressions. For example, they point out that the English ‘it is not difficult to see,’ which expresses a negative, may be replaced with the French positive ‘il est facile de démontrer’ (it is easy to show). Equivalences ‘are [mostly] fixed, and belong to a phraseological repertoire of idioms, clichés, proverbs, nominal or adjectival phrases, etc.’ (op. cit.: p. 38). For example, the Danish expression, ‘det regner skomagerdrenge’ (it is raining shoemaker’s boys) corresponds to the English ‘It is raining cats and dogs.’ Equivalences also include the expressions in the 157

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language of e.g. characteristic animal sounds (‘cocoroco’ versus ‘cock-a-doodle-do’), and exclamations at the onset of sudden pain (‘av’ versus ‘ouch’). It is crucial to point out that this conception of equivalence as mostly obtaining between fixed expressions and idioms differs significantly from the definition proffered in Gideon Toury’s target-oriented approach to translation, according to which translation equivalence ‘occurs when an SL and a TL text (or item) are relatable to (at least some of ) the same relevant features’ (Toury, 1980, p. 37). This is clearly a broader conception of equivalence than Vinay and Darbelnet’s. Vinay and Darbelnet’s (1958/1995, p. 39 final suggested procedure for oblique translation, namely adaptation, takes us to ‘the extreme limit of translation.’ Adaptation is used when the situation being described in the source language text does not exist in the target culture, in which case a translator might want to replace the original’s situation with a situation that is familiar to the target audience. Therefore, Vinay and Darbelnet consider adaptation ‘a special kind of equivalence, a situational equivalence’ (ibid.) The remainder of Vinay and Darbelnet’s book is devoted to discussions of translating between English and French (in either direction) at the levels of the lexicon, structures, and messages, and the relevant chapters are organized according to categories that belong to linguistics, including semantics. Nevertheless, it should be borne in mind that Vinay and Darbelnet consider their work an example of the application of linguistics to the study of style; and they share with other stylistic approaches to translation a strong interest in how ‘saying the same thing’ in different ways may influence how whatever is being said is understood – in their case, particularly how French and English manners of expression affect the messages that each language tends to convey in similar or identical situations. Later stylistically oriented approaches include Jean Boase-Beier’s (2006, 2020) approach together with my own, which I have named Translational Stylistics (Malmkjær, 2003; 2004). Of these, Boase-Beier’s approach is closely aligned with relevance theory (see e.g. Sperber & Wilson, 1986; Wilson & Sperber, 1990), which leans more toward philosophy than toward linguistics insofar as it takes its starting point in the Gricean account of conversation (Grice, 1975). According to Grice, every normal adult knows, at least implicitly, that conversation is expected by all involved to proceed according to a number of principles, each of which has some maxims falling under it; and if one or more of these maxims is not adhered to – for example, if someone says something that appears to be blatantly untrue, thus sinning against the maxim of Quality, which says ‘Try to make your contribution [to a conversation] one that is true’ – then the listener will seek a way to understand what has been said which will re-instate the maxim. Grice refers to this process as the generation of implicatures. According to Sperber and Wilson, the principle of relevance is the only principle necessary to account for all language use, literal as well figurative. The principle says (Wilson & Sperber, 1990, p. 45) ‘Every act of inferential communication creates a presumption of its own optimal relevance.’ Therefore, listeners will look for a way to make their interactants’ conversational contributions relevant to the situation in which the speech act has been made. Translational stylistics does not pay homage to any particular linguistic theory. Rather, it simply asks of any translation why it may be that, given the source text, the translator has chosen to translate in the way that he or she has. In the next section, I turn to a second, overtly linguistic approach to translation, the approach propounded by John Cunnison ( J. C. (Ian)) Catford (1965).

J. C. Catford J. C. Catford’s book on translation, A Linguistic Theory of Translation, obviously wears its allegiance to linguistics on its sleeve, all the more so given its subtitle: An Essay in Applied 158

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Linguistics. Catford defines translation as ‘an operation performed on languages: a process of substituting a text in one language for a text in another’ (1965, p. 1), and therefore he thinks that ‘any theory of translation must draw upon a theory of language – a general linguistic theory’ (ibid). He selects the linguistic theory of his then colleague at Edinburgh University, Michael Alexander Kirkwood Halliday (1961), mentioned in the Section ‘Saussure’s theory of the sign’. At the time when Catford was writing, Halliday’s theory was as presented in his (Halliday’s) extensive article, ‘Categories of the theory of grammar’ (1961) and in a book Halliday co-authored with Angus McIntosh and Peter Derek Strevens (1964). This theory was influenced by the work of John Rupert Firth (1957a, 1957b; see Halliday 1961, p. 242 and passim), and is fundamentally contextually and socially oriented. For example, Firth famously considers meaning to consist in ‘situational relations in a context of situation’ (1957b, p. 2). Combining this insight with the Saussurean notion that language is a system of systems, Catford defines meaning as ‘[t]he total network of relations entered into by any linguistic form’ and hence as ‘a property of a language. An SL text has an SL meaning, and a TL text has a TL meaning’ (1965, p. 35). Devastating for translation, we might think, if we believe that what has to be translated is meaning. However, Catford rescues the possibility of translation by way of the notion of the situation he sees Halliday adopt from Firth: ‘SL and TL texts or items are translation equivalents when they are interchangeable in a given situation’ (1965, p. 49. Italics in the original), Catford declares. For this reason, too, it is the sentence that is the unit of translation: ‘the sentence is the grammatical unit most directly related to speech-function within a situation’ (ibid.); and interchangeability in situations is defining of translation equivalence in Catford’s approach (see below). Like Vinay and Darbelnet (see the Section “Vinay and Darbelnet”), Catford proffers some advice on how to set about translating. The notion of the situation is helpful here because there is some hope that features of the situation substance may remain stable, or be shared, even when speakers’ languages and the internal relationships between the terms in these languages differ. However, languages also differ in terms of which features of a given situation are relevant to the linguistic choices that have to be made when speaking (or writing), and therefore when translating. Catford (1965, p. 37) offers the example of the deictic demonstrative system of North East Scots, which distinguishes between distances from the speaker by way of a choice between ‘this,’ ‘that’ and ‘yon,’ but which is unidimensional, that is, identifying only distance, with three degrees of this: and the Standard English deictic system which includes identification of number (singular or plural), but provides for only two degrees of distance; thus ‘this’ or ‘these,’ and ‘that’ or ‘those.’ As Catford puts it, (ibid.) It is clear that if we translate from Standard English to Scots we cannot ‘transfer meaning’. There is no way in which, for example, Scots that can be said to ‘mean the same’ as English that or this or these or those. On a given occasion it may refer to, or be relatable to, the same feature of the situation as one of the English deictics – but its formal and contextual meaning is clearly different. In Scots, the number is irrelevant to the choice of deictic demonstrative; in standard English, the number is relevant to the choice. The notion of relevance that Catford introduces recurs in the descriptive Translation Studies approach developed by Gideon Toury, who, as mentioned in the Section ‘Vinay and Darbelnet’, defines translation equivalence as occurring ‘when a SL and a TL text (or item) are relatable to (at least some of ) the same relevant features’ (Toury, 1980, p. 37), making explicit reference to Catford (1965, p. 50). Given the differences between linguistic systems, there are not going to be any ‘same places’ in linguistic systems for most 159

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terms or other items in different languages; there are, however, going to be some similarities between situations in which speakers of language A are likely to say certain things and speakers of language B are likely to say certain things, and those certain things can be considered translational equivalents, even though they do not ‘mean’ the same. This is an insight elaborated further by Eugene A. Nida, as we shall see in the Section ‘Eugene A. Nida’, and it offers a way out of the conundrum into which translation is cast by Saussure’s concept of meanings as values distributed over the terms in a system (see the Section ‘Saussure’s theory of the sign’). The distinction Catford draws between ‘meaning’ and ‘translation equivalence’ is crucial for a theoretically sound account of the fact of translation, by which I mean the fact that translations exist, at least if by ‘meaning’ is meant the place in the language of a given item or structure. The notions of formal and contextual meaning derive from Halliday (1961, p. 244): ‘The formal meaning of an item is its operation in the network of formal relations’ whereas ‘[t]he contextual meaning of an item is its relation to extratextual features.’ It is contextual meaning that is normally thought of as ‘meaning,” according to Halliday (1961, p. 245). What is perhaps the best-known aspect of Catford’s theory of translation, the notion of the shift, is also dependent to a high degree on Halliday’s early iteration of his General Linguistic theory. According to Halliday (1961, p. 243), the primary linguistic levels are form, substance and context. Form is the organization of substance into meaningful events, and context is the relation of form ‘to non-linguistic features of the situations in which language operates’ (1961, pp. 243–244). There are two levels of the linguistic form: grammar and lexis. The fundamental categories of grammar, according to Halliday (1961, p. 247) are unit, structure, class and system. Units carry grammatical patterns (op. cit.: p. 251) and the relations between units (unit types) is that ‘going from top (largest) to bottom (smallest), each “consists of ” one, or more than one, of the units next below (next smaller),’ the scale on which the unit’s range is called the rank (ibid.). At the top of the rank scale is the sentence, and at the bottom is the morpheme. Below the rank of morpheme, we leave grammar and enter phonology; and above the sentence, we leave grammar and move to text studies, perhaps, although a text can of course consist of one sentence only (or, indeed, of a word, as in the text ‘DANGER’ as written on a notice, or the spoken text ‘help’). In between are, from the top, clause, phrase or group, and word. It is possible for units on the scale to shift downward to a lower rank (but not upwards to a higher rank). This means that ‘a unit can include, in what it consists of, a unit of rank higher than or equal to itself but not a unit of rank more than one degree lower than itself ’ (ibid.). This phenomenon is known as Rankshift, and Catford (1965, p. 73) duly defines translation shifts as ‘departures from formal correspondence in the process of going from the SL to the TL.’ For example, there is often, in translation, a shift between levels in the sense that what some languages accomplish on one level, other languages achieve on another level; and given that in the case of translation shifts, we are dealing with two separate texts, the bar on upward rank shift does not pertain to translation shifts. Examples of translation shifts are, for example, the translation of tense indicators from English into Mandarin, or from Mandarin into English. Mandarin has no grammatical markers for tense (Li & Thompson, 1981, p. 13), so an English past tense ending, for example, ‘-ed,’ a morpheme that is a feature of the grammar, would be matched in mandarin by a time adverb that is a feature of lexis (if it is deemed important to indicate the time at which the event occurred) in the Mandarin text. In translation into English, of course, a tense has to be selected; fortunately, the context will often indicate which tense is suitable. Catford 160

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himself provides an example of translation between English and French to illustrate a shift between grammar and lexis. He points out that the English ‘This texts is intended for …’ can be translated into French as ‘Le présent Manuel (sic) s’adresse à …’ where ‘the SL modifier, This – a term in a grammatical system of deictics – has as its TL equivalent the modifier Le present, an article + a lexical adjective” (1965, p. 75). Catford also illustrates what he terms “category shifts.” These are departures from formal correspondence in translation, and include structure shifts, class shifts, unit shifts and intra-system shifts (1965, p. 76). A structure shift occurs between the following two phrases: English SL text: A white house French TL text: Une maison blanche The English phrase here is structured Modifier + Head while the French is structured as Modifier + Head + Qualifier. (1965, p. 78) Class shifts occur ‘when the translation equivalent of an SL item is a member of a different class from the original item’ (ibid.). For example, while in the English ‘a medical student,’ ‘medical’ is an adjective, in the French ‘un étudiant en medicine,’ its translation equivalent is the noun ‘médecine’ (op. cit.: p. 79). Unit shifts are actually changes of rank, but because that term had already been employed by Halliday, as we saw above, to stand for an intra-language phenomenon, Catford selects the term ‘unit shift’ for use in the case of translation between languages. Unit shift obtains between the English ‘A white house’ and the French ‘Une maison blanche,’ where there is a shift from Modifier + Head to Modifier + Head + Qualifier.’ Intra-system shifts occur when ‘SL and TL possess systems which approximately correspond formally as to their constitution, but when translation involves the selection of a non-corresponding term in the TL system.’ For example, although English and French both have article systems that distinguish between definite and indefinite articles, the two systems are not used identically in identical circumstances. For example, where English speaks of ‘love’ and ‘wine,’ French has ‘l’amour’ and ‘Du vin’ (op. cit.: p. 81). Catford’s approach is one of the most overtly linguistic among linguistically oriented theories of translation, insofar as he sets about applying a particular linguistic theory, that of Halliday (1961), to account for translational phenomena. Others who have adopted a similar approach include Mona Baker (1992), whose book is organized in terms of equivalence at the levels of the word, word combinations, phrases, grammatical categories and textual levels. Although a later Halliday remains a strong influence on Baker’s approach and thought (references reach all the way to his major late work, An Introduction to Functional Grammar of 1985), Baker is immensely eclectic in her choice of theoretical inspiration. Further, her book is replete with illustrative text examples and covers pragmatics in its final chapter (1992, p. 5). It is, however, very clearly a coursebook rather than a contribution to translation theory (for which, see instead Baker, 2006). In the following section, I shall discuss in some detail the work of another Translation Studies scholar who has declared his allegiance to linguistic theories, namely Eugene A. Nida.

Eugene A. Nida As we saw in the Section ‘J. C. Catford’, Catford draws upon what was arguably the dominant local (that is, in his case, British) theory of meaning and language at the time when 161

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he was writing; and Nida does the same for his own location, the United States. Here, Katz and Fodor (1962, 1963) sought to provide a theory of meaning to complement Chomsky’s theory of generative grammar by way of an approach known as componential analysis. In this approach, terms are broken down into several meaning components. Katz and Fodor propose that each term in a language, for example, ‘bachelor,’ can be described in terms of a set of semantic markers (in the case of ‘bachelor’ either ‘human, or ‘male’ and ‘human,’ or ‘male’ and ‘animal’) and a set of distinguishers which allow us to distinguish (in English) between humans (males or females) holding the lowest academic degree, and either human males who have never married or male human young knights serving under the standard of another knight; and between each of these and young male fur seals when without mates during the breeding time (see Katz & Fodor, 1963, p. 185; Nida, 1964, p. 39). Semantic markers reflect systematic semantic relations between an item and the rest of the vocabulary of the language, whereas distinguishers reflect what is idiosyncratic about the meaning of an item (Katz & Fodor, 1963, p. 187): For example, if the distinction between the markers (Male) and (Female) were obliterated in a semantic theory of English, not only would every pair of sex-antonyms be represented as synonymous but the indefinitely many other semantic relations involving this distinction would also be incorrectly represented by the theory. In contrast, eliminating the distinguisher [young fur seal when without a mate during the breeding time] would merely prevent a theory from representing one sense of bachelor and whatever synonymity relations obtained between that sense of bachelor and certain senses of other words. World knowledge together with linguistic context will generally disambiguate ambiguous terms for language users: ‘For example, the context the … who lives in the penthouse will immediately rule out the meanings of “young fur seal” and “young knight”’ (Nida, 1964, p. 39). Nida also draws on an early Chomskyan distinction between, in Nida’s terminology, kernels and transformations (Nida, 1964, pp. 66–69). Kernels differ between languages, but ‘there appear to be many more parallelisms between kernel structures than between the more elaborated transforms.’ He highlights particularly the fact that ‘all languages seem to have something equivalent to subject-predicate constructions’ (1964, p. 66). Although Chomsky himself denied that the sharing between languages of deep-seated formal universals implies ‘that there must be some reasonable procedure for translating between languages’ (Chomsky, 1965, p. 30), Nida suggests that it is both scientifically and practically … efficient (1) to reduce the source text to its structurally simplest and most semantically evident kernels, (2) to transfer the meaning from source language to receptor language on a structurally simple level, and (3) to generate the stylistically and semantically equivalent expression in the receptor language. (Nida, 1964, p. 68) It is interesting to note that Seleskovitch’s Interpretive Theory of Translation (1968, 1975) incorporates a very similar procedure, and there can be little doubt that it is indeed ‘practically efficient’; whether it is scientifically justified seems less certain. Clearly, an issue will be how to identify the expressions mentioned (and apparently assumed to be fairly readily available) under (3) above.

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In approaching the tasks of reducing, transferring and equivalence generating, Nida draws on componential analysis for sets of related terms (1964, p. 82): For example, father and mother in English share the component of generation older than ego (the person central to the kinship structure in question), but they differ as to sex. The two components of generation and sex help us, therefore, to define the relationship of ego to father and mother. We can extend the number of kinship terms to include grandmother, grandfather, grandson, granddaughter, son, daughter, uncle, aunt, nephew, niece, cousin, etc. As we do so, it becomes evident that there are other important elements … These components of meaning are of course testable in the nonlinguistic world, for we can confirm their validity in terms of biological relationships and marriage contracts. This approach to meaning analysis appears to work reasonably well for terms that are indeed relatable to identifiable aspects of the non-linguistic world, although, as Lewis points out, ‘semantic makerese’ tells us nothing about the nature of meaning as such (1983, p. 190): Translation into Markerese is at best a substitute for real semantics, relying either on out tacit competence (at some future date) as speakers of Markerese or on our ability to do real semantics at least for the one language Markerese. Translation into Latin might serve as well, except insofar as designers of Markerese may choose to build into it useful features – freedom from ambiguity, grammar based on symbolic logic – that might make it easier to do real semantics for Markerese then for Latin. Real semantics is supposed to tell us what terms mean, not what they mean the same as; Markerese is not helpful unless we already know the meaning of the markers. Of course, Nida is not in the business of developing a philosophical theory of meaning; he is, though, if we believe Lewis, in the process of developing a theory of translation that is based on a flawed account of meaning. In any case, the Markerese approach is less likely to be helpful in cases of terms that do not have identifiable, physical, referents. In this connection, Nida draws an important distinction between referential and emotive meanings. The latter ‘relate to the responses of the participants in the communicative act’ (1964, p. 70), a phenomenon that is central to Nida’s approach to translation. Drawing on Belloc’s insight that identical equivalents do not exist (1931, p. 37), Nida sets his sights on ‘the closest possible equivalent’ (Nida, 1964, p. 159). He identifies two main types of equivalence: formal and dynamic. Formal equivalence focuses on the form and content of the message. It matches genre to genre, sentence to sentence and concept to concept, whereas dynamic equivalence obtains between ‘the relationship between receptor and message’ in the two texts: ‘A translation of dynamic equivalence aims at complete naturalness of expression, and tries to relate the receptor to modes of behavior relevant within the context of his own culture’ (ibid). Nida famously gives as an example of such a translation J. B. Phillips’ rendering, ‘give one another a hearty handshake all around,’ in the latter’s New Testament translation of Romans 16.16, which Nida quotes as ‘greet one another with a holy kiss’ (as though the New Testament’s original language was English). However, whether a translator aims for one or the other of these two main modes of translation, certain techniques of adjustment will almost always be required in order to ensure that the form of the message conforms to the requirements of the structure of the receptor language; that the structures of the translation are semantically equivalent to those of the source text; that

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the translation is stylistically appropriate; and that both texts ‘carry an equivalent communication load’ (one wonders how that might be measured). Three ‘classes of modification’ can help to ensure success, namely additions, subtractions and alterations (op. Cit.: p. 226). Nida devotes a chapter to the role of the translator (Chapter Seven). He remarks on our lack of knowledge of what goes on in the translator’s mind – a lack that has been a focus of much research in Translation Studies subsequently (see e.g. Carl, Schaeffer & Bangalore, 2016; Jakobsen, 2017) – but he stresses the important point that ‘merely having a knowledge of two languages is no guarantee that a person can function as a translator’ (1964, p. 145). The ideal translator, according to Nida, is ‘a person who has complete knowledge of both source and receptor languages, intimate acquaintance with the subject matter, effective empathy with the original author and content, and stylistic facility in the receptor language’; such a person ‘is rarely found’ (1964, p. 153) – never, we might even say, given that no one ever achieves ‘complete’ knowledge of their language, in any usual sense of ‘complete.’ As Quine has it ‘No two of us learn our language alike, nor, in a sense, does any finish learning it while he lives’ (1960, p. 13), a prelude to Davidson’s (1986, p. 446) assertion that There is no such thing as a language, not if a language is anything like what many philosophers and linguists have supposed. There is therefore no such thing to be learned, mastered, or born with. We must give up the idea of a clearly defined shared structure which language-users acquire and then apply to cases. And we should try again to say how convention in any important sense is involved in language; or, as I think, we should give up the attempt to illuminate how we communicate by appeal to conventions. This view of communication can seem devastating to proponents of linguistic theories because such theories tend to describe exactly the kinds of ‘clearly defined shared structure which language-users acquire and then apply to cases’ that Davidson dismisses. For translation theory, the view may seem much less worrying, because it is widely accepted within our discipline that translation proceeds in spite of the many un-samenesses between languages. The view is liberating because it frees us from the potential shackles of convention that would prevent linguistic innovation and which have been known to disallow or at least eschew in translation the kinds of innovation that may be deemed acceptable within one language. Ultimately, Nida’s is at best what we might refer to as ‘a leap of faith account,’ like so many other explanations of what happens when we believe we understand one another, whether in one or in several languages. As Davidson puts it (1984, p. 125) The problem of interpretation is domestic as well as foreign: it surfaces for speakers of the same language in the form of the question, how can it be determined that the language is the same? Speakers of the same language can go on the assumption that for them the same expressions are to be interpreted in the same way, but this does not indicate what justifies the assumption. Obviously, when engaging in what Nida would call dynamic equivalence translation, it will, according to conventional accounts of language and meaning, be much more difficult to find such justification than when discussing realia-related translation. But according to Davidson, ‘All understanding of the speech of another involves radical interpretation’ (Davidson, 1984, p. 125). How do we, then, live without language?

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There is no such thing as a language According to Donald Davidson, we live without language as it has traditionally been defined by philosophers and linguists by rethinking it; in this re-thought understanding, ‘linguistic ability is the ability to converge on a passing theory from time to time’ (Davidson, 1986, p. 445) with another person that one is trying to communicate with. A passing theory is a theory (different for each encounter where communication is attempted) that is used on a given occasion of attempted communication. When both communicators use the same passing theory, then each understands the other on the basis of expectations that they both share, and in that sense communication is successful. Note that a pessimistic view allows for that never to happen, an optimistic view would posit that it always happens; and the truth is probably somewhere in between. The passing theory need not be identical to the expectations (theories) brought to each encounter in advance by the interlocutors. Those expectations are called prior theories in Davidson’s conception, and prior theories will differ more or less radically between individuals because they have been learned through each individual’s previous communication encounters and general world experience. They will include expectations about how the other person in an encounter is prepared in advance to interpret what they are about to say. However, people are fairly flexible in their abilities to adjust their expectations as a linguistic encounter proceeds. For example, if someone says ‘lead the way and we’ll precede’ (Davidson, 1986, p. 434), most speakers of English would probably (more or less) instantly realize that this is meant to indicate what is more commonly expressed by way of ‘lead the way and we’ll proceed.’ This suggests that meaning in speech encounters is fairly often not identical with the kind of ‘meaning’ provided in a dictionary or a phrase book. Rather, it suggests, meaning is a momentary relationship between interlocutors, their utterances, and a context (see Lewis, 1983, p. 230). Davidson (ibid) calls this fleeting relationship ‘first meaning’ to indicate that this ‘meaning’ is whatever comes first in the order of interpretation. In the context of this volume, it may be helpful to point out that it is not a Peircean firstness Davidson is concerned with. Davidson deals in thirdnesses, and hence with symbols (not indexes and icons), because for him language is by its nature symbolic. He points to Grice’s (1957) distinction between natural and non-natural meaning (Davidson, 1986, p. 436), adding that traditional attempts to restrict non-natural meaning to linguistic meaning have imposed on first meaning three requirements: systematicity, sharedness and preparedness (note that in the quotation below, and in general, Davidson means by ‘interpreter’ ‘someone trying to make sense of what someone else has said,’ irrespective of whether or not the interlocutors are, as we say, ‘speaking the same language’): 1

2 3

First meaning is systematic. A competent speaker or interpreter is able to interpret utterances, his own or those of others, on the basis of the semantic properties of the parts, or words, in the utterance, and the structure of the utterance. For this to be possible, there must be systematic relations between the meanings of utterances. First meanings are shared. For the speaker and interpreter to communicate successfully and regularly, they must share a method of interpretation of the sort described in (1). First meanings are governed by learned conventions or regularities. The systematic knowledge or competence of the speaker or interpreter is learned in advance of occasions of interpretation and is conventional in character.

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As we have just seen, speakers’ ability to deal with the unexpected in language, such as malapropisms, indicates that the third principle cannot be correct (1986, pp. 442–443): Every deviation from ordinary usage, as long as it is agreed on for the moment (knowingly deviant, or not, on one, or both, sides), is in the passing theory as a feature of what the words mean on that occasion. Such meanings, transient though they may be, are literal; they are what I have called first meanings. A passing theory is not a theory of what anyone (except perhaps a philosopher) would call an actual natural language. ‘Mastery’ of such a language would be useless, since knowing a passing theory is only knowing how to interpret a particular utterance on a particular occasion. Nor could such a language, if we want to call it that, be said to have been learned, or to be governed by conventions. Of course things previously learned were essential to arriving at the passing theory, but what was learned [in advance] could not have been the passing theory. Of course, Peirce’s writings predate Davidson’s, and trying to second guess what Peirce might have made of Davidson’s work would be foolish. Still, both philosophers pursued accounts of the connection between language and ‘reality’ and of ‘how collaborative activity among the members of a community of inquirers can take place.’ Peirce’s theory includes a general explanation of what it is for something to have a meaning, to represent something other than itself; it accounts for the kinds of linguistic actions that are involved in ‘scientific’ (sc. ‘cognitive’) discourse; and it investigates what must be the character of a language usable as a vehicle for serious inquiry. (Hookway, 1985, p. 119) For both philosophers, that language cannot be the pre-scripted, fixed system described by traditional linguistics, even descriptive linguistics, because descriptive linguistics is perforce a description of something that existed in the past, whereas living discourse faces forward. Each new encounter involves a passing theory (Davidson), in which the triadic Sign relation (Peirce) consists of ‘the sign itself, the object of the sign, and the interpretant, which is itself a sign and thus stands in the same triadic relation to a further interpretant’ (Hookway, 1985, p. 121). The sign is defined as ‘anything which is so determined by something else, called its Object, and so determines an effect upon a person, which effect I call its interpretant, that the latter is thereby mediately determined by the former’ (Peirce, 1908, nd. Letter to Lady Welby. Peirce Edition Project, Volume 2, 1998, p. 478). The sign relation is thus endless, like thought and language within and among people. This is not a weakness of language, but a major strength. It allows for the development of language along with life – in fact, it justifies the general optimism about interpersonal communication that we require to maintain human societies and also to translate. As for the descriptions of languages that our now potentially extremely disgruntled philosophers and linguists have devoted their working lives to developing; in fact, they can remain exactly as before and be used exactly as before. They outline the axioms of the grammar of languages, and some include a dictionary that indicates what most people would expect to be the senses and denotations of the terms of the language. They can be useful in speakers’ – native and non-native alike – efforts to prepare themselves for linguistic encounters. And for translators. We just need to rethink descriptions of language as helpful aids to language mastery and use. 166

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References Baker, M. (1992). In Other Words: A Coursebook on Translation. London: Routledge. Baker, M. (2006). Translation and Conflict: A Narrative Account. London: Routledge. Belloc, H. (1931).On Translation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Boase-Beier, J. (2006). Stylistic Approaches to Translation. Manchester: St. Jerome. Boase-Beier, J. Translation and Style: Second Edition. London: Routledge, 2020. Carl, M., Schaeffer, M., & Bangalore, S. eds. (2016). New Directions in Empirical Translation Process Research: Exploring the CRITT TPR-DB (pp. 13–54). Cham: Springer. Catford, J. C. (1965). A Linguistic Theory of Translation: An Essay in Applied Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chomsky, N. (1965). Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Cobley, P. (2006). Saussure: Theory of the Sign. In E. K. Brown (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics: Second Edition, Volume 10 (pp. 757–768). Amsterdam: Elsevier. Davidson, D. (1984). Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Davidson, D. (1986). A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs. In E. LePore (Ed.), Truth and Interpretation: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson (pp. 433–446). Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Deely, J. (2006). On ‘semiotics’ as naming the doctrine of signs. Semiotica, 158, 1–33. Firth, J. R. (1975a). Papers in Linguistics 1934–1951. London: Oxford University Press. Firth, J. R. (1957b). A Synopsis of Linguistic Theory 1930–55. In J.R. Firth (Ed.), Studies in Linguistic Analysis (pp. 1–32). Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Grice, H. P. (1957). Meaning. Philosophical Review, 66, 377–388. Grice, H. P. (1975). Logic and Conversation. In P. Cole and J. L. Morgan (Eds.), Syntax and Semantics 3: Speech Acts (pp. 41–58). New York: Academic Press. Halliday, M. A. K. (1961). Categories of the Theory of Grammar. Word, 17, 241–292. Halliday, M. A. K. (1985). An Introduction to Functional Grammar. London: Edward Arnold. Halliday, M. A. K., McIntosh, A., & Strevens, P. D. (1964). The Linguistic Sciences and Language Teaching. London: Longmans. Hookway, C. (1985). Peirce. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Jakobson, R. (1959). On Linguistic Aspects of Translation. In R. A. Brower (Ed.), On Translation (pp. 232–239). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Reprinted in Jakobson, R. (1987). Language in Literature, Ed. Pomorska, K. and Rudy, S. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Jakobsen, A. L. (2017). Translation Process Research. In J. W. Schwieter & A. Ferreira (Eds.), The Handbook of Translation and Cognition (pp. 21–49). New York: John Wiley and Sons, Inc. Katz, Jerrold J., & Fodor, J. (1962). What’s Wrong with the Philosophy of Language?. Inquiry, 5(1–4), 197–237. Katz, J., & Fodor, J. (1963). The Structure of a Semantic Theory. Language, 39, 170–210. Koerner, E. F. K. (2006). Saussure, Ferdinand (-Mongin) de (1857–1913). In E. K. Brown (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics: Second Edition, Volume 10 (pp. 754–757). Amsterdam: Elsevier. Lewis, D. (1983). Philosophical Papers: Volume I. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Li, C. N., & Thompson, S. A. (1981). Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar. Berkeley: University of California Press. Nida, E. A. (1964). Toward a Science of Translating: With Special Reference to Principles and Procedures Involved in Bible Translating. Leiden: E. J. Brill. Malmkjær, K. (2003). What Happened to God and the Angels: An Exercise in Translational Stylistics. Target, 15(1), 39–62. Malmkjær, K. (2004). Translational Stylistics. Language and Literature, 13(1), 13–24 Panneton, G. (1946). La Transposition en Traduction (MA thesis, University of Montreal). Peirce Edition Project (1998) The Essential Peirce, Volume 2: Selected Philosophical Writings (1893-1913). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Quine, W. (1960). Word and Object. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Sapir, E. (1921). Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech. New York: Harcourt, Brace. Saussure, F. (1916). Cours de Linguistique Générale, edited by Bally, A. Sechehaye & R. Riedlinger. Paris: Payot. English translation by Roy Harris (1983, 2013), Ferdinand de Saussure: Course in General Linguistics. London: Bloomsbury. Seleskovitch, D. (1978). L’Interprète dans les Conférences Internationales –Problèmes de Langage et de Communication. Paris: Lettres modernes Minard, 1968 (S. Dailey & E. N. McMillan, Trans.). 167

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Interpreting for International Conferences – Problems of Language and Communication. Washington, DC: Pen and Booth. Seleskovitch, D. (1975). Langage, Langues et Mémoire. Paris: Minard Lettres Modernes. Sperber, D., & Wilson, D. (1986). Relevance : Communication and Cognition. Oxford: Blackwell. Toury, G. (1980). Translated Literature: System, Norm, Performance: Toward a TT-Oriented Approach to Literary Translation. In In Search of a Theory of Translation (pp. 35–50). Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University, The Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics. Reprinted in: Poetics Today 2(4), 1981, 9–27. Toury, G. (1995). Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Vinay, J.-P., & Darbelnet, J. (1995). Stylistique Comparée du Français et de L’anglais. Paris: Les éditions Didier.1958. ( J. Sager & M.-J. Hamel, Trans.). Comparative Stylistics of French and English: A Methodology for Translation. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Wilson, D., & Sperber, D. (1990). Outline of Relevance Theory. Hermes: Tidsskrift for Sprog forskning, 5, 35–56.

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9 Functionalist approaches Christiane Nord

Introduction The starting point for what is now called functionalism in translation was a lecture course on a ‘General Theory of Translation’ held by the German linguist, translator and translation scholar Hans J. Vermeer at the School for Translation and Interpreting Studies in Germersheim, University of Mainz, Germany, in the academic year 1976–1977 (cf. SnellHornby, 2006, p. 51). The theory was introduced to a wider audience in an essay published in the journal Lebende Sprachen (Vermeer, 1978), in which the author proposed a ‘framework for a general theory of translational action.’ Translational action (in German: Translation, a Latinism derived from translatum, the past participle of the verb transferre) is used as a generic term covering both translation and interpreting. Vermeer justifies this terminological choice in the seminal book co-authored with Katharina Reiss, his teacher and colleague at the School of Translation and Interpreting of the University of Heidelberg, Germany: A generic term is useful when we want to emphasise the similarities between translating and interpreting and when terminological distinctions are not relevant for a general analysis (Reiss & Vermeer, 2013, p. 5) Vermeer called his theory skopos theory (Skopostheorie), from the Greek skopos, ‘purpose,’ and suggested that the most important criterion guiding the translator’s decisions should be the skopos, i. e. the aim or purpose of the translation process. In the following chapter, we will first look briefly at the historical development of functional perspectives in translational contexts (1.) and then discuss the basic concepts of the skopos theory (2.), before dealing with the various areas of translation theory, teaching and practice which are currently subsumed under the generic term of functionalism (3.). Due to its origin in action theory, functionalism in translation and Translation Studies is particularly appropriate for an extension to intersemiotic applications, which will be dealt with in Section ‘Intersemiotic aspects’. A short discussion of the research perspectives derived from this broad concept will round off the chapter. DOI: 10.4324/9781003161448-13

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Historical overview At one point or another, every person who translates will have to decide whether to keep closely (or ‘faithfully’) to the source-text wording or to choose ways of expression that are more in accordance with the usage of the target-language culture. As Cicero (106–43 B.C.E.) stated, referring to his own translations of the Greek statesmen and orators Aischines and Demosthenes: I did not translate them as an interpreter but as an orator, keeping the same ideas and the forms, or as one might say, the “figures” of thought, but in language which conforms to our usage. And in so doing I did not hold it necessary to render word for word, but I preserved the general style and force of the language. For I did not think I should count them out to the reader like coins, but to pay them by weight, as it were. (Cicero, [46 B.C.E.]1949, v. 14) To translate ‘like an orator’ means using modes and strategies of the art of rhetoric, i.e. the techniques writers or speakers utilize to inform, persuade, or motivate particular audiences in specific situations, whereas translating ‘like an interpreter’ (here: translator) obviously refers to the opposite strategy and leads to a word-for-word or literal translation that is often hard to understand let alone pleasant to read or effective. Throughout the centuries, this dilemma was also problematized by several Bible translators, among them Jerome (348–420) and Martin Luther (1483–1546), who held the view that either strategy was appropriate in certain passages of the Bible, without, however, justifying their choices (cf. Jerome, [394]2004, Luther, [1530]2017). It was Eugene A. Nida who, by means of his distinction between formal and dynamic (later: functional) equivalence (Nida, 1964), introduced the ‘purpose’ of the translated text as a guideline for the translator’s decisions: When the question of the superiority of one translation over another is raised, the answer should be looked for in the answer to another question, ‘Best for whom?’. The relative adequacy of different translations of the same text can only be determined in terms of the extent to which each translation successfully fulfils the purpose for which it was intended. In other words, the relative validity of each translation is seen in the degree to which the receptors are able to respond to its message (in terms of both form and content) in comparison with (1) what the original author evidently intended would be the response of the original audience and (2) how that audience did, in fact, respond. The responses can, of course, never be identical, for interlingual communication always implies some differences in cultural setting, with accompanying diversities in value systems, conceptual presuppositions, and historical antecedents. (Nida, 1976, pp. 64–65) Unfortunately, this ‘sociolinguistic’ approach, as Nida called it, was overruled by the general focus on linguistics of the time, which, following Chomsky’s theory of syntax and generative grammar and the first experiments regarding machine translation, was to dominate the discourse on translation in the English-speaking world for many years to come. In East and West Germany (GDR and FRG, respectively), however, we observe two different strands of development. At the University of Leipzig (GDR), the so-called Leipzig School of Translation Science (cf. García Bernardo, 2010, pp. 49–83), with Otto Kade as its 170

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most prominent representative, combined linguistics and communication theory with the aim to establish a translation grammar between language pairs. Here, equivalence, in the sense of invariance of meaning, was the general yardstick for comparisons between source and target texts. At the University of Heidelberg (FRG), the linguist and translation teacher Katharina Reiss (in German: Reiß), developed a translation-oriented text typology based on the classification of three basic communicative functions as proposed by the German psychologist Karl Bühler (1934]2011) in his ‘organon model.’ In her book on translation quality assessment published in 1971 (Reiss, 2000), she postulated that equivalence on the level of text type should be the standard for any translation. This means that, for Reiss, the target text must be a representation of the same text type as the source text. Interlingual translation may be defined as a bilingual mediated process of communication, which ordinarily aims at the production of a TL [target language] text that is functionally equivalent to an SL [source language] text. (Reiss, 2004, p. 168) However, drawing on her own experience as a translator of various books, both literary and non-literary, Reiss recognized that there were certain exceptions to this iron rule of equivalence, which she subsumed under a ‘functional’ category of translation criticism (Reiss, 2000, pp. 92–94). This category includes the specific function of a translation in contrast with that of the original (e.g., in résumé translations, interlinear translations for study purposes, Bible translation, or adaptations of literary works for the stage), and the possibility that the target text might address a different kind of audience than the source text (as in translations of adult literature for children or popularizations of specialized texts for lay audiences). In these exceptional cases, the intended function of the target text would take precedence over functional equivalence on the text-type level so that the standard for translation criticism would no longer be equivalence but adequacy regarding the intended function. It is this functional category in her model that can be regarded as the starting point of functionalism in modern translation theory, although Reiss herself excluded such products from translation proper and called them ‘transfer’ (Übertragung).

Basic principles of the skopos theory Hans J. Vermeer, who had been trained as an interpreter by Katharina Reiss, turned Reiss’ model upside down, claiming that a change of function(s) was the general case in any translational action, whereas invariance was an exceptional case in which the change of function is set to ‘zero.’ He called his theory ‘skopos theory’ (from the Greek word skopos, meaning purpose or aim) because, according to this theory, the general standard for translation is no longer any kind of equivalence regarding the source text but the communicative purpose pursued in and through the translation process. A functional translation is one that is adequate for the intended purpose. Thus, the concept of equivalence was replaced by that of adequacy. The skopos theory is based on action theory. Action is the process of acting, which means ‘intentionally (at will) bringing about or preventing a change in the world (in nature)’ (Von Wright, 1968, p. 38). Action can thus be defined as an intentional ‘change or transition from one state of affairs to another’ (cf. Von Wright, 1963, p. 28). If generalized to cases where there are two or more agents, the theory of action can become a theory of interaction. The aspect of intentionality, or purposefulness, is therefore an essential characteristic of action theory, and consequently also of the skopos theory, which contradicts the widespread opinion 171

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that there can be translations without a purpose, e.g. in the case of literary texts (cf. Nord, 2018, pp. 101–102). Vermeer defines human action as intentional, purposeful behavior that takes place in a given situation; it is part of the situation at the same time as it modifies the situation (cf. Vermeer, 1978, p. 99). According to Vermeer, translation and interpreting are forms of translational action based on a source text, which may consist of verbal and/or nonverbal elements (illustrations, plans, tables, gestures, body language, etc.). Other forms of translational action may involve actions like a consultant giving information. This general framework is explained as follows: Any form of translational action, including therefore translation itself, may be conceived as an action, as the name implies. Any action has an aim, a purpose. […] The word skopos, then, is a technical term for the aim or purpose of a translation. […] Further: an action leads to a result, a new situation or event, and possibly to a ‘new’ object. (Vermeer, 1989, pp. 173–174) Drawing on action theory, skopos theory takes the whole situation in which any translated text is produced and received, respectively, as well as the agents who are involved in these processes, into account. Communicative situations are always embedded in a cultural environment, and this guides the behavior, both verbal and nonverbal, of the agents. Cultural features are termed ‘culturemes.’ A cultureme is a social phenomenon of culture X that is regarded as relevant by the members of this culture and, when compared with a corresponding social phenomenon in culture Y, is found to be specific to culture X. Along with the pragmatic turn in linguistics, this cultural turn in Translation Studies shifted the focus to the situation, and this, in turn, meant that professional translation and its needs and requirements came to the fore. The skopos theory rests on five general rules (cf. Reiss & Vermeer, 2013, p. 107): 1

2

3

4

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‘A translatum is determined by its skopos.’ This means that translators should do their work in a way that enables the target text to function in the situation in which it is used and with the people who want to use it and precisely in the way they want it to function (see also Vermeer, 1989). ‘A translatum is an offer of information in a target culture and language about an offer of information in a source culture and language.’ This means that, as a meta-offer of information, a translated text has a different status from that of the corresponding source text and that, therefore, equivalence cannot be the general yardstick for the assessment of translation quality, but only one possible skopos among others. ‘A translatum is a unique, irreversible mapping of a source-culture offer of information.’ Therefore, back-translation into the source language cannot be a way to check on the ‘correctness’ of a translated text unless the translation brief demands a literal rendering. ‘A translatum must be coherent in itself.’ This so-called coherence rule specifies that a translation should be acceptable in a sense that it is coherent with the receivers’ situation. The term ‘intratextual coherence’ used by Vermeer may be misleading because this kind of coherence is actually formed in the receivers’ mind and not inherent in the text. ‘A translatum must be coherent with the source text.’ This so-called fidelity rule means that the target text is expected to bear a certain kind of relationship with the corresponding source text. Vermeer calls this relationship ‘intertextual coherence,’ which should exist between source and target text, while the form it takes depends both on the translator’s interpretation of the source text and on the translation skopos.

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These rules are ordered hierarchically. Intertextual coherence is regarded as subordinate to intratextual coherence, and both are subordinate to the skopos rule. If the skopos requires a change of function, the standard will no longer be intertextual coherence with the source text but adequacy or appropriateness regarding the skopos (Reiss & Vermeer, 2013, p. 127). And if the skopos demands intertextual incoherence, the standard of intratextual coherence would no longer apply (as, for example, in a translation of the theatre of the absurd). Vermeer’s first articles on his skopos theory were published in journals of limited diffusion which mainly addressed practicing translators and interpreters (Lebende Sprachen or MDÜ, the newsletter of the German Association of Interpreters and Translators), who were not really interested in something like ‘a general theory of translation’ – they just did intuitively what they thought would serve their clients’ needs (which, in fact, was even ‘functional’ at times). Therefore, it was not until 1984, when the book Grundlegung einer allgemeinen Translationstheorie, co-authored by Hans J. Vermeer and Katharina Reiss (Reiss & Vermeer, 2013), was first published that German translation scholars began to take notice of this new theoretical approach. During the 1980s, Translation Studies in Germany was entirely dominated by linguistic theories based on the fundamental notion of equivalence. Therefore, the skopos theory was harshly criticized for transgressing the limits of ‘translation proper’ and making ‘the contours of translation, as the object of study […] steadily vaguer and more difficult to survey’ (Koller, 1995, p. 193). And since most publications involved in this debate were written in German, the skopos theory did not make its way to an international, mainly English-speaking, audience until the early 1990s, when international scholars began to discuss the theory (see, for example, Gentzler, 1993). It is rather revealing that the seminal publications by Reiss and Vermeer were not translated into English until the turn of the millennium or even later (Reiss, 2000, Reiss & Vermeer, 2013).

Functionalism However, within the German-speaking context, Vermeer’s theoretical reflections fell on the fertile ground right after being presented at the Germersheim campus in 1977. Vermeer’s colleagues both in Germersheim and in nearby Heidelberg had been looking for a theoretical framework supporting their translation courses for some time and eagerly took up the functional perspective. Hans G. Hönig and Paul Kussmaul were the first to publish their application of the theory to translator training in a book on functional translation strategies (Hönig & Kussmaul, 1982), while others developed methodologies for various aspects of teaching, e.g. error analysis and evaluation (Kupsch-Losereit, 1985, 1986), interpreter training (Kalina, 1986), the translation brief (Nord, 1986), a model for pre-translational text analysis (Nord, 1987 and, more in detail, Nord, 2005), the culture-specificity of technical texts and terminology (Schmitt, 1987), a systematic approach to translation problems (Nord, 2011), a functional typology of translations (Nord, 1988, in English: Nord, 1997), and ethical aspects of translation including the concept of loyalty (Nord, 1989, in English: Nord, 2005, pp. 31–34). These applications of the skopos theory are what is nowadays subsumed under the umbrella term of functionalism in translation practice, translator training, and Translation Studies. They were originally designed for translation pedagogy but later also extended to interpreting, literary translation, Bible translation, legal translation, as well as practical aspects of the translation profession, to name the most important areas (for more details and recent research in each of these areas see Nord, 2018, pp. 126–133). What they all have in common is their focus on the (intended) functions of the target text, specified in a translation brief which, 173

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explicitly or implicitly, describes the situation (time, place, medium, addressed audience and intended functions) for which the target text is needed. This means that for one and the same source text there can be various translations, each with a different skopos, which can be regarded as adequate if they fulfill the desired function or functions. Such an approach to translation relies on a different concept of what a text is, a concept that is in line with the claim put forward by the so-called aesthetics of reception in literary studies of the time (cf. Iser, 1978 or Jauss, 1982) that a text is as many texts as there are readers or recipients of it. This concept presupposes a distinction between ‘addressed audience,’ i. e., a specific group of readers or listeners imagined by the author, and ‘recipients,’ i.e., persons who happen to read, or listen to, the text even though they may not be the addressees. According to Vermeer, a text is an offer of information from which potential recipients choose what they are willing, or able, to process. The meaning is not inherent in the text, and thus cannot be ‘transferred’ to another text in another language. Instead, it is the recipients who reconstruct the meaning and ‘make sense’ of the text, in light of their respective background knowledge, horizon, expectations, and communicative needs. In order to avoid a conceptual confusion, Nord (2005, pp. 53–54) proposed a distinction between ‘intention’ or ‘intended function,’ seen from the sender’s viewpoint, and ‘function,’ from the recipients’ perspective. If the communication is successful, the sender’s intention finds its aim and becomes analogous to, or even identical with, the function the text has for the recipient. A translator is a recipient of the source text, whose reception process is guided by the purpose of conveying the source-text offer of information to a particular audience at a specific place and moment in time in order to allow them to make sense of it. Like any other text producer, translators will adapt the way they formulate this new information offer to the idea they have of the addressed target-culture audience, of what these may know (or not know) about the topic, of their reading experience and expectations, and their cultural and environmental imprinting. For pedagogical purposes, it may be useful to classify the communicative functions intended by a particular text producer (and the translator as a text producer). Nord (2018, pp. 39–50) suggested a four-function model together with a typology of translations. The four-function model is based on a combination of Bühler’s organon model (2011), which was used by Reiss for her text typology, and Jakobson’s model of language functions (1959). From Bühler’s model, Nord borrowed the referential, the expressive, and the appellative functions, which are also included in Jakobson’s model. The fourth function, the phatic function, was adapted from Jakobson. Each of these four basic functions can be broken down into several subfunctions if necessary. The referential function refers to the relationship between the communicative sign and the outside world of objects and phenomena, with subfunctions such as informative, descriptive, instructive, or metalinguistic (in the sense that the object of reference is language in general or a specific language). The expressive function, with subfunctions like emotive or evaluative, is linked to the sender or text producer, their emotions, values, personal experience, etc. The appellative function is addressee-oriented. It is intended to make the recipients respond in a particular way, e.g., to persuade them, to illustrate a hypothesis with an example or to demand a certain reaction. The phatic function aims at establishing, maintaining, or ending contact between sender and receiver, and defining the relationship holding between them, thus providing the channel for communication. In this sense, the phatic function can be regarded as the most important of the four, because the other three functions will not reach their aim unless the channel works. Except for purely phatic utterances (e.g., in a small talk about the weather), texts are rarely monofunctional. We can usually identify different parts or sections in a text that are 174

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intended to achieve different functions, possibly in a hierarchical order in which one function may take priority, while the others serve as supporting devices. For each of the four basic functions, certain requirements must be fulfilled. The phatic function works on the basis of conventional forms like greetings, apologies, forms of address, etc. The referential function is based on an appropriate balance between what is presupposed to be known by the addressed audience and what is expected to be unknown and, therefore, interesting for them, i.e., between ‘given’ and ‘new’ information. The expressive function relies on shared value systems between sender and receiver unless it is explicitly stated by means of evaluative or emotive forms of expression. And, finally, the appellative function works on the basis of a correct appreciation of the audience’s sensitivity, cultural knowledge, value system, etc. These requirements apply to both the source and the target culture, and it depends on the translation skopos whether the intended functions of the source text are expected to be achieved also by the target text or whether the target-cultural situation is so different from the source-text situation that this is not possible or not even desirable. These considerations result in a typology of translations which may be useful as a guideline for the translator’s decision whether to aim at an invariance of functions, which usually implies an adaptation of the text form to target-culture standards, or at a change of functions, if the skopos requires a more source-oriented way of translating. Nord classifies the two types as instrumental or documentary translations, each with a number of subtypes or forms (first in Nord, 1989, in English: Nord, 1997). Bible translation is a perfect case in point. Throughout the centuries, we observe that there are different translations of the Bible: documentary translations like interlinear versions for study purposes, literal translations keeping as closely as possible to the source-text wording, allegedly to avoid any interpretation (if this is at all feasible and does not lead to unwanted interpretations), philological translations with notes and glossaries intended to explain the cultural background or certain linguistic problems, on the one hand, and translations in modern language adapted to the reception abilities of young people or even children, translations for Protestants or Catholics, translations for Muslims or missionary translations like those following Nida’s dynamic equivalence model, etc., on the other hand. These forms of translation show that functionalism overcomes the eternal dilemma mentioned above. There is no longer a need to take sides between ‘literal’ or ‘free’ translation because either strategy, and some others between these two extremes, is ‘adequate’ if it is applied consistently throughout the translation project and fulfills the intended purposes. There is, however, one aspect which seems irrelevant in a general theory but is essential in any application to the teaching and the practice of translation. When Reiss and Vermeer (2013, p. 90) state that the basic principle of skopos theory is ‘the end justifies the means,’ they seem to allow for any manipulation of the message according to the commissioner’s or the translator’s personal aims or ideologies. This attitude has sometimes been criticized, but one could always argue that a general theory does not have to be directly applicable, nor does it have to account for ethical considerations. Whether or not one agrees to this definition of a general theory, translation practice, and therefore also translator training, do not occur in a vacuum. Translators interact with other human beings on both sides of the culture barrier (the source-text author, the client and the target-text recipients), to whom they owe the responsibility of experts whose professional competence rests on the knowledge of both the source and the target cultures. This responsibility is what I have called ‘loyalty’ (cf. Nord, 2018, 113–117). Loyalty must not be confused with faithfulness or fidelity referring to a formal relationship between two texts, because it is an interpersonal category describing the ethical attitude of translators with regard to their interaction partners. In practical applications of the 175

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skopos theory, it is precisely the concept of ‘function plus loyalty’ that matters, even though there may be cases where these principles seem to contradict each other. Loyalty restricts the range of possible skopoi for one particular source text. It raises the need for a negotiation of the translation brief between translators and their commissioners in those cases in which the requirements of the brief seem incompatible with the translator’s professional ethics.

Intersemiotic aspects Intersemiotic aspects have been present in functionalism from the beginning. Apart from the three text types (content-focused, form-focused, appeal-focused texts) based on Bühler’s three basic language functions, Katharina Reiss added a fourth type to her text typology, which she called audio-medial (Reiss, 2000, p. 43). Audio-medial texts are ‘distinctive in their dependence on non-linguistic media and on graphic, acoustic, and visual kinds of expression’ (ibid.). The term was later changed to ‘multimedial,’ cf. Reiss & Vermeer, 2013, p. 186), and nowadays we would speak of ‘multimodal’ texts (cf., for example, O’Sullivan, 2013). According to Reiss, this type includes radio and television scripts, radio newscasts and reports, topical surveys and dramatic productions as well as all kinds of combinations of music and text. In later publications, Reiss reduced her four text types to three, specifying that the fourth type is a ‘hyper-type which is superimposed over the three other basic types, each of which may occur in the form of a multimedial text’ (Reiss & Vermeer, 2013, p. 187). A similar attitude toward non-linguistic sign systems can be found in the skopostheoretical groundwork. As mentioned before, the foundation of functionalism in action theory provides a useful framework for several intersemiotic aspects of translation and interpreting which are linked to translational action by means of the generic concept of transfer. As Vermeer puts it (in Reiss & Vermeer, 2013, pp. 79–80): Within the framework of a general theory, the specific feature of “translation” as an information offer is included in the generic term “transfer”. In general, a “transfer” refers to the transformation of a sign, as an element of a sign system which possesses a potential for form and function, into another sign, as an element of another sign system. The strategy chosen for this transfer depends on the circumstances of the purpose behind the transfer. The strategy includes, for example, the selection of an appropriate sign from the target system, etc. Given that signs are elements of a system and are transferred as such, and not as isolated elements, the transfer may be assumed to possess certain regularities, or, at the very least, arbitrariness may be excluded. The complexity of the signs is not specified (a sign could be, for example, a word, a sentence or a text). Therefore, the rule includes complex signs or sign-systems, such as texts. In real situations, the transfer is subject to individual circumstances; the transfer of verbal signs is subject to language- and culture-specific conditions of verbalisation and its cultural implications, i.e. in the transfer of signs from system S to system T, linguistic and cultural conditions will have to be taken into account, e.g. thank you → a smile; hallo → bon soir; auf Wiedersehen → Ø (a zero sign). Although, in this explanation, the examples point to communicative situations typical of interpreting, Vermeer discusses the concept of transfer also in a wider sense when he specifies various types and subtypes (in Reiss & Vermeer, 2013, p. 22): 1

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action → action (e.g. I see someone point to a piece of paper on the floor and I pick it up);

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2 3

non-verbal action → verbal action and vice versa (e.g. I am asked to pick the paper up and I pick it up; I see someone point to the piece of paper and I utter a cry of protest); verbal action → verbal action (e.g. transforming an assertion into a question).

This list is contrasted with Jakobson’s ([1959]2004, p. 139) two types of transfer, each with a subtype: 4 4’ 5

5’

the transfer of a set of signs from sign system x into an (equivalent) set of signs from the same sign system (e.g. modifying a piano score for a full orchestra); subtype: the transfer of a novel written in language A into a theatre play in the same language, etc. (‘intralingual translation’); the transfer of a set of signs from sign system x into a set of signs from sign system y (e.g. converting a mathematical formula in the decimal system into a sequence of electrical impulses in binary code; playing music from notes on paper); subtype: the transfer of a text in language A into language B (e.g. translating a novel by T. S. Eliot into German; translating John Hartley’s Yorkshire Ditties into standard English (‘interlingual translation’). Such cases always imply a cultural transfer in addition to linguistic transfer.

Coming back to the concept of transfer in a later chapter (Reiss & Vermeer, 2013, p. 80), Vermeer gives some more examples of transfer activities: 6 7 8

intralingual examples: dramatizing a novel, taking notes of a conversation; extralingual examples: filming an action, painting a landscape, transferring the cultural value of a cow (in India) to that of a pet (in Germany); transfer between extralingual and intralingual examples: reporting an event, recording a conversation. In addition: Mussorgsky composing a piece of music with the title Pictures at an Exhibition, building a cathedral from a construction plan, building/interpreting a cathedral as an expression of religious faith.

However, most of these examples, except no. (3) and no. (5’), are excluded from translational action (i.e. translation and interpreting), which is considered to be a type of transfer where communicative verbal and nonverbal signs are transferred from one language and culture (or ‘linguaculture,’ as Michael Agar has called it) into another (Vermeer, 1978, p. 99). Apart from this reference to nonverbal signs, we find one more remark on non-linguistic sign systems involved in translational action: Applied to texts-in-situation, translational action is not only verbal, it also involves the whole person and, as a specific form of transfer, includes the possibility of verbal action being transformed into non-verbal action and vice versa. In interpreting, for example, it is the interpreter as a person, his posture and behaviour, his clothing, his voice, etc. that are involved. (Reiss & Vermeer, 2013, p. 82) At any rate, such references are scarce and not very systematic. Vermeer’s concern with the transfer is more on cultural and linguistic aspects. This distinguishes it from the model proposed by Justa Holz-Mänttäri, a German-born translator, translation teacher and translation scholar working in Finland. In 1984, the same year in which Vermeer presented the 177

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groundwork of skopos theory in the book co-authored with Reiss, Holz-Mänttäri published her doctoral thesis Translatorisches Handeln, ‘translatorial action’ (Holz-Mänttäri, 1984). The term translatorial refers to all objects and phenomena related to what translators actually do (cf. Pym, 2009, p. 46). It illustrates the fact that Holz-Mänttäri’s approach goes further than Vermeer’s skopos theory. Also drawing on action theory and her own experience as a professional translator of technical documents, she understands translatorial action as the process of producing a message transmitter of a certain kind, designed to be employed in superordinate action systems in order to coordinate actional and communicative cooperation. (1984, p. 17, my translation) Along the lines of this definition, Holz-Mänttäri consistently avoids the term text replacing it by ‘message transmitter’ (Botschaftsträger), because she wants to include all kinds of non-linguistic signs which are used in communication. By creating a new terminology, her aim is to emphasize the fact that professional translation is much more than a mere linguistic activity. These references to both skopos theory and the theory of translatorial action show that the action-theoretical groundwork sets the basis for an intersemiotic application of the functionalist perspective (for research examples see Section ‘Research perspectives’). This links with two more recent fields of study: adaptation studies and transfer studies. Adaption studies came up in the 1950s and has been focussing mainly on novel-to-film adaptation, as the presentation of the journal Adaptation shows. The journal offers …academic articles, film and book reviews (including both book to screen adaptations and screen to book adaptations), popular and ‘classic’ adaptations, theatre and novel screen adaptations, television, animation, soundtracks, production issues and genres in literature on screen. Adaptation provides an international forum to theorise and interrogate the phenomenon of literature on screen from both a literary and film studies perspective. (https://academic.oup.com/adaptation, 24/11/2021) Adaptation studies has recently widened its scope to other media and other text types and to cultural adaptation. Adaptation scholars clearly refer to functionalism in Translation Studies, as Vandal-Sirois and Bastin (2012, p. 25) point out: Although many theories that push the domesticating ‘agenda’ suit the notion of adaptation very well, the functionalist approach seems the most suitable to describe the reasons why a translator resorts to adapting a text. Since adaptations are motivated by keeping the source text applicable to the target culture, and ensuring the efficacy of a text for a specific group of readers, the translator should consider the purpose of the text that will be introduced in a different culture, the reason why the translation is requested, and the target readers of the translation. (Vandal-Sirois & Bastin, 2012, p. 25) This shows that functionalism is often misunderstood as a theory of adaptation (cf. Nord, 2018, p. 119), although it includes adaptation as one of various techniques and strategies in translational action.

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Like adaptation studies, transfer studies, a ‘transdiscipline’ (cf. Antos, 2001) of German origin, also meet with translational functionalism. Transfer studies (Transferwissenschaft) focus on the transfer of knowledge through communication across disciplinary boundaries and between experts and non-experts. It was mainly Susanne Göpferich, coming from functionalism in Translation Studies herself, who introduced certain aspects of skopos theory into this discipline, founded at a conference in Göttingen in 1999. Göpferich argues that by widening the scope of Translation Studies it would be possible to include other forms of mediated communication performed to fulfill specific functions and meet the needs of specific audiences (Göpferich, 2007), thus forming a link between Translation Studies and transfer studies. However, we must emphasize again that both adaptation studies and transfer studies clearly differ from translational functionalism in one important aspect. In functionalism, the adaptation to the conditions of the target situation is only one of two possible global strategies chosen for the translation of an entire communicative event, as well as a technique on lower levels. The other global strategy can be the orientation toward the source text and its culture whenever this is required by the translation brief. If the brief so demands, an interlineal translation is just as ‘functional’ as an exoticizing or an equifunctional translation.

Research perspectives As we have mentioned above, functionalism had a great impact on translation teaching, for which it was designed in the first place, from the very start. And it still inspires translation teachers to check on the validity of skopos-theoretical postulates with their students as readily available subjects. But there are other promising fields in which functionalism offers rich research perspectives. The comparison of culture-specificity in different text types or genres by means of parallel texts is one of them. It must be emphasized that, in contrast to the usage within the framework of corpus-based Translation Studies, by ‘parallel texts’ we understand untranslated texts belonging to the same genre and produced independently in two different cultures. The term was coined by German linguists (e.g. Spillner, 1981 or Hartmann, 1980), who called for a ‘contrastive textology’ long before corpus-based Translation Studies came into being. Contrastive textology can also reveal culture-specific differences in parallel texts of different cultures using the same language (e.g. a comparison of Spanish, Argentinian and Mexican texts of the same genre) or shed light on the expectations of users with regard to genre conventions. As early as 1978, Paul Kussmaul studied the communicative conventions in academic texts (Kussmaul, 1978). Göpferich (1995) analyzed technical and scientific parallel texts in English and German, and Nord studied the conventions of titles and headings in German, English, Spanish and French (Nord, 1995) or of metacommunicative utterances in English and German (Nord, 2007). During the first two decades after its introduction, many critics accepted functionalism in the translation of operating instructions or advertisements but doubted that it could be applied to literary translation, claiming that literary texts, like any work of art, have a different status that does not allow for a functional translation. Apart from the fact that, in real life, we see indeed a lot of audience orientation in translated literature, e.g. in children’s books or certain genres of theatre plays, many translation problems do not only allow but demand that their possible or intended functions should be taken into account. This does not only affect the text level, where translators have to take a decision about the appropriate text type

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or form but also inferior levels of lexis or syntax, e.g. with regard to the reproduction or adaptation of proper names, the transfer of culture references, dealing with forms of address between fictional characters (cf. Nord, 2012), or attending to the concerns of sensitivity in readers. For quite some time, critics also held the view that functionalism was not applicable to legal translation, although some scholars had already applied the distinction between documentary and instrumental translation in this field (e.g., Prieto Ramos, 2002, Calvo Encinas, 2002, among others). Inspired by Nord’s looping model of the translation process (Nord, [1991]2005, pp. 36–39), Prieto Ramos showed how terminological choices, particularly in sworn translation, are guided by the translator’s search for communicative adequacy in each situation. He made a distinction between five categories of legal texts (legislative texts, judicial texts, other public legal instruments or texts of legal implementation, private legal instruments and legal scholarly writings) with three main functions (to govern public or private legal relations, to apply legal instruments in specific scenarios, and to convey specialized knowledge on sources of law and legal relations (Prieto Ramos, 2014). Another specific case in which the application of functionalism has long been regarded as impossible is the translation of religious texts, in general, and Biblical texts, in particular. Nevertheless, this topic has been dealt with in several studies, such as Nord, 2002 and 2005, Downie, 2009, and Cheung, 2011 about functionalism in Bible translation, and Guimarães (2009) about the translation of the Bhagavad Gita. Like in literary translation, functional decisions must be taken both at the level of the whole text and with regard to translation units at lower levels. It is precisely in these fields that the concept of loyalty seems to be most welcome. It was one of the merits of the skopos theory that researchers became interested in the conditions of professional translation. Since the labor market for intercultural mediation is getting more and more global, this issue has become a promising field for translatological research. There are various scholars focusing their investigation activities on the translator’s workplace, for example, Matilde Nisbeth Brøgger (2017), who studied the practice of medical translation, or Elisa Calvo Encinas, whose interest was on the employability of graduates from translator and interpreter training institutions (Calvo Encinas & Morón-Martín, 2010). There are also several studies referring to the intersemiotic aspects of functionalism. As early as 1989, Peter A. Schmitt applied the functional approach to the translation of graphic representations in technical texts (Schmitt, 1989) and later in comics and cartoons (Schmitt, 1997). The translation of comics was also a topic studied by the Austrian scholar Klaus Kaindl (1999, 2010, 2018). However, Kaindl’s main research focus was (and is) the intersection of music and text in translation. His studies include opera librettos (Kaindl, 1995, 2020), pop songs (Kaindl, 2003, 2005), French chansons (Kaindl, 2012b, 2012c), or multimodal translation in general (Kaindl, 2012a, 2019).

Conclusion In conclusion, we can see that functionalism (including loyalty) is an approach that is applicable to all forms of translational action (written translation, interpreting, sight translation, multimodal translation, etc.) without any expansions or adaptations. Thanks to its foundation in action theory, intersemiotic aspects have always been included in the concept. With regard to functionalist research, we have seen studies predominantly in translation pedagogy, but also works referring to the translation of literary, legal, medical and even religious 180

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texts, apart from those genres and text types which seem to lend themselves particularly to a functional approach, like advertising or tourism. Another important field is professional translation practice, where functionalism is not yet as widespread as it should be, mainly because many users of translation (clients, commissioners, but also the public in general) still cling to a traditional concept of translation as a linguistic code-switching operation. In the profession, we therefore see that translators have introduced the concept of ‘transcreation’ for a more audience- and purpose-oriented way of translating – a concept which has always been an integral part of functionalism and, from a theoretical perspective, does not need to be excluded from (functional) translation.

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Jerome [Hieronymus, Sophronius Eusebius] ([394]2004). Letter to Pammachius (K. Davies, Trans.). In L. Venuti (Ed.), The Translation Studies Reader (pp. 21–30, 2nd edition). London: Routledge. Original title: Hieronymi epistula LVII. ad Pammachium de optimo genere interpretandi (pp. 11–22), edited by G. J. M. Bartelink. Leiden: Brill 1980. Kaindl, K. (1995). Die Oper als Textgestalt: Perspektiven einer interdisziplinären Übersetzungswissenschaft. Tübingen, Germany: Stauffenburg (Studien zur Translation, 2). Kaindl, K. (1999). Thump, Whizz, Poom: A Framework for the Study of Comics under Translation. Target, 11(2), 263–288. Kaindl, K. (2003). Ein Schiff wird kommen: Zur Übersetzung von Popularmusik. In B. Nord & P. A. Schmitt (Eds.), Traducere Navem. Festschrift für Christiane Nord (pp. 83–101). Tübingen, Germany: Stauffenburg. Kaindl, K. (2005). The Plurisemiotics of Pop Song Translation: Words, Music, Voice and Image. In D. Gorlée (Ed.), Song and Significance. Virtues and Vices of Vocal Translation (pp. 235–263). Leiden, Netherlands: Brill. Kaindl, K. (2010). Comics in Translation. In Y. Gambier & L. van Doorslaer (Eds.), Handbook of Translation Studies (pp. 36–40). Vol. 1. Amsterdam, Netherlands: Benjamins. Kaindl, K. (2012a). Multimodality and Translation. In K. Washbourne & B. Van Wyke (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Translation Studies (pp. 257–269). London: Routledge. Kaindl, K. (2012b). From Realism to Shnulze and Back: The Songs of Edith Piaf in German. In H. J. Minors (Ed.), Music, Text and Translation (pp. 225–241). London: Continuum. Kaindl, K. (2012c). Die Übersetzung französischer Chansons: Am Beispiel von Barbara. Lied und populäre Kultur. Jahrbuch des Deutschen Volksliedarchivs, 57, 207–217. Kaindl, K. (2018). Comics, the Graphic Novel and Fan Fiction. In K. Washbourne & B. Van Wyke (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Literary Translation (pp. 240–243). London: Routledge. Kaindl, K. (2019). Theoretische und praktische Implikationen einer multimodalen Übersetzung(swissenschaft). In H. E. H. Lenk, H. W. Giessen, S. Tienken & L. Tiittula (Eds.), Medienkulturen – Multimodalität und Intermedialität (pp. 189–212). Frankfurt am Main, Germany: Peter Lang. Kaindl, K. (2020). Ordne die Reih’n. The Translation of Mozart-da Ponte Operas in the Third Reich. In A. Şerban & K. K. Y. Chan (Eds.), Opera in Translation: Unity and Diversity (pp. 175–194). Amsterdam, Netherlands: Benjamins. Kalina, S. (1986). Das Dolmetschen – Theorie und Praxis – die Besonderheiten von Dolmetschprozessen und ihre situativen Bedingungen – Folgerungen und Forderungen für Ausbildung und Arbeit des Dolmetschers. TextconText, 1(3), 171–192. Koller, W. (1995). The Concept of Equivalence and the Object of Translation Studies. Target, 7(2), 191–222. Kupsch-Losereit, S. (1985). The Problem of Translation Error Evaluation. In C. Titford & A. E. Hieke (Eds.), Translation in Foreign Language Learning and Testing (pp. 169–179). Tübingen, Germany: Gunter Narr. Kupsch-Losereit, S. (1986). Scheint eine schöne Sonne? oder: Was ist ein Übersetzungsfehler? Lebende Sprachen, 31(1), 12–16. Kussmaul, P. (1978). Kommunikationskonventionen in Textsorten am Beispiel deutscher und englischer geisteswissenschaftlicher Abhandlungen. Lebende Sprachen, 23(2), 54–58. Luther, M. ([1530]2017). An Open Letter on Translating (G. Mann, Trans.). Revised and annotated by M. D. Marlowe. Retrieved from http://www.bible-researcher.com/luther01.html. Original title: Sendbrief vom Dolmetschen. Reprint in H.-J. Störig (Ed.), Das Problem des Übersetzens (pp. 14–32). Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft 1963. Nida, E. A. (1964). Toward a Science of Translating. With Special Reference to Principles and Procedures Involved in Bible Translating. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill. Nida, E. A. (1976). A Framework for the Analysis and Evaluation of Theories of Translation. In R. W. Brislin (Ed.), Translation. Application and Research (pp. 47–91). New York: Gardner Press. Nisbeth Brøgger, M. (2017). When Translation Competence Is Not Enough: A Focus Group Study of Medical Translators. Meta, 62(2), 396–414. Nord, C. (1986). Treue, Freiheit, Äquivalenz – Oder: Wozu brauchen wir den Übersetzungsauftrag? TextconText, 1(1), 30–47. Nord, C. (1987). Textanalyse im Übersetzungsunterricht? Überlegungen zur Verhältnismässigkeit der Mittel. Verhindert die Textanalyse im Übersetzungsunterricht dessen eigentliches Ziel, das Übersetzenlernen? TextconText, 2(1), 42–61.

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Nord, C. (1988). Übersetzungshandwerk – Übersetzungskunst. Was bringt die Translationstheorie für das literarische Übersetzen? Lebende Sprachen, 33(2), 51–57. Nord, C. (1989). Loyalität statt Treue. Lebende Sprachen, 34(3), 100–105. Nord, C. (1995). Text Functions in Translation. Titles and Headings as a Case in Point. Target, 7(2), 261–284. Nord, C. (1997). A Functional Typology of Translations. In A. Trosborg (Ed.), Text Typology and Translation (pp. 43–66). Amsterdam, Netherlands: Benjamins. Nord, C. (2002). Bridging the Cultural Gap: Bible Translation as a Case in Point. Acta Theologica, 11(1), 98–116. Nord, C. (2005a). Making Otherness Accessible. Functionality and Skopos in the Translation of New Testament Texts. Meta, 50(3), 868–880. Nord, C. (2005b). Text Analysis in Translation. Theory, Methodology, and Didactic Application of a Model for Translation-Oriented Text Analysis (C. Nord & P. Sparrow, Trans.). Revised 2nd edition, Leiden, Netherlands: Brill. Original title: Textanalyse und Übersetzen: Theoretische Grundlagen, Methode und didaktische Anwendung einer übersetzungsrelevanten Textanalyse. 2nd revised edition, Tübingen, Germany: Julius Groos, 2009. Nord, C. (2007). The Phatic Function in Translation: Metacommunication as a Case in Point. In W. Vanderweghe, S. Vandepitte & M. van de Velde (Eds.), The Study of Language and Translation (pp. 171–184). Amsterdam, Netherlands: Benjamins. Nord, C. (2011). Übersetzungsprobleme – Übersetzungsschwierigkeiten. Was in den Köpfen von Übersetzern vorgehen sollte. In C. Nord (Ed.), Funktionsgerechtigkeit und Loyalität. Theorie, Methode und Didaktik des funktionalen Übersetzens (pp. 115–125). Berlin, Germany: Frank & Timme. Nord, C. (2012). “You Can Say You to Me!” Organizing Relationships in Literary Translation. In B. Adab, P. A. Schmitt & G. Shreve (Eds.), Discourses of Translation. Festschrift in Honour of Christina Schäffner (pp. 147–160). Frankfurt am Main, Germany: Peter Lang. Nord, C. (2018). Translating as a Purposeful Activity. Functionalist Approaches Explained. 2nd revised and updated edition, London: Routledge. O’Sullivan, C. (2013). Multimodality as a Challenge and Resource for Translation. Journal of Specialised Translation ( JoSTrans), 20, 2–14. Prieto Ramos, F. (2002). Beyond the Confines of Literality. A Functionalist Approach to the Sworn Translation of Legal Documents. Puentes, 2, 27–36. http://wpd.ugr.es/~greti/ publicaciones-revista-puentes. Prieto Ramos, F. (2014). Legal Translation Studies as Interdiscipline: Scope and Evolution. Meta, 59(2), 260–277. Pym, A. (2009). Exploring Translation Theories. London: Routledge. Reiss, K. (2000). Translation Criticism – The Potentials & Limitations (E. F. Rhodes, Trans.). Manchester: St. Jerome. Original title: Möglichkeiten und Grenzen der Übersetzungskritik. Kategorien und Kriterien für eine sachgerechte Beurteilung von Übersetzungen. München, Germany: Hueber, 1971. Reiss, K. (2004). Type, Kind and Individuality of Text: Decision Making in Translation (S. Kitron, Trans.). In L. Venuti (Ed.), The Translation Studies Reader (pp. 168–179), London: Routledge. First published in Poetics Today, 2(4) (1981), 121–131. Reiss, K., & Vermeer, H. J. (2013). Towards a General Theory of Translational Action. Skopos Theory Explained (C. Nord, Trans.). London: Routledge. German original: Grundlegung einer allgemeinen Translationstheorie. Tübingen, Germany: Niemeyer, 1984. Schmitt, P. A. (1987). Fachtextübersetzung und Texttreue: Bemerkungen zur Qualität von Ausganstexten. Lebende Sprachen, 32(1), 1–7. Schmitt, P. A. (1989). Kulturspezifik von Technik-Texten: Ein translatorisches und terminographisches Problem. In H. J. Vermeer (Ed.), Skopos und Translationsauftrag – Aufsätze (pp. 53–87). Heidelberg, Germany: University. Schmitt, P. A. (1997). Comics und Cartoons: (kein) Gegenstand der Übersetzungswissenschaft? In H. W. Drescher (Ed.) Transfer. Übersetzen – Dolmetschen – Interkulturalität (pp. 619–662). Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Snell-Hornby, M. (2006). The Turns of Translation Studies. Amsterdam, Netherlands: Benjamins. Spillner, B. (1981). Textsorten im Sprachvergleich. Ansätze zu einer kontrastiven Textologie. In W. Kühlwein, G. Thome & W. Wilss (Eds.), Kontrastive Linguistik und Übersetzungswissenschaft (pp. 239–250). Munich, Germany: Wilhelm Fink.

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Vandal-Sirois, H., & Bastin, G. L. (2012). Adaptation and Appropriation. Is There a Limit? In L. Raw (Ed.), Translation, Adaptation and Transformation (pp. 21–41). London: Bloomsbury. Vermeer, H. J. (1978). Ein Rahmen für eine allgemeine Translationstheorie. Lebende Sprachen, 23(1), 99–102. Vermeer, H. J. (1989). Skopos and Commission in Translational Action. In A. Chesterman (Ed.), Readings in Translation (pp. 173–187). Helsinki, Finland: Oy Finn Lectura Ab. Von Wright, G. H. (1963). Norm and Action. A Logical Enquiry. New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul (= International Library of Philosophy and Scientific Method). Von Wright, G. H. (1968). An Essay in Deontic Logic and the General Theory of Action. Amsterdam, Netherlands: North Holland Publishing Company.

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10 Descriptive approaches Alexandra Assis Rosa

Introduction This chapter offers a selective view of the main theoretical coordinates of descriptive approaches to the study of translation, usually known as Descriptive Translation Studies (DTS). They started in the 1970s, and developed in the 1980s and 1990s mainly as a joint effort with Polysystem Theory, ‘among scholars and students of comparative literature as a reaction against the prescriptively oriented and linguistically inspired approaches to translation that were prevalent at the time’ (Hermans, 2020, p. 143). The two last decades of the twentieth century are stated to be ‘the central years of Translation Studies in which its most important ideas were elaborated and tested: the period in which Translation Studies was wedded, for better or worse, to polysystem theory’ (Gentzler, 2001, p. 105). Since the 1970s, many authors have been relevant for the development of descriptive approaches, namely James S Holmes (1924–1986), José Lambert, André Lefevere (1945–1996), Theo Hermans, Dirk Delabastita, Andrew Chesterman, Christina Schäffner, Kitty van Leuven-Zwart, Gideon Toury (1942–2016), Itamar Even-Zohar, among others. Hermans (2020, p. 143) stresses the importance of four publications for this descriptive paradigm: the essay ‘The Name and Nature of Translation Studies’ (presented in 1972 and first published in 1988; Holmes, 2000); the volume The Manipulation of Literature (Hermans, 1985), the collection of essays entitled Translation, Rewriting and the Manipulation of Literary Fame (Lefevere, 1992), and Gideon Toury’s Descriptive Translation and Beyond (published in 1995 as an expanded version of a previous 1980 publication; Toury, 2012). If we are to consider Gentzler’s association of Translation Studies with polysystem theory, another publication must be added to this list, Itamar Even-Zohar’s Polysystem Studies (EvenZohar, 1990). Although considering other contributions, for the sake of concision and coherence, this chapter takes as chief reference Gideon Toury’s Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond, first published in 1995 and thoroughly revised in 2012, which contributed to a conceptual network aimed at producing descriptive and target-oriented approaches to translation, a concept he famously redefined as a fact of the target culture.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003161448-14

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Accordingly, translation as an object of study was dramatically redefined. But the definition of an object of study Is never a neutral procedure. Rather, it is a function of the theory in whose terms it is constituted, which is always geared to cater for particular needs. Its establishment and justification are therefore intimately connected with the questions one wishes to pose, the possible methods of dealing with the selected objects with an eye to exploring those questions – and, indeed, the kind of answers which would count as admissible. (Toury, 2012, p. 17) This chapter first addresses a selection of the main coordinates of DTS. Second, it focuses on selected key concepts, including assumed translation, pseudotranslation, indirect translation, semiotic transfer, equivalence, untranslatability, translational norms and laws. Third, it offers a brief consideration of how descriptive research on translation regularities and patterns has diversified and branched out, by developing different approaches, and addressing specific interests and objects. The chapter ends with a consideration of critical topics and issues regarding DTS.

Main coordinates Descriptive Translation Studies go by many names. In a nutshell: Also known as the Polysystem Approach, the Manipulation School, the Tel Aviv Leuven Axis, the Descriptive, Empirical or Systemic School, or the Low Countries Group, DTS corresponds to a descriptive, empirical, interdisciplinary, target-oriented approach to the study of translation, focusing especially on its role in cultural history. This approach was first developed in the early 1970s, gained momentum in the 1980s, boomed in the 1990s, and still inspires several researchers. (Assis Rosa, 2016, p. 94) Despite this variability, it is mostly known as Descriptive Translation Studies or by the acronym DTS. Responsibility for the name of the discipline in English as well as for its most influential map falls on James S. Holmes, who named it in his seminal 1972 paper entitled ‘The Name and Nature of Translation Studies’ and published only in 1988 (2000). The author subdivided the discipline into Pure and Applied Translation Studies; Descriptive Translation Studies was identified as one of the two branches within Pure Translation Studies, besides Translation Theory. The three terms in the name of this branch offer a very good starting point to address its main coordinates.

Descriptive Taking a descriptive approach means to Take translation as it comes rather as we might have wished it. [To] focus less on what translation should have been, could have been, or might have been than on what it is – or better: how it appears to be, how it presents itself to us. (Hermans, 1999, p. 6)

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This statement opens many avenues for interpretation. First, to take translation ‘as it comes rather as we might have wished it,’ means to steer away from a critical evaluation (as much as possible) and to focus on understanding, describing and explaining translation. It means Accepting them [translations] as they are, warts and all, and then trying to figure out why they look the way they do, what factors and conditions account for their production, why they were received as they were, what actual impact they had. (Hermans, 1999, p. 4) DTS developed historically by importing the empirical aims of understanding, describing, explaining and predicting translation; and as such in explicit opposition to the then predominant prescriptive, speculative and evaluative approaches to translation, developed to take a stance and intervene to change the object of study. Second, ‘[to] focus less on what translation (…) could have been, or might have been than on what it is’ may be interpreted to stress the distinction between theoretical and descriptive research on translation, the distinction between the two branches of Pure Translation Studies: descriptive and theoretical. Third, in ‘descriptive’ studies, the empirical aims of understanding, describing, explaining and predicting translation also replaced the historically predominant problem-solving objectives of applied studies on translation, focused mainly on translator training and the production of translation tools. Toury states: … My own endeavours have always been geared primarily toward the descriptiveexplanatory goal of supplying exhaustive accounts of whatever has been presented/ regarded as translational within a target culture, on the way to making some generalizations regarding translational behaviour. (Toury, 2012, p. 20) The main aim of ‘Descriptive’ studies is to diagnose the status quo of translation considering specific time and space coordinates. In this regard, DTS may also be traced back to James McFarlane’s essay ‘Modes of Translation’ (1953) where the author advocates a systematic descriptive study of ‘what translation is and can be rather than what it ought to be but never is’ (1953, p. 93).

Translation Translation Studies focus on translation and translating, in their many forms and formats, modes, channels, agents, text types and genres, including, e.g., human and machine translation, written and oral translation (interpreting, simultaneous and consecutive), multimedia and audiovisual translation, and the translation of a wide range of genres and text types (including the translation of literature, scientific and technical texts, music, film, ballet, comics and video games) in an increasing variety of platforms. It addresses source and target texts (defined broadly to encompass various semiotic systems, modes and channels) and also metatexts (paratexts, reviews and critiques, guidelines and specifications, codes of conduct and good practice). Following Holmes, as an object of study, translation is amplified to encompass translation as a product (the translated text), as a process (translating, understood in terms of cognitive process but also as a sociological process) and as a function (role and value) within its context.

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In the words of Toury, [Every product] is an actual translation only inasmuch as it meets the requirements set to texts of the “translation” type in and by the recipient system […] From the viewpoint of the target system […] the term translation applies to any target text that is regarded as a translation from the intrinsic considerations of that system. (Toury, 1986, p. 1119) Accordingly, translation as an object of study is further amplified as assumed translation, i.e., as any text presented and functioning as a translation in a target context, and by taking translation ‘how it appears to be, how it presents itself to us’ (Hermans, 1999, p. 6), in a move that encompasses within the object of study all contextual variables that may influence translation.

Studies Holmes’ choice of naming the discipline Translation Studies (TS) was motivated by his wish to avoid referring to the discipline by its subject matter: translation, as this was criticized for failing to distinguish the territory (translation), from the map (Translation Studies). Moreover, Holmes also explains this as a choice to explicitly affiliate the discipline with the arts and humanities. (Holmes, 2000, p. 175) Despite variable cultural and linguistic preferences, this proposal is still the most influential nowadays and the discipline became known as TS, and descriptive approaches associated with its descriptive branch: DTS.

Target-oriented The study of translation aims ‘to account for real-life phenomena in their immediate contexts’ (Toury, 2012, p. 26). For a contextual study of translation, DTS focuses on textual and contextual variables and the relations between them, by resorting to concepts such as system (and polysystem), norms and laws. For example, the translational relationship between source and target text is a descriptive contextually motivated concept instead of being speculatively and prescriptively stated a priori. Moreover, in reaction to previously dominant source-orientedness, Toury recommends ‘translations be regarded as facts of the culture that would host them, with the concomitant assumption that whatever their function and systemic status, these are constituted within the target-culture and reflect its own systemic constellation’ (Toury, 2012, p. 18). Not only is translation defined by resorting to the target context, but translations are also strongly marked by the function or prospective position they will hold in the target cultural context. Therefore, ‘translations are facts of the target culture’ (Toury, 2012, p. 23). This has been argued notably by Pym (1998), who states translations are facts of an interculture. However, this target-orientedness of Descriptive Translation Studies also deserves a contextual interpretation. In the 1970s, when the target-oriented approach was first developed, the field was still strongly marked by source-orientedness (as well as by the goal of developing applied research and prescriptive research with an impact on translator training or quality assessment). The study of translation consisted most often of an evaluative comparison of a source text and its translation, without considering the contexts in which they were produced.

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Against this isolated consideration of translated texts, DTS intentionally changes the focus to zoom in on the interdependencies and interrelations of translation (as a product), of translating (as a process) and on their position (as a function) in the target culture. This suggests a shift of main focus to how the target context constrains translation. The initial systemic position and function of a translation are established based on a reconstructed context: context, therefore, has the status of an ‘explanatory hypothesis for descriptive findings’ (Toury, 2012, p. 23) (and it may change over time). According to Gentzler, this target-oriented study of translation is also developed under the influence of polysystem theory because: ‘[p]olysystem theorists presume (…) that the social norms and literary conventions in the receiving culture (“target” system) govern the aesthetic presuppositions of the translator and thus influence ensuing translation decisions.’ (Gentzler, 2001, p. 108) This focus on target-orientedness for the study of translation, however, should not be mistaken as an exclusive focus upon the target context, aimed at excluding the source culture and text or the wider international context. They are also essential coordinates to understand translation in context. As stated by Toury, this approach ‘has been defined as target oriented because this is where observations begin, but by no means should it be taken to imply that this is where they should also end.’ (Toury, 2012, p. 31). Actual translation relationships result from target-culture-specific translational norms that are contextually accepted models to perform the social role of a translator. Identifying them is also revealing of a given socio-cultural and historical community’s self-definition. However, this self-definition can only occur within wider intercultural international (power) relations, as revealed, e.g., by varying degrees of tolerance to interference (Toury, 2012).

Interdisciplinary Only an ‘interdisciplinary’ approach can encompass such a holistic conception of translation. Beyond a merely linguistic and textual, communicative nature, this object is also addressed in its historical, social, cultural, economic, ideological and political nature. In the early fifties, James McFarlane had already suggested the necessarily interdisciplinary nature of this study, for ‘translation borders on too many provinces.’ In ‘Complexity and Interdisciplinarity: Two Key Concepts in Translation Studies,’ Klaus Kaindl (2006) takes a further step to suggest translation has been understood since the 1980s as a complex object of study, presupposing ‘constructive reflection, and acceptance of indeterminism, and appraisal of difference, and a conception of the object as process’ (Kaindl, 2006, p. 86). With a complex object of study and openness to other disciplines, TS fulfills two relevant conditions for interdisciplinarity. It may be argued that this reflection might benefit from further development by zooming in on the difference between complicated and complex systems. The study of a complex system focuses on its structure, dynamics and interaction with the environment and requires more attention to it as an open system (or a polysystem) where many degrees of freedom can be found. Kaindl suggests, however, that this potential has not found its way into DTS. Interdisciplinarity is defined as involving either a relationship between branches of the same discipline (in internal interdisciplinarity) or cooperation with other disciplines, which may involve various degrees of theoretical and methodological interrelations (in external interdisciplinarity). Cooperation between disciplines can also take different forms, ranging from what is called ‘disciplinary imperialism’ (e.g., when Linguistics still dominated theoretical and methodological production in the 1950s and 1960s), to ‘import interdisciplinarity’

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(since the 1980s, by importing methods and theories from other disciplines), to the highest level of ‘mutual or reciprocal interdisciplinarity’ (when cooperation between disciplines contributes to the theoretical and methodological development of interrelated approaches that produce relevant findings for the disciplines involved and not only for one of them). One also finds references (favorable and unfavorable) to TS as a multidisciplinary or pluridisciplinary area. These designations are used to refer to the study developed by several disciplines, in juxtaposition, on a shared object. Thus, they correspond to the lowest degree of cooperation, since they characterize work in which each discipline applies its own theoretical and methodological frameworks, without necessarily interrelating or sharing the results of their studies (Kaindl, 2006, p. 87). As Kaindl argues, although some authors advocate this possibility, it would be desirable to increase the degree of cooperation among the disciplines involved in the study of translation to aspire to a transdisciplinary area. Transdisciplinarity corresponds precisely to the most advanced type of cooperation between disciplines and is, therefore, desirable, although the author recognizes that this is a difficult or only long-term goal for TS. This profile of interdisciplinarity that has marked TS (and DTS) since its inception is not without reason for reflection and some concern. The openness to other disciplinary approaches and the dynamism evident in the enlargement aimed at integrating a multiplicity of subfields may jeopardize both the disciplinary autonomy (largely dependent on the identification of its own methodologies, adequate to a multiplicity of new definitions of translation) and the unity of the discipline, due to a possible internal fragmentation (as pointed out by Delabastita, 2003 or Gambier, 2015). TS, therefore, may run the risk of becoming a polydiscipline: ‘a complex discipline, lacking unity,’ as Brems et al. (2015, p. 3) point out. Returning to Kaindl’s reflection (2006), the author diagnoses that, at the beginning of the 21st century, the stage of TS is still that of importing theories, methodologies and results from other disciplines, which TS adopts and adapts to the singularity and complexity of its object of study, not having yet reached a stage of mutual or reciprocal interdisciplinarity, which he points out as the desirable path (Kaindl, 2006, pp. 90–92). Perhaps this is also the reason why the most frequent designation for TS today is that of an interdisciplinary area. According to Gentzler (2001, p. 187), however, reciprocal interdisciplinarity, or even transdisciplinarity, may not be too far off since, in a final chapter entitled ‘The Future of Translation Studies,’ one reads ‘Today an argument can be made that a variety of academic and socio-political events occurring internationally have made conditions ripe for a “translation turn” in several fields simultaneously, including linguistics, anthropology, psychology, women’s studies, cultural studies, and postcolonial studies.’

Empirical TS is defined by Holmes as a field of pure research, as an empirical discipline focused on the study of translation, on describing ‘the phenomena of translating and translation(s) as they manifest themselves in the world of our experience’ and, based on such descriptions, on formulating general principles that allow one to both explain and predict translational phenomena (Holmes, 2000, p. 176). The main aim of empirical studies has been formulated as describing and understanding but also explaining and even predicting. Given the epistemological problems with predicting the future states of complex systems (i.e., complex in both structure and behavior), this aim of predicting has often been questioned. However, it needs to be stressed that this aim is understood as involving the formulation of general principles that are presupposed to 190

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have the ontological status of tentative and temporary hypotheses based on the description of translational regularities. The development of relevant methodologies, the identification of pertinent profile and contextual variables, the formulation and testing of hypotheses and the proposal of operative categories and classifications are also paramount aims for empirical descriptive studies (Chesterman, 2001). Although mainly formulated with literary translation in mind, these basic principles of DTS have been very productive when applied to research on other text types and translation modalities (see also Ben-Ari, 2013 or Assis Rosa, 2016, 2018, 2022). Since its inception, descriptive approaches have developed with a very broad definition of translation, which does not exclude what Meylaerts and Marais mention in the introduction to this volume: As a result of the exponential growth of multimodal and hyper objects massively distributed in time and space, and dethroning the (literary) text as the primary product of translation, the need for expanded definitions of translation as a complex, unpredictable process (rather than as a product), involving much more than texts (linguistic bias) and overtaking the binaries (source-target) that have traditionally delimited its field of study, has come to the fore. (Meylaerts & Marais, 2022, in this volume). As Pym suggests (2001, p. 279), multimedia and audiovisual translation and the consideration of international media beg for a redefinition of the sender, receiver, sending system, receiver system and culture (‘the set of factors creating resistance to the movement of information,’ Pym, 2001, p. 278), the location of translation agents (who the author suggests operate in an ‘intercultural space [inter- in the sense of intersection, an overlap between cultures and /or languages],’ Pym, 2001, p. 278).

Key concepts In the words of Gideon Toury, ‘concepts are always embedded in conceptual networks, so that each one of them can only be rendered intelligible, and hence be accounted for, within that network and in its own internal terms.’ (Toury, 2012, p. 36) Following this idea, let us move on to a selective consideration of the conceptual network of DTS, by looking at the key concepts of assumed translation, indirect translation, pseudotranslation, equivalence, untranslatability, translation norms and laws.

Assumed translation The strongly target-oriented redefinition of the object of study as assumed translation plays a central role in the conceptual network of DTS. Within a target-oriented approach, it comes as no surprise that it is the target culture context that defines translation: ‘… a text’s position and functions, including those that go with a text’s being regarded as a translation, are determined first and foremost by considerations originating in the target culture.’ (Toury, 2012, p. 20) According to this radical change of approach, Toury openly adopts not only a ‘cultureinternal distinctions’ (Toury, 2012, p. 20) standpoint but also imports ‘the pre-systematic attitude of the persons-in-the culture’ (Toury, 2012, p. 26) and suggests the object of study be redefined as: ‘“assumed translations”: that is all utterances in a [target] culture which are presented or regarded as translations, on any grounds whatever, as well as all phenomena within them and the processes that gave rise to them.’ (Toury, 2012, p. 27) This redefinition of the object of study – translation as assumed translation – discards the usual yardsticks used to identify and define it: both the source text and a priori notions of 191

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equivalence. Instead, Toury suggests one should look in the target context for the definition of translation as any text which within that specific target system has the status and the function of a translation. Given the theoretical framework and the set of goals of the discipline, the object of TS, DTS included, is reformulated to become more encompassing than a mere consideration of source and target texts: ‘… it is interdependencies that will be the focus of our attention, the main intention being to lay bare the regularities marking the relationships assumed to obtain between function, product and process.’ (Toury, 2012, p. 18) This allows the study of what translation actually is within a specific social, cultural and historical context, it also requires a broader outlook by including within the object of study the interdependencies between the product, process and function of translation. Toury offers a more specific definition for assumed translation (as product), considering three main postulates: An assumed translation would amount to any target-culture text for which there are reasons to tentatively posit the existence of another text, in another culture/language, from which it was presumably derived by transfer operations and to which it is now tied by a set of relationships based on shared features, some of which may be regarded -- within the culture in question – as necessary and/or sufficient. (Toury, 2012, pp. 30–31) The three postulates (meaning that ‘their existence is postulated rather than factual,’ Toury, 2012, 28) are: the source text, the transfer and the relationship postulates. In a nutshell, the source text postulate corresponds to the assumption of the existence of a source text. If a text is assumed to be a translation, then it is also assumed to be the translation of another text: an assumed source text, ‘which has both chronological and logical priority over it.’ (Toury, 2012, p. 29) The transfer postulate corresponds to the assumption that certain features have been transferred from the source to the target text; such features are now common to both. According to the Relationship postulate, tangible relationships associate the target and source text. These relationships are posited given the assumption of shared features of both textual products, and the assumption that they resulted from transfer operations. The researcher is expected to proceed inductively, i.e., starting with data on translation with the goal of identifying regularities and deriving general principles, with the status of temporary hypotheses. Starting, e.g., with the identification of target texts and source texts, once target text segments are mapped onto source text segments, the analysis of maintenance and shifts allows for the identification of equivalence as a result of the study. It is defined as: ‘that translation relationship which would have emerged as constituting the norms for the pair of texts under study’ (Toury, 2012, p. 32). Undefining translation as assumed translation allows for the consideration of equivalence and translation as the result of a descriptive study of translation. So, instead of being defined a priori, the concepts of translation and equivalence are the ultimate goal of descriptive studies.

Pseudotranslation and indirect translation The adoption of assumed translation as an object of study allows for a very considerable expansion. It encompasses previously ignored phenomena such as ‘pseudotranslation’ or ‘fictitious translations’ (Toury, 2012, p. 20). These are texts that are presented, bought, read,

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received and assumed to be a translation of a source text. But that source text does not exist, as they are actually original non-translated work passing for translations. Describing and explaining this phenomenon of pseudotranslations offers many insights into the target text culture, the functioning of publishers and collections, the book market, power relations between translation agents, readership expectations and sometimes rather unexpected motivations. In Portugal, for example, pseudotranslations signed by the author Dennis McShade are perhaps the most well-known cases of this phenomenon. It is said the journalist and writer Dinis Ramos Machado (1930–2008) needed extra income due to the birth of a daughter and arranged with a publisher to write four detective novels under the North-American pseudonym of Dennis McShade, to be published as translations in the collection Rififi. Published, advertised and received as translations they are in fact four non-translated detective novels authored by Dinis Machado.1 The object of study also encompasses phenomena previously dismissed as bad translations and for that reason excluded from the study, as was the case of indirect translation, i.e. the translation of a translation (see Assis Rosa et al., 2019). As an object of study, indirect translation opens up the possibility for a contextually informed study of intercultural routes taken by authors, works, text types, genres, poetics and textual models, and encompasses a multiplicity of features and factors, including several agents, stages, languages and texts within a very wide constellation of contexts.

Semiotic transfer Translation as a process, or translating, is also considered part of the object of study and it is redefined as a transfer of semiotic units (signs, messages, rules, norms, models) with communicative, social and cultural value, across several semiotic borders. Translation does not operate in a cultural vacuum; it takes place in specific communicative situations and cultural contexts; within such contexts, the units used for communication have a function, defined as their communicative and sociocultural value (Toury, 2012, p. 6). So, translating is no longer understood as a mere interlingual transfer of meaning. Instead, it is redefined in a much more encompassing way as intercultural communication taking place in a specific historical context, involving many more channels, modes and semiotic systems. Translating as a process is also understood as generating not only invariance but also variance. Several proposals have been made to identify stages in the translation process. Toury tentatively postulates such stages considering: the analysis of the source entity into features, a selection of relevant features to be retained, the transfer of the selected features across semiotic borders, and a recomposing of the target entity, which involves assigning the same or a different level of relevance to each transferred feature (Toury, 1986, p. 1114). According to these stages, translation involves the recreation of sameness (or invariance). However, translation also (and perhaps mostly) involves variance, difference and transformation (as both obligatory and optional shifts, as omissions, and additions). Toury also stresses the inherent variability and instability of preferred and thus more frequent choices for a certain type of relation between the source and target entity. This relation depends on the target context in general, but more specifically on the prospective position and function, a translation is expected to hold within that target context. Semiotically, this position is central for the identification of less relevant or irrelevant features to be transformed or omitted and of relevant features to be transferred in the translating process.

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Equivalence and untranslatability This dramatic redefinition of translation and translating has a bearing on the concepts of equivalence and also of untranslatability. If translation is acknowledged to involve sameness but also (and perhaps even mostly) difference, variance and transformation, then, untranslatability ceases to be an issue. Once the source text is not taken to be the absolute and definitive reference for translation, translational equivalence ceases to be defined as identity. It no longer makes any sense to aprioristically determine that a translation should be equal to its source. As a consequence, the notion of ‘fidelity’ to the source becomes irrelevant too, as it also ceases to make sense to impose a moral judgment of ‘(in)fidelity’ on the difference generated by translation. Equivalence is then redefined as ‘any relation which is found to have characterized translation under a specified set of circumstances’ (Toury, 2012, p. 85). So, it becomes possible to empirically verify equivalence by means of a comparative analysis of a source text and its corresponding target texts. Describing what translation, in reality, is (as a fact of the target culture) enables the identification of the type of equivalence adopted. The study of equivalence can be addressed in many different ways according to various criteria. The observed equivalence can be dynamic or pragmatic (i.e., aiming to recreate a similar effect for the target text), denotative and referential (maintaining the referent) or connotative (with a similar association or connotation), formal (considering several linguistic levels), textual, lexical, text-normative (adopting uses appropriate to similar contexts), or functional (based on transfer priorities within a specific communicative situation or cultural context) (Kenny, 2008). More importantly, it ceases to be identified as an a priori condition for the definition of translation. Instead, equivalence is identified a posteriori, it is a result of the description of the assumed translation. In any case, the preference for a specific type of equivalence is expected to be motivated by the target context.

Translational norm Translational norm is heralded as the most central concept of DTS. As a fact of the target context, translation (as product, process and function) is contextually motivated. To understand, identify and explain how the context influences translation, and the interrelations between the context and translation, Toury proposes the concept of the translational norm. Hermans defines it as a key concept ‘able to link the personal and the social dimensions of translation’ (Hermans, 2020, p. 145).

A genealogy of the concept of translational norm For a genealogy of the concept of translational norm, a selection of authors and works are suggested for further reading. Toury acknowledges inspiration from Jiří Levý’s notion of ‘Übersetsungsnorm’ (Levý, 1969, p. 25, pp. 28–29), as well as by previous work by Itamar Even-Zohar (1971) and James S Holmes (2000) (Toury, 2012, p. 61), regarding the key concept of the translational norm. Translational norms are defined for the first time by Toury in his 1977 PhD thesis (in Hebrew, Toury, 1977) as a set of intersubjective sociocultural constraints that are independent from source text features, systemic differences between the language pair involved in an interlingual translation process, and possible cognitive limitations of the translator. According to Malmkjaer (2008, p. 49), ‘[t]he notion of norms enters the broad field of Translation Studies with Toury’s essay “The nature and role of norms in Translation Studies,” first published in In Search of a Theory of Translation (1980).’ 194

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To better profile this concept, it also proves useful to consider the evolution of the debate on translational norms. In Christina Schäffner’s, 1999 work entitled Translation and Norms, Gideon Toury, Theo Hermans, Andrew Chesterman, Daniel Gile, Anthony Pym, Douglas Robinson, and Sergio Viaggio present their views and discuss this concept. Schäffner (1999) thus offers an interesting outline of the evolution of the debate about norms in the second half of the twentieth century, highlighting how the main focus shifted from linguistic norms to textual linguistic norms, and then to socioculturally specific translation norms. As stated, in the 1950s, translation was approached with a focus on linguistic norms: The target-language text was required to be identical to the SL-text in content, style and effect, and to respect the rules and norms of the TL. Linguistic translation studies, thus, were basically interested in the norms of the language systems. (…) A translation norm in this context was defined as translating a linguistic unit by its generally accepted equivalent. (Schäffner, 1999, p. 2) However, linguistic correctness offers no guarantee for appropriateness or communicative efficacy; systemic differences between the language pair involved in an interlingual translation process proved insufficient to account for all the features of translated texts. To address this issue, in the 1970s, TS started importing from text linguistics. The main focus shifted from linguistic features to the consideration of translation as communication in context, to the notions of text – genre – and of course context: For translation studies, this means that the text itself [as the basic unit of communication] is considered to be the unit of translation. Translation is no longer defined as transcoding linguistic signs but as retextualizing the SL-text. The focus has changed from reproducing meanings to producing texts. (Schäffner, 1999, p. 3) So the main focus shifted to translation as retextualizing a source text so that it fulfills a communicative function in a specific situation in a different context of culture: the target one. Toury’s proposals shift this focus once again: Translational behaviour is contextualized as social behaviour, and translational norms are understood as internalized behavioural constraints which embody the values shared by a community. All decisions in the translation process are thus primarily governed by such norms, and not (dominantly or exclusively) by the two language systems involved. (Schäffner, 1999, p. 5) As intersubjective and socioculturally specific models for translational behavior in force within a given community, translational norms have been considered a pivotal concept of DTS.

Translational norms: Concept and definition Davis (1994, p. 97 quoted by Toury, 2012, p. 62) states: ‘[p]eople use their given sociability to create agreements about actions,’ which are negotiated with groups and between groups (with concomitant power struggles) for the sake of stability, regularity, order, and 195

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predictability regarding what is appropriate and inappropriate behavior. Toury defines norms as follows: Norms have long been regarded as the translation of general values or ideas shared by a community — as to what would count as right or wrong, adequate or inadequate — into performance ‘instructions’ appropriate for and applicable to concrete situations. These ‘instructions’ specify what it prescribed and forbidden, as well as what is tolerated and permitted in a certain behavioural dimension. (Toury, 2012, p. 63) In the words of Schäffner: Norms (…) are related to assumptions and expectations about correctness and/or appropriateness. (…) Norms are developed in the process of socialization. They are conventional, they are shared by members of a community, i. e. they function intersubjectively as models of behaviour, and they also regulate expectations concerning both the behaviour itself and the products of this behaviour. (Schäffner, 1999, p. 1) When applied to translation, norms offer a model of good practice in translation, a model of what is tacitly and intersubjectively considered correct, appropriate and adequate within a given community. As such, they are taken to influence the practice of translation agents (i. e., all processes related to translating) and thus actual translations (i. e., the products), and also the expectations of the community regarding translation (i. e., their function, role), which means their influence also reaches the reception and effects of translation. The concept of translational norms can be deepened by addressing normative content, normative force, decision-making, subjectivity, and variability; the possibility for nonnormative translational behavior; object-level vs meta-level, and sources of information about translational norms.

Normative content In terms of normative content, norms are related to ‘assumptions and expectations about correctness and/or appropriateness’ (Schäffner, 1999, p. 1). Their content is intersubjectively accepted, culture-specific, and corresponds to social notions of good practice, correctness and appropriateness. As such translational norms regulate correct behavior in translation, they regulate translation products and they also regulate expectations regarding translation. Such social notions of good practice influence translation as a process, product and function; they also influence the reception of translation.

Normative force and subjectivity Toury defines translation from a sociocultural angle as an activity that is regulated by social constraints classifiable in terms of normative force and subjectivity, in a dynamic continuum. In terms of normative force or potency and subjectivity, norms occupy a middle ground in a continuum drawn between the opposing poles of stronger and more objective rules on one hand and weaker and more subjective idiosyncrasies on the other. Rules are stronger and relatively objective. Norms are intersubjective specific instructions on what is culturally 196

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appropriate (and inappropriate). Norms involve sanctions (actual or potential; negative/punitive or positive/rewarding); and they can either be verbalized or not. Besides mere idiosyncrasies, Toury also mentions the notion of conventions as vague, fluid, not specific and not binding. Other authors also distinguish between norms and conventions, defining the latter as mere preferences not involving sanctions. However, as stated by Hermans (2013, p. 1) ‘there is no unanimity as regards terminology or the exact distinction between norms, conventions, rules, constraints, and other similar terms,’ despite the usefulness of these concepts in various social sciences.

Decision-making Translational norms apply when a choice is needed between alternatives and the choice is non-random and requires a decision. As a model of what is socially and culturally accepted to be a translation, translational norms influence translational decisions by translation agents (e.g., publishers, editors, translation revisors and proofreaders) and generate culture-specific regularities. This non-random choice is motivated by the general values in force which generate specific instructions applicable to the situation in which a decision has to be made.

The multiplicity, variability and instability of translational norms The multiplicity of norms is mostly due to their sociocultural specificity and potential instability and variability (Toury, 2012, p. 86). Besides being socioculturally specific, and thus multiple and variable across cultures, norms are also inherently variable and unstable within a community and over time. As sociocultural constraints, they are, as expected, prone to change over time, both in terms of potency and validity, under the influence of different agents and contextual pressures. As norms tend to change over time, it is not unusual to find the influence of competing sets of norms at the same historical moment (namely, oldfashioned, mainstream, and progressive norms). (Toury, 2012, p. 87) Within a community, translational norms may also vary according to contextual features such as genre or text type or the function of translation. For example, in subtitling omission tends to be a favored procedure and it is also frequent in the translation of other text types, such as literary or philosophical texts. However, in sight translation in a courtroom omission, on the contrary, is not favored. In a community, the potency and validity of translational norms may also vary within different groups: ‘[s]hifts of validity and potency are intimately connected with changes of status, and hence with struggles for priority and domination, be it between (sub)cultures or within individual ones.’ (Toury, 2012, p. 66) Their normative force is variable (Toury, 2012, p. 65), as some norms can be stronger and as such closer to rules, or they can be weaker and as such closer to idiosyncrasies, both in a given moment and over time. Based on their normative force or potency, Toury distinguishes three subtypes of translational norms: (1) Basic or primary norms (maximum intensity); (2) Secondary norms or tendencies (medium intensity); and (3) Tolerated or permitted behavior (minimum intensity) (Toury, 2012, p. 90). This distinction has been adopted, adapted and imported, and operationalized by various authors for the purpose of quantitative analysis (see e.g. Alvstad, 2001 or Assis Rosa, 2003). Despite the prescriptive force of norms within a community, there is always the possibility for non-normative behavior. With stronger or weaker prescriptive force, translational norms are always negotiated by actual translation agents who are relatively free in their choices. 197

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Accordingly, both normative and non-normative behavior occur. Translation agents can choose to follow or to deviate from prevailing behavior motivated by translational norms. They have a choice – even if non-normative behavior entails sanctions, both positive and negative. In the words of Toury: Surely, even within the socio-cultural paradigm, the actual decision is up to the individual. In spite of all the restrictions caused by responsibility to society (sanctions, remember?), translators are still given great latitude and considerable autonomy. It is precisely here that the norms intersect with the translators’ liberties and give rise to the decisions that are actually made. (Toury, 2012, p. 68)

Translation norms and prescription: object level vs. meta level Regarding the prescriptive nature of norms: it is vital to avoid a ‘fatal confusion between the discipline’s object level (translational phenomena) and its meta-level (the scholarly discourse about translational phenomena).’ (Hermans, 1991, p. 166) Within a community, translational norms hold a certain prescriptive force and imply sanctions, both positive and negative. For DTS, however, translational norms are a descriptive and explanatory category for the analysis of translational phenomena. As a descriptive category, they are used for the study of what translation is, based on the analysis of texts or corpora of translated texts that are not a priori selected because they are deemed good, appropriate, or ideal translations. The goal of DTS is to describe what translation really is in each social, cultural and historical context. This description is also aimed at extracting the underlying model of prescriptive options in force in that community for performing the social role of translator, i.e. translational norms. Within DTS, norms are also a category for explanatory research, e.g., by identifying contextual variables that potentially influence textual variables.

First and second-order objects: Translational regularities vs. norms Toury distinguishes between regularities exhibited by translation and translational norms (the underlying model motivating translational regularities): ‘what is available for observation is never the norms themselves, but rather instances of norm-governed behaviour, or (…) their end-products.’ (Toury, 2012, p. 87) This distinction resides in their ontological status. There are first-order objects: translated texts, and corpora of translated texts, studied with the aim of uncovering the interdependencies between function, product and process, and patterns and regularities that are real, tangible, and verifiable. Regularities are first-order objects. Translational norms are a second-order object. They are a psycho-social phenomenon, they are not directly observable. From regularities, researchers extract hypothetical formulations of an underlying model; so, translational norms are descriptive explanatory hypotheses for regularities of translational behavior.

Data for the study of translational norms If norms are not directly observable, the researcher is faced with the need to identify data relevant and pertinent to their study: ‘instances of norm-governed behaviour’ (Toury, 2012, p. 87).

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Two major sources of data for the study of translational norms are identified: (1) textual sources, i. e., translated texts and databases (‘analytical inventories of translations […] assigned the status of virtual text for various preliminary norms’ Toury, 2012, p. 87); and (2) extratextual sources: ‘semi-theoretical or critical formulations,’ i. e., paratextual and evaluative writing about translation (Toury, 2012, p. 87), such as theories of translation, texts or paratexts on translation (by translators, editors and publishers) also including reviews and critiques, or codes of good professional practice. According to Malmkjaer (2008, p. 51): [A]lthough norms (…) obviously relate to systems of belief among groups of people about what is appropriate behaviour at a certain time in certain circumstances, it is important to note that what people believe should be done may not necessarily be what even those who hold the belief actually do. In the social sciences, a distinction is made between the former, attitudinal norms, and the latter, behavioral norms. As primary products of norm-governed behavior, textual sources reveal behavioral norms; as subjective statements, extratextual sources reveal attitudinal norms. Chesterman appears to invoke this distinction when stressing three conditions to establish a relation of cause and effect between a translational norm and a given regularity or pattern: X manifests/is caused by a norm if (i) most people (in a given society or group at a given time, under given conditions) regularly do X; and (ii) they think they should indeed do X; and (iii) they can justifiably be criticized if they do not do X. (Chesterman, 2006, p. 14) According to these conditions, the triangulation of data both on norm-governed behavior (i) and on attitudes (ii and iii) is thus considered mandatory for the extraction of translational norms. Chesterman stresses these conditions because he also states regularities in translational behavior can be caused by other factors, besides norms or laws, such as constraints of translators, time and task constraints, background knowledge, or even mere chance (Chesterman, 2016, p. 16).

The nature of translational norms Toury distinguishes three subcategories of translational norms: initial, preliminary and operational. First, regarding the initial norms of adequacy or acceptability, Toury states any translator must make a choice between orienting his translation toward the source text, language and culture, producing an adequate (or source-oriented) translation; or orienting his translation toward the norms of the target culture, producing an acceptable (or target-oriented) translation. (Toury, 2012, pp. 79–80) Any translation will tend to present a varying proportion of both norms. Second, preliminary norms are related to translation policies and to varying degrees of tolerance regarding mediated or indirect translation. They influence the selection of source languages, authors, literary modes and genres, or specific texts for translation. Third, operational norms concern decisions made during the translation process and are subdivided into: matricial norms regulating the full or abridged nature of translation, the segmentation and the distribution of segments in the translation; and textual-linguistic norms influencing the linguistic and textual choices made when formulating the translated text.2

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Translation law Toury first considers the possibility of universals of translational behavior (Toury, 1977), as illustrated by the tendency toward explicitation in translation, later studied by other authors (e.g. Blum-Kulka, 2000; Gaspari & Bernardini, 2010). The study of translation universals boomed in the 1990s, especially after Baker (1993), with the application of corpus linguistics to descriptive TS, and the influence of this concept survived well into the twenty-first century (e.g., Mauranen & Kujamäki, 2004). Universals have been defined by Baker (1993, pp. 243–245) as typicality in the translated text, and they are listed as: explicitation, disambiguation, simplification, conventionalization, omission of repetition, a higher frequency of target language features and interference. They have also been addressed by Chesterman (2004) and discussed by Mauranen and Kujamäki (2004) and Malmkjaer (2008). Malmkjaer (2008, pp. 52–53) discusses the interface between norms and universals in terms of social and cognitive constraints and determination, to distinguish between absolute universals (cognitively determined) and non-absolute universals (cognitively constrained). However, both the concept and term have been severely criticized because translation universals tend to be equated with the linguistic definition of absolute universals (instead of the notion of non-absolute or statistical universals, corresponding to statistically significant tendencies, see Malmkjaer, 2008). Toury had long before preferred to consider the alternative term and definition of translation laws instead (Toury, 2004), stressing their probabilistic nature based on the identification of generalized regularities, which integrate the notion of exception. They are descriptive, as Toury’s proposal is based on his own descriptive research and on the identification of regularities exhibited by translations of literary texts in various languages and cultures. Laws are defined as ‘theoretical formulations purporting to state the relations between all variables which have been found relevant to a particular domain’ (Toury, 2012, p. 295). Toury proposes to formulate laws by describing translation options that have actually occurred and, as such, are empirically verifiable. Such laws are to be extracted by focusing on the relationship between variables. Moreover, their probabilistic nature is always stressed, given that translation is a stochastic, not a deterministic system, as stated by Lefevere (1985). In other words, translation is neither fully predictable nor fully unpredictable but reveals regularities arising from constraints. Any law can consequently only be formulated in probabilistic terms, and never in deterministic terms (Lefevere, 1985, pp. 225–226). There is a pertinent distinction between translation laws and translation norms. The formulation of a translational norm results from the consideration of a specific culture at a specific point in time. Although it also involves the formulation of conditions (independent variables) and their relations with translational behavior (dependent variables), a translation law will be transversal to various cultures and historical moments. Thus, they are formulated as a result of the identification of general or predominant patterns shared by different languages, cultures, communities, groups, timeframes and text types. Toury proposes two hypothetical laws of translation behavior. The first is the law of growing standardization. In its most general formulation: the textemes of a source text tend to be replaced by repertoremes of the target language (Toury, 2012, pp. 267–268). This formulation integrates several concepts that require some explanation: a texteme is identified by Toury as a sign whose meaning and function derives from the network of textual relations it integrates; a repertoreme is a sign that, by belonging to an institutionalized repertoire, is available as a choice in a given community. In other words, the increased and ad hoc signification that a sign tends to assume within a text, by virtue of the intersection of various relations established within that text, tends not to be transferred to the target text. The target 200

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text tends to ignore such networks of textual relations, including instead signs that the target context uses more frequently. To this extent, the translated text tends to be more conventional. As possible independent variables for such regularities, Toury points to the age and/ or previous experience of the translator, or even, according to Even-Zohar, the central or peripheral position occupied by translation in the target system. The more peripheral, i.e., the less prestigious the translation is, the more it will tend to opt for pre-existing models and repertoires in the target culture, the more conservative and secondary it will be. The second law of translation is the so-called law of interference or discourse transfer, according to which a translated text tends to integrate aspects or features of the make-up of the source text and language (Toury, 2012, p. 275). This occurs in target texts either as a change in the frequency of elements that the target language already integrates or by the import of elements or patterns that do not exist in the target language (positive or negative transfer, respectively). In this case, Toury suggests two independent variables to consider. The first is the degree of experience of the translators: tolerance to interference tends to be lower in the case of more experienced translators. The second independent variable is the relative prestige of the two cultures and languages involved: interference will tend to be higher whenever the source has more prestige than the target. Based on such regularities, description and explanation can lead to the (always hypothetical) prediction of probable behavior in translation.

Researching translation regularities, norms and laws Descriptive research has diversified and branched out, following a variety of paths, and has enlarged its scope by considering many types of different objects of study and importing conceptual and methodological proposals from other disciplines. In view of the above tension between translational norms and laws, it becomes particularly pertinent, relevant and interesting to produce descriptive studies with the aim of identifying to what extent translational regularities may be (i) dependent on a given sociocultural context (i.e., resulting from translational norms); or (ii) dependent on factors that are not specific to a given culture (i.e., resulting from translation laws). In this regard, it is particularly important to identify theoretical and methodological options to relate textual or behavioral regularities with contextual factors and to address all potentially relevant variables that may have a bearing on translation. Research on such translation regularities has continued, namely on universal features of translation, as initially suggested by Shlesinger for simultaneous interpreting (Shlesinger, 1989) and studied within corpus-based TS mainly after the 1990s, notably by Mona Baker, or on professional norms as suggested by Andrew Chesterman (2016). Taking Holmes as a starting point, it is possible to identify at least three main types of research focused on the product, the process and the function of translation. The study of translation as a product can focus on the description of the textual profile of a translation, or on the comparative description of one or several translations of one source text into the same or different languages. Alternatively, the description can also consider large translational corpora, with the aim of describing a given time frame, language or text type; description can also focus on diachronic studies (and even aim to produce a general history of translation). In response to this possibility, the study of corpora in translation showed a remarkable development in the early 1990s. The concept of the translational norm has been applied to large historical translational corpora (e.g., at the University of Leuven, Belgium, on early nineteenth-century France; the University of Göttingen, Germany, on eighteenthto twentieth-century literature; or the University of Lisbon, Portugal, on an inventory of 201

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twentieth-century translations of literature). The function-oriented study of translation is more a study of contexts (rather than of texts) since it aims at describing the function, value and influence that translation has in the target sociocultural context. Recently, there has been a great interest in the sociology of translation, concerned with research on the context, the agents and the conditions under which various kinds of translation are produced, that is, the translation event, also under the influence of Pierre Bourdieu’s works, among others (see Wolf & Fukari [2007] or Díaz Fouces & Monzó [2010]), or by projects on translation historiography. Finally, descriptive studies of the translation process aim at systematically describing the act of translation, what happens in the translator’s mind when a formulation in one language is associated with a formulation in another language, to produce a psychology of translation, or to study the process of (more or less conscious) decision-making. This type of experimental study has witnessed great development in the last decades, due to the application of new technologies, which have made it possible to move from the analysis of the verbalization of thoughts by translators during the translation process (TAP, think-aloud protocols) to the analysis of the speed and pace of translation work and the type of unit on which different translators tend to focus their attention. This is made possible by analyzing the recording of keyboard movements (with ‘key-logging’ software, such as Translog), or by analyzing data on eye movements (with eye-tracking software) to identify a particular mode of reading a text for translation purposes. However, for studies to be not only descriptive but also explanatory, the three aspects have to be considered in their ‘tripartite interdependence’: product, process and function (defined in semiotic terms as the value of an element, resulting from the network of relations it establishes with other elements of a system) (Toury, 2012, p. 5, 6). From this point of view, the function of a translation and the value it has in the target culture influence both the process and the product of translation, and also have a bearing on the translation strategies and procedures applied as well as the type of solutions adopted and the type of relationship established with the source (Toury, 2012, p. 7). As Vandepitte pertinently adds, within the descriptive branch of TS, it is important to describe what translation is as discourse/product and process, the contextual influences from which it results (causes) but also the effects it originates in the target culture (results) (Vandepitte, 2008, p. 575).

Descriptive approaches criticized Many researchers have adopted this descriptive target-oriented stance to the study of translation, refraining as much as possible from ‘value judgments in selecting subject matter or in presenting findings, and/or refus[ing] to draw any conclusions in the form of recommendations for “proper” behaviour’ (Toury, 2012, p. xii). Such research values a diagnosis of the role played by translation in cultural history and the importance of considering inter- and intra-cultural power relations, ideology, market forces, a.o., as part of the analysis of contextually motivated translational phenomena. However, DTS has been subject to a variety of criticism. DTS research has been criticized and accused of importing the goals of (exact) sciences and producing models based on them, encouraging ‘research in the humanities to look and sound like the work of lab-coated scientists somehow entirely disinterested in their object’ (Pym, 2001, p. 276); because it does not pay enough attention to the relevance of power relations and ideology when addressing intercultural and interlingual relations in empirical studies of translational phenomena (Niranjana, 1992); because it does not focus enough on the translator as an agent operating in a specific set of circumstances or for not considering further explanations for translational 202

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behavior due to being too strictly target-oriented (Pym 1998); for scarce attention paid to reception studies (Gambier, 1997); for insufficient self-criticism and self-reflexivity (Arrojo, 1998; Hermans, 1999); for focusing more on repeated behavior and less on individual choices and translator style (Baker, 2007, p. 152); for sidelining issues related to power relationships or conflict between groups (Pym, 1998, p. 111); or for appearing to place the researcher (and the theory) above involved value judgements and power relations, which are neatly tucked within the object of study (Assis Rosa, 2022), thus performing the fiction of ‘subjectless research’ and camouflaging the researchers’ strategic power (Pym, 2001, pp. 279–280), and taking for granted ‘the separation between object-level and meta-level’ (Hermans, 2020, p. 145). Though not always, some of this criticism tends to correlate with approaches influenced by cultural studies, postcolonial studies, cultural materialism, women’s studies, queer studies or a more general political motivation to call attention to the ethical implications of a merely descriptive approach to translation. Instead, such approaches advocate a politically motivated stance geared toward prescriptive intervention regarding, for instance, translator invisibility (Simon, 1996; Bassnett & Trivedi, 1999; Venuti, 2017), or by campaigning for programmatic and powerful research geared toward solving socially relevant problems (Pym, 2001). However, some criticism also concedes there may be different degrees of involvement in descriptivism. Such different degrees are not covered by the early binary opposition between descriptive vs. prescriptive approaches. As suggested by Brownlie, they can be best described as taking place between early descriptive approaches, current critical descriptive approaches (recognizing the ‘pervasiveness of interpretation and values’ and varying degrees of involvement within descriptive studies of translation) and committed approaches (‘prescribing what translators should do’). (Brownlie, p. 2003) If we look back to early descriptive approaches, Holmes did write a defense of pure research ‘pursued for its own sake, quite apart from any direct practical application’ (2000, p. 176). Toury did claim ‘it is no concern of a scientific discipline (…) to effect changes in the world of our experience’ (2012, p. 11); Hermans did stress ‘[t]he primary task of the study of translation is not to seek to interfere directly with the practice of translation by laying down norms or rules’ (Hermans, 1999, p. 65). However, and as already argued (Assis Rosa, 2016, 2018, 2022), besides identifying such stances as an explicit opposition toward traditional prescriptivism or a stronger focus on applied studies, it may be worth attempting a more contextualized reading of such statements. At the time they were first made, TS was still fighting to become independent not only from predominantly prescriptive approaches but also from a very strong focus on applied research (Toury, 2012, p. xii). Moreover, the discipline was struggling (and it still is…) for academic recognition. It probably appeared easier to achieve if it was presented as another discipline in the ranks of empirical (soft/human) sciences. Considering the continuum between fundamental and applied research, critical descriptive approaches allow for more leeway, although still intently keeping a distance from committed approaches aimed at solving socially relevant problems and geared toward a change of the object of study (as in applied research). Considering ontological positionings, neither descriptive nor critical descriptive approaches can be equated with objectivism, but rather with realism, which accepts ‘that the social world has a reality that is separate from the social actors involved in it and that this can be known through the senses’ (Matthews & Ross, 2010, p. 26) though also acknowledging a dimension of reality that cannot be directly observed by the senses, related to social mechanisms influencing observable social behavior. Considering epistemological approaches, empiricism should not be equated with positivism; or as Saldanha and O’Brien aptly state ‘just because research is “empirical” in nature 203

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does not mean that it is “objective.”’ (Saldanha & O’Brien, 2013, p. 11). In terms of epistemological approach, empiricism is probably closer to realism or postpositivism, in that empirical descriptive research ‘recognizes the existence of invisible but powerful structures and mechanisms that cannot be directly observable but whose effects are apparent, and these effects can provide evidence of the underlying structures and mechanisms’ (Saldanha & O’Brien, 2013, p. 12).

Final remarks Despite criticism, descriptive approaches to translation have made impressive progress. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Anthony Pym stated: There can be little doubt that the long-term project we know as Descriptive Translation Studies has achieved much, most usefully by challenging the narrowly linguistic sourcebased prescriptions that still inform many of our teaching practices. In proclaiming the need for broadly systemic target-based descriptions, the project has enabled us to accumulate knowledge about the diversity of translational behaviour and its role within cultures. (Pym, 2001, pp. 275–276) Pym stresses as major achievements: the amplification of the object of study; the concomitant amplification of approaches and the necessary interdisciplinarity of studies on translation redefined as a complex object; the target-orientedness of description in opposition to source-oriented prescription; the accumulation of descriptive TS revealing the multiplicity of translation (inter-, intra-lingual, and intersemiotic translation, interpreting, non-human translation, among others), by means of the identification of new data, the testing and reformulation of pre-existing hypotheses, the formulation and justification of new hypotheses; the potential to feed into theoretical and applied research; and the identification of new knowledge produced by broadly systemic descriptive studies focused on the role played by translation in cultural history. To these major achievements, Hermans (2020, pp. 146–147) more recently also adds: It [the descriptive moment] helped stimulate academic research into translation and contributed to establishing the modern discipline of translation studies as such. Its strength lay in its openness and antiessentialism, its willingness to treat concepts and theories as no more than heuristic tools. It spawned a wide array of case studies and, in so doing, valorized translation as a historical and cultural force. Perhaps its key contribution was that it empowered researchers to study translation as they might study other cultural goods or phenomena. It made it possible to appreciate translation as an index of cultural identity. Despite listing several accomplishments, Pym, nevertheless, voices criticism that seems to echo in contemporary critical stances regarding descriptive research. He advocates there are ‘degrees of involvement within descriptivism’ (Pym, 2001, p. 277) – and more importantly that there should be higher degrees of involvement, so as to achieve social importance. The more the object is formulated in terms of socially lived problems in need of solution, the more likely the resulting research is to question endemic beliefs, arouse interest in a 204

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field, make the researcher feel involved, and perhaps even be of importance to the people who ultimately finance our labours. (Pym, 2001, p. 276) Applied research geared toward solving ‘socially lived problems in need of solution’ is undeniably of social importance, and the ‘people who ultimately finance our labours’ have certainly favored it, so much so that it currently has the upper hand when compared to fundamental research. Committed research intent on not only describing but changing power relations, on understanding but also laying bare the ideological bias revealed by some translation, on debunking the power of market forces, commercial objectives, censorship or legislation upon translation may indeed actually achieve some impact upon society. But the very possibility of such committed and applied research was created by the contextually informed descriptive approach to translation as a social activity, constrained by prestige and power relations within specific communicative situations, within a wider context of culture (mainly the target one), and within an even wider context of intercultural relations. Such a major redefinition of a much more comprehensive object of study was a breakthrough of DTS, in close cooperation with Polysystem Studies. This expansion of the object of study paved the way to research focused on the translator as an agent, on the cultural, social, ideological and political role of translators and on the historical and cultural force of translation. It also opened up the possibility for more critically, socially, ideologically and politically intervening stances on translation practice and on TS.

Notes 1 The four detective novels are: (1) Mão direita do Diabo. Amadora: Ibis Editora (McShade, 1967); with a new edition by Assírio & Alvim (2008); (2) Requiem para D. Quixote. Amadora: Ibis Editora (McShade, 1967); with new editions by Círculo de Leitores (1987) and Assírio & Alvim (2008); (3) Mulher e arma com guitarra espanhola. Amadora: Ibis Editora (McShade, 1968); with new editions by Círculo de Leitores, (1987); and Assírio & Alvim (2009); and (4) Blackpot.Lisboa: Assírio & Alvim (McShade, 2009). 2 Examples of alternative views on translational norms suggested for further reading include those by Chesterman (professional norms of responsibility, communication and relationship, and expectation norms, Chesterman 2016), or those advanced by Simeoni (1998) and Meylaerts (2008) addressing translation and habitus. On the issue of translator agency regarding the creation and maintenance of norms, i.e., on the relation between norms and habitus, much more could be said, but it was considered beyond the scope of this chapter.

References Alvstad, C. (2001). Normas Paratextuales en Traducciones. Un Modelo Descriptivo de Libros Para niños y Jóvenes Orientado a la Cultura Meta. [Doctoral Dissertation, Göteborgs Universitet]. Arrojo, R. (1998). The Revision of the Traditional Gap Between Theory and Practice and the Empowerment of Translation in Modern Times. The Translator, 4(1), 25–48. https://doi.org/10.1080/1355 6509.1998.10799005 Assis Rosa, A. (2003). Translation, Power and Ideology. Interpersonal Rhetoric in Dickensian Fictional Dialogue Translated into Portuguese 1950–1999. [Doctoral Dissertation, University of Lisbon]. Assis Rosa, A. (2016). Descriptive Translation Studies – DTS. In Y. Gambier & L. van Doorslaer (Eds.), Handbook of Translation Studies (revised version, pp. 94–104). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https:// doi.org/10.1075/hts.2016.des1 Assis Rosa, A. (2018). Descriptive Translation Studies of Audiovisual Translation: 21st-century Issues, Challenges and Opportunities. In S. Ramos Pinto & Y. Gambier (Eds.), Audiovisual Translation:

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Kaindl, K. (2006). Complexity and Interdisciplinarity: Two Key Concepts in Translation Studies. In Ö. T. Kasar (Ed.), Interdisciplinarité en Traduction. Actes du 11è Colloque International sur la Traduction organisé par l’Université Technique de Yildiz (Volume 1, pp. 85–94). Istanbul: Isis. Kenny, D. (2008). Equivalence. In M. Baker & G. Saldanha (Eds.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies (pp. 96–99). London: Routledge. Lefevere, A. (1985). Why Waste our Time on Rewrites? The Trouble with Interpretation and the Role of Rewriting in an Alternative Paradigm. In T. Hermans (Ed.), The Manipulation of Literature. Studies in Literary Translation (pp. 215–243). Leuven: Acco. Lefevere, A. (1992). Translation, Rewriting and the Manipulation of Literary Fame. London: Routledge. Levý, J. (1969). Die literarische Übersetzung. Theorie einer Kunstgattung. Athenäum Verlag. Malmkjaer, K. (2008). Norms and Nature in Translation Studies. In G. M. Anderman & M. Rogers (Eds.), Incorporating Corpora: The Linguist and the Translator (pp. 49–59). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Matthews, B., & Ross, L. (2010). Research Methods: A Practical Guide for the Social Sciences. Harlow: Pearson Education. Mauranen, A., & Kujamäki, P. (2004). Translation Universals: Do They Exist? Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/btl.48 McFarlane, J. (1953). Modes of Translation. The Durham University Journal, 45(3), 77–93. McShade, D. (1967a). Mão direita do diabo. Amadora: Ibis Editora. McShade, D. (1967b). Requiem para D. Quixote. Amadora: Ibis Editora. McShade, D. (1968). Mulher e arma com guitarra espanhola. Amadora: Ibis Editora. McShade, D. (2009) Blackpot. Lisboa: Assírio e Alvim. Meylaerts, R. (2008). Translators and (their) Norms: Towards a Sociological Construction of the Individual. In A. Pym, M. Shlesinger & D. Simeoni (Eds.), Beyond Descriptive Translation Studies. Investigations in Homage to Gideon Toury (pp. 91–102). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi. org/10.1075/btl.75.08mey Meylaerts, R., & Marais, K. (2022). Introduction. In R. Meylaerts & K.Marais (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Translation Theory and Concepts. (pp. ???) London: Routledge. Niranjana, T. (1992). Siting Translation: History, Poststructuralism, and the Colonial Context. California: University of California Press. Pym, A. (1998). Method in Translation History. St. Jerome. Pym, A. (2001). Four Remarks on Translation Research and Multimedia. In Y. Gambier & H. Gottlieb (Eds.), (Multi)Media Translation. (pp. 275–282) Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Saldanha, G., & O’Brien, S. (2013). Research Methodologies in Translation Studies. London: Routledge. Schäffner, C. (Ed.) (1999). Translation and Norms. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Shlesinger, M. (1989). Simultaneous Interpreting as a Factor in Effecting Shifts in the Position of Texts in the Oral-Literate Continuum. [MA thesis, Tel Aviv University]. Simeoni, D. (1998). The Pivotal Status of the Translator’s Habitus. Target, 10(1), 1–39. https://doi. org/10.1075/target.10.1.02sim Simon, S. (1996). Gender in Translation: Cultural Identity and the Politics of Transmission. London: Routledge. Toury, G. (1977). Translational Norms and Literary Translation into Hebrew, 1930–1945. [Doctoral dissertation, Tel-Aviv University]. Toury, G. (1978). The Nature and Role of Norms in Literary Translation. In J. S. Holmes J. Lambert & R. van den Broeck (Eds.), Literature and Translation: New Perspectives in Literary Studies (pp. 83–100). Leuven: Acco. Toury, G. (1980). In Search of a Theory of Translation. The Porter Institute. Toury, G. (2004). Probabilistic Explanations in Translation Studies: Welcome as they are, would they Qualify as Universals? In A. Mauranen & P. Kujamäki (Eds.), Translation Universals. Do they Exist? (pp. 15–32). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/btl.48.03tou Toury, G. (2012). Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond (Revised Edition). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/btl.100 Vandepitte, S. (2008). Remapping Translation Studies: Towards a Translation Studies Ontology. Meta, 53(3), 569–588. Venuti, L. (2017). The Translator’s Invisibility. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315098746 Wolf, M., & Fukari, A. (Eds.) (2007). Constructing a Sociology of Translation. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/btl.74

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11 Systems approaches Sergey Tyulenev and Wenyan Luo

Introduction One of the ways to conceptualize translation is to describe it as a system or as a part of a system. A systemic approach to studying translation allows contextualizing it within larger structures within which it exists; translators can be presented as complex agents interacting in complex ways with other agents; finally, translation can be seen as one of the mechanisms of sign creation and exchange. In what follows systemic approaches will be traced back to their earlier manifestations, yet the emphasis will be laid on the latest developments in Translation Studies (TS). This dynamic reflects the evolution of considering translation – from theorizing it almost exclusively as an interlingual transfer to seeing it as part of social interactions and as a semiotic phenomenon. A system can be defined as a whole that consists of mutually interrelated elements. Any systemic structure depends on elements and a relationship between elements. Translation, thus, can be viewed as a whole with some elements the interrelation of which subsists the whole, or as an element interrelated with other elements within a whole. For instance, translation may be viewed as a complex system which includes different types of mediation, verbal (between different languages), extraverbal (in gesticulative communication, one might think here of how people interpret gestures or of sign language interpreting) or even extrahuman (how do ants or bees interpret their fellow creatures’ messages?). All these variegated manifestations of mediation can be viewed as belonging to the system of translation. Considering translation as a system allows describing it as a complex phenomenon that manifests itself in a variety of forms, that is, various types of activities that fall under the category ‘translation’ (no matter how defined). Considering translation as a part of a larger structure – as a part of a system – allows describing it in relation to other phenomena, which operate as parts of the overall system, and/or in relation to the overall system itself. As an example, one might imagine translation as part of the art system: in music or literature or painting or sculpture, the artist translates his/her ideas or impressions into a material manifestation, a piece of music, a literary work, a watercolor or a statuette, which can be appreciated by the audience. In all its multifarious manifestations, translation belongs to a larger system, be it art as a whole or any of its 208

DOI: 10.4324/9781003161448-15

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branches, such as music or literature, or plastic arts. Whether viewed as a part of the system of arts or as a part of one of the arts, translation is looked at from the point of view of its relationship to other parts of those systems or to the system as a whole. For instance, in literature, translation can be studied in relation to non-translated belles-lettres; in music, translation can be studied in relation to how it works in the case of the composer and in the case(s) of the score’s interpreters, the musicians who perform it; in visual arts, translation can be discussed in relation to the original inspiration of the artist and in relation to the final product – a painting with oils on the canvas or a carved stone. Based on such observations, one might conclude how one might define translation in arts and what role(s) translation plays in them.

Earlier systemic inspirations More often than not, translation is associated with larger structures, notably as a means of exchange between languages or between cultures and societies, or between sign systems. In all such interactions, according to systems approaches, translation exercises its fundamental function – it mediates: it helps the involved parties communicate. The parties speak different languages (in the broadest sense of the word – that is, they use different codes of communication) and therefore, their direct interaction cannot go beyond basic communication. Only translation can render the communication of such parties more efficient. Thus, the function of translation is to make the parties understand and appreciate each other despite their intrinsic differences. In his article ‘On Linguistic Aspects of Translation’ which was first published in 1959, Roman Jakobson, inspired by Charles S. Peirce, introduced a tripartite classification of types of translation: intralingual, interlingual and intersemiotic. Intralingual translation is mediation within one and the same language but between its different registers. For instance, a complicated concept can be explained, or translated, by means of simpler words. That is why another name for this type of translation is rewording. The second type is interlingual translation, or ‘translation proper.’ Finally, the third type is intersemiotic translation, or transmutation which is ‘an interpretation of verbal signs by means of signs of nonverbal sign systems’ ( Jakobson, 2012, p. 127). It shall be noted that the focus of Jakobson’s classification is linguistic: he secures two of the three categories for linguistic translation – intra- and interlingual types. Even the third, non-linguistic, type is defined in terms of the relationship between verbal and nonverbal sign systems. Despite the linguistic bias, Jakobson’s classification was an attempt at describing translation systemically, i.e., as a set of transfers all of which fall under the category ‘translation’; each kind of transfer is defined in relation to another and together they form a system called ‘translation.’ Moreover, by extension, his classification allows imagining translation within or between nonverbal systems. One might imagine, for instance, intramusical translation, when one motif is ‘translated’ or modulated in pitch, rhythm, texture, timbre, etc. (Cope, 1997); different musical styles and epochs enter complex dialogues by means of imitations, influences or direct borrowings and even citations (Metzer, 2007). In other words, one might say that there are translational relations between different musical traditions and these relations are comparable to translation between different languages. Finally, music inspires works of other arts, and musical compositions are inspired by other arts; one can interpret such mutual inspirations as intersemiotic translation between music and the other sign systems. Jakobson did not go beyond linguistics, but his systemics of translation implies a broader and more complex system than the one he described. 209

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In TS, the term ‘translation’ has been largely reserved for interlingual transfer, while other types of translation have been left to adjacent humanities with relevant expertise and research foci. In other words, if all translation is viewed as a system sui generis, TS is focused on one type of translation – translation between lingual systems, on the second type in Jakobson’s classification, ‘translation proper’ (2012, p. 127). The polysystem theorists, Itamar Even-Zohar and scholars of the Tel Aviv–Leuven School, also known as the Manipulation School, furnish an example of another systemic approach to studying translation (Even-Zohar, 1979; Hermans, 1985). They theorized translation in system-theoretical terms following the structuralism of the Russian Formalists: translation was described as a system within a national literary polysystem which included, beside translation, other types of literary creativity (poly- means multi or many). Polysystems are ‘network[s] of relations’ in which various elements form (Even-Zohar, 1990, p. 27). Relationism, a key property of any system, brings elements into one whole, organizing them in various ways: elements relate to other elements as a center to the periphery or as high forms and genres to low ones. Complex relations (together with imports) within the polysystem make the polysystem evolve over time. The polysystem theory’s approach showed translation not as a system sui generis, but as a part of another, larger system (a national literary polysystem) and allowed the viewing of translation in relation to other parts of the system (various types of non-translated literary works and genres). André Lefevere made another significant contribution to the development of systemic inquiries into translation. He also focused on literary translation. He viewed it as a form of rewriting practiced within a literary system, which, in turn, is a part of a complex system – culture (1992). Lefevere’s theory was influenced by the German literary systems theorist Siegfried J. Schmidt who applied Niklas Luhmann’s social systems theory (see more about it below) to studying literature. Thus, Lefevere was the first in TS to apply a sociological systemic theory, albeit indirectly. According to Lefevere, the systemics of a socioculture and translation as a part thereof are predicated on constraints. Constraints are generated, according to Lefevere, by ‘certain ideological and/or poetological currents’ (1992, p. 4). Constraints are imposed both from within and outside the literary system. Poetics is an internal literary aesthetic constraint; ideology is an external constraint coming from, for instance, political or religious authorities. The aesthetic and ideological constraints are closely connected, and this is how the literary system is joined to the social system within which it is embedded. Like in the case of the polysystem theory, Lefevere sees literary translation as a part of a larger sociocultural system and demonstrates its interrelationship with other parts of the system – poetics and ideology. Justa Holz-Mänttäri’s theory of Translatorial Action (in German: Translatorisches Handeln) was a truly revolutionary broadening of the scope of systemic thinking about translation in TS. She drew explicitly and directly on a body of sociological theories studying social action (Holz-Mänttäri, 1984). Social action is different from physiological action in that it is an action intended for interpersonal communication. One might yawn unintentionally because s/he is sleepy or intentionally in order to show that s/he is bored; the former is an example of physiological action whereas the latter is a social action because it communicates a message. Social action is the basis of all things social. Holz-Mänttäri discussed translation as a type of social action. According to Holz-Mäntärri, overall, translation is a social occupation fulfilling a specific function within the social system. The translator facilitates (inter)social communication by transferring texts, or rather – message carriers (Botschaftsträger). The ultimate goal of communication mediated by translation is social cooperation (ibid., p. 17; also pp. 23–24). Translation was no longer described as an activity requiring bilingual competence 210

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(ibid., pp. 18–19); rather, translation was shown as a profession, and as such it was carefully distinguished from the type of translation exercise used in foreign language acquisition (ibid., p. 21). To summarize, Holz-Mänttäri theorized translation as a social action, that is, as a constituent of the overall social system; translation has a definite social function – facilitating social cooperation.

Fully developed social-systemic paradigms Although systemic thinking was quite prominent in several translation theories in the 1970s– early 1990s, it is within the sociological turn (late 1990s onwards) that full-scale systemics has been developed in TS. The TS systemic research was based on social-systemic theories, that is, theories of society as a systemic phenomenon. In sociology, systemic paradigms tend to consider society as a macrostructure. The social order is believed within them to be a phenomenon which exists above the level of individual humans. Individual social agents are viewed as largely enacting the dictates of the established social order. Pierre Bourdieu and Niklas Luhmann, two leading twentieth-century sociologists whose theories have been applied to studying translation more than any other theories, considered society to be composed of macrostructural units. The German sociologist Niklas Luhmann’s social systems theory (SST; Luhmann, 1995) allows translation to be viewed both as a (social) system in its own right and a subsystem of a larger (social) system. Luhmann theorized modern society as a system consisting of subsystems with distinct functions (‘function subsystems’), such as religion, politics, education and art. Arguably, translation can be considered one of the functional subsystems of contemporary society (Tyulenev, 2012). Andreas Poltermann was the first to apply SST to the study of translation (1992). Like Lefevere before him, Poltermann applied Luhmann’s theory to literary translation as a part of the national literary subsystem within the subsystem of art, which, finally, is a subsystem of the overall social system. Later Theo Hermans considered translation mostly as a system in its own right (1999, pp. 137–150). Another attempt to apply SST was made by Hans J. Vermeer (2006). However, Vermeer looked at Luhmann’s theory from the point of view of his own skopos theory which resulted in a somewhat confused analysis. A fuller monographic treatment of SST in application to translation both as a system and as a subsystem was carried out in Tyulenev, 2012. According to Luhmann, the social system is separate from its environment, that is, everything that is not that system. Translation as a (social) system has its unique element that is the smallest unit which demonstrates translation’s unique nature (Tyulenev, 2012, pp. 38–42). The element is the translation communication event (TCE). TCE consists of at least two communication events connected by means of the mediating agency. The simplest TCE involves three parties (not necessarily three individuals!): A< >B< >C, where A and C are parties which can interact through Mediator B in both directions. B understands A’s utterance in the sense that it chooses only some but not all of the semantic options extractable from A’s utterance. B’s understanding becomes the utterance that reaches C. Out of all semantic options extractable from B’s utterance, C also selects a few and this constitutes C’s understanding. Schematically, TCE looks as follows: A: Utterance1 > Information1 ≅ B: (Understanding1 = Utterance2) > Information 2 ≅ C: Understanding 2. Let us consider the following example. One of the interlocutors might say: ‘It is going to rain today.’ This phrase may mean, however, more than just what the words used mean. It may imply that a stroll in the park is to be canceled or that the stroll will need to be taken 211

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with umbrellas. This is how the other interlocutor may understand the statement. Based on such understanding, s/he will produce his/her utterance, that is, his/her reply – agreement or disagreement or a suggestion to dress warmly as well. If the interlocutors communicate in two different languages, there will be a translating mediation. Interlingual translation is perhaps more active interpreting than implicitly passive understanding. The translator, dealing usually with more than just one phrase but with a text, decides which features of the translated source text are to be left out and which are to be preserved in the target text. Thus, in the Luhmannian formula of a communication event, when it is applied to translation, one must add not only another element – mediation, as is shown above in the formulaic representation of TCE, but also opt for Interpreting, rather than understanding for B (mediating agent): A: Utterance1 > Information1 ≅ B: (Interpreting1 = Utterance2) > Information 2 ≅ C: Understanding 2. TCE and the conditions of its performance are the focus of TS as an academic discipline. TCE allows both the identification of translational phenomena in any form or/and in any semiotic domain and the conceptualization of translation despite its diversity. Luhmann’s theory allows conceptualizing translation not only as a social but also as a semiotic phenomenon. From a systems perspective, translation’s principal function both socially and semiotically is mediation. Translation ensures interaction across boundaries of interacting systems or subsystems within larger systems. Translation assumes different forms and uses different semiotic sign systems depending on the systems for which it mediates. When it mediates between two verbal systems, it uses human languages. When it mediates between nonverbal systems, it uses the codes of the involved parties. For instance, in an auction, it mediates between painting and the economy, it expresses the value of the painting to be sold in monetary symbols which, then, are converted into money. If Luhmann’s concept of binary codes, which can be found in social function (sub)system, is applied to translation, translation can be said to treat all phenomena as either mediated or unmediated. This is the basic binary systemic code of translation. For instance, in the case of interlingual interaction, translation sees any text as either translated or not. That is why the natural tendency among interlingual translators is to translate what has not been translated, rather than re-translate. In the case of a composed musical piece, translation looks at it as performed/performable or not (=translated/translatable from written notes into performance). Therefore, musicians look at music as something that they might perform, even when it is written not for their instrument as was the case with Franz Liszt’s numerous piano transcriptions of symphonic music and other non-piano music. Applying Luhmann’s idea of programs to translation, translation also has flexible programs which are rules or principles of adjusting fundamental systemic codes to different space and time conditions. Programs reflect changes in the mediation policies from culture to culture and from period to period. That is why texts are translated and then re-translated. If there was only the code (mediated/unmediated), there should not be retranslations, but they happen because the application of the code may change in different places and different periods. That is why artistic works are also interpreted and re-interpreted time and again. Each period tends to have its own understanding/interpretation of the preceding epochs. One might imagine re-translation as a change of the mediating agent in the formula of TCE: A: Utterance1 > Information1 ≅ B: (Interpreting1 = Utterance2) > Information 2 ≅ C: Understanding 2. The change of the mediating agents inevitably leads to a change of Interpreting1 and the resulting Utterance2 and sends the entire interchange between A and C along another trajectory.

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Finally, each TCE has its medium which constitutes it. Translation uses different media depending on the semiotic domain within which it occurs: language is the medium of interlingual translation; sound is the medium which turns the composer’s ideas into music. To continue our application of Luhmann’s ideas to translation, translation qua system has its subsystems – networks of relations between various types of its element, TCE. For example, within the lingual type of TCE, there are intra- and interlingual subsystems, which can be further divided according to language combinations, belonging to oral or written forms (interpreting vs. translation), thematic areas (legal, medical, academic, literary translation), etc. The specialization in a particular subsystem of the translation system is what makes the interlingual translator different from the painter or composer. Finer specialisms in interlingual translator distinguish between a legal translator and a literary translator; or in music translation, between a Romantic composer (=translator) and a jazz composer (=translator). As a next step in considering its systemics, translation should be viewed as a subsystem of a larger system. Luhmann’s theory is a sociological theory, hence its application in TS has so far been focused on the place translation occupies in society. Translation facilitates interaction across boundaries. Therefore, in light of Luhmann’s theory, translation is a social boundary phenomenon: it is ‘located’ and functions on boundaries between the overall social system and its environment or on the boundaries between different subsystems within the overall social system (see a detailed discussion of translation as a social boundary phenomenon in Tyulenev [2012, pp. 146–157]). The systemic paradigm developed on Luhmann’s theoretical foundation allows considering translation among other social-systemic boundary phenomena. The boundary of the social system has a complex two-layered structure. It consists of an internal layer and an external layer (Tyulenev, 2020). The internal layer may be termed ‘endohomorous’ and the external – ‘ectohomorous’ (from the Greek words ‘endon’ meaning ‘within,’ ‘inside,’ and ‘ektos’ meaning ‘without,’ ‘outside,’ combined with the word `homoros’, related to ‘horos’ – ‘border’). Endohomorous phenomena operate on the inside of the social linguocultural boundary (e.g., diplomacy) and deal with foreign or extra-systemic phenomena indirectly. That is to say, endohomorous agents may act without necessarily knowing or using foreign language(s) or culture(s); they do not need to come into direct, unmediated verbal contact with the target social system. Ectohomorous phenomena operate on the outside and constitute the point of actual verbal contact between the system and its environment. We know their operation as the work of translators and interpreters who enable the internal layer to establish direct (unmediated) verbal contact with the foreign environment. For instance, the military forces of a state need translators and interpreters to help them make sense of intercepted documents or interrogate prisoners of war. Potentially, translation can be considered as a part not only of social systems but also of various semiotic systems. An example of this was mutatis mutandis the polysystem theory. Translation there was viewed in its literary form and in relation to the realm of literature: translated literary texts were considered as compared to other types of literary texts. Lefevere’s theorizing of translation is another example of how literary translation can be viewed as a part of the system of activities which were dubbed ‘rewriting.’ Luhmann’s theory equips the researcher with analytical tools to look at translation as a system or as a subsystem of a larger system, but it is hardly suitable to look at individual translators and interpreters. The reason is that Luhmann views sociology as a discipline whose focus is exclusively on social interactions, rather than on human beings who should be studied separately as biological beings (e.g., by biologists), as psychological beings

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(e.g., by psychologists) and as social agents (e.g., by sociologists). To observe and study translators/interpreters in social systems, one needs another theory. The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of social fields has been used in TS more than any other sociological theory. Bourdieu’s is a less formalized theory of society. Yet, although different from Luhmann’s SST in significant ways, Bourdieu’s theory of social fields converges with SST in seeing society as composed of system-like social spaces, namely fields. Fields are relatively autonomous, yet interconnected areas of activity (1990, pp. 87–88). Bourdieu’s theory has inspired much research into the social profile of the translator/ interpreter, or, to use Bourdieu’s term, into the habitus of the translator/interpreter. Bourdieu attempted to overcome the dichotomization of social reality as an opposition of social institutions (structures) and individuals (actors or agents) and allowed the researcher to analyze relations between structures, such as social fields, and actors. In other words, Bourdieu’s theory invites the researcher to look at the social profile of the translator, and their habitus, as intimately connected to their position in the relevant field(s). Habitus is the result of the individual’s exposure to social-systemic structures. By interiorizing principles offered by those structures, each social agent becomes a product of his/her social upbringing which constitutes his/her ability to act in a field, a structured social space. Social fields were defined by Bourdieu (1990, pp. 87–88) as ‘historically constituted areas of activity with their specific institutions and their own laws of functioning.’ Fields are social spaces in which agents demonstrate and put to practice their various stakes and interests; they invest themselves both economically (money, work, education) and psychologically (enthusiasm, passion or even fanaticism) in social activities of the field in which they operate. The agent’s habitus is, on the one hand, constituted of his/her individual history, and, on the other hand, the individual’s experience of objectified institutions and behavioral patterns of the fields in which they act (Bourdieu, 1990, p. 57). Another factor that determines the position of the individual in the social space is the capital s/he has accumulated. For Bourdieu, capital is a broader notion than only an economic category, rather it includes social connections, education and professional experience – cultural capital. As money (economic capital) offers possibilities to engage in activities one fancies, so also cultural capital moves its owner to better ‘located’ positions in a social field. For instance, if one has received a better education, s/he can vie for a better and more prestigious job. The two kinds of capital can be turned one into the other, like the kinetic and potential types of energy: one’s better education may result in a lucrative job or one’s affluence may offer him/her enjoy better education. Bourdieu’s conceptualization of the social agent’s habitus and capital in relation to social fields (or, one might say, system-like structures) allowed generalized, sociologically informed discussions of the translator’s habitus. Simeoni (1998) was a pioneer study which defined the translator’s habitus as that of subservience. Gouanvic (2005) and Inghilleri (2012) are examples of studies of the translator/interpreter habitus, and what is important for the discussion at hand is that these studies were intrinsically sociological in that they examined the translator/ interpreter habitus drawing on social-systemic structures – Bourdieusian fields. The question that is bound to arise when it comes to applying Bourdieu’s theory to translation, is whether there is a translation field or a social phenomenon less stable and tangible than a field. Daniel Simeoni doubted the existence of such a translation field (1998, p. 19). So did other scholars (see an overview in Wolf, 2007, pp. 115–117). Yet Michaela Wolf argued that translation is a kind of ‘mediation space’ and it is not ‘a space which disappears without leaving a trace’ (2007, p. 117). She grants that this space is constantly rebuilt by means of newly forged connections and its agents are continuously re-interpreting themselves, yet 214

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there are continuities which make one hypothesize a translation field. Wolf finds that Bourdieu’s conceptual apparatus is not sufficient for conceptualizing a ‘translation field.’ Yet it is necessary to detect this field either as an ontological phenomenon or at least as an epistemologically validated phenomenon, in order to account for translation as a social activity with its own protocols, rather than reduce identifying translation to discussing the impact of its products. Thus, two different sociological theories postulating social-systemic phenomena allow seeing translation and its agents differently. Luhmann’s social systems theory offers a view of translation as a system and translation as a subsystem, that is, translation’s social-systemic involvements and interactions. Bourdieu’s theory of social fields enables the translation scholar to examine the social profile of the translator and the dependence of the latter on the rules of the ‘game’ operating in the field, provided there is a translation social field (which is another intriguing repercussion of applying Bourdieu’s theory to studying translation).

An alternative: non-systemic structures Systemic approaches, however, tend to explain better stable structures, notably societies over longer stretches of time. Yet societies have their daily aspects and that is where systemic approaches need to be complemented by a more flexible theoretical apparatus. When translation is perceived as a complex of face-to-face interactions, it emerges as an assemblage of people and things, all having their own identities, preferences and habits, pursuing their goals, playing different roles and following different ways of action and interaction. These are individually distinctive factors that constitute, or rather, construct the social which manifests itself as a loose and flexible network, rather than a stable system. Different from the macro-sociological approaches outlined above which postulate some grand and encompassing structures or systems imposing themselves on individuals, microsociology believes that it is individuals or smaller groups of social agents who, by making (inter)actions, produce a larger social structure (see a detailed discussion on macro- and micro-sociology in Manzo, 2015). In micro-sociological approaches, the focus of the study shifts to agent and individual agency. Society is seen as existing – and, therefore, observed – on the micro level, in which individual actors come to the fore, while larger social formations retreat to the backdrop. Actor-Network Theory (ANT) could be considered as a prime example of a micro-sociological approach. It has been applied to studying translation in TS more than many micro-sociological theories. ANT has been developed in social studies in the fields of science and technology in the 1970s and the 1980s. Three scholars, Michel Callon, Bruno Latour and John Law, have contributed most to proposing and elaborating the theory. Like most micro-level social analytical tools, ANT insists on a bottom-up approach to studying the social. In general, ANT proponents argue that social causality is turned upside down by macro-sociological theories. This argument does not aim to cause binary oppositions between ‘bottom’ and ‘top,’ nor those between bottom-up and top-down approaches in sociology. Rather, it is made to emphasize the underlying logic of ANT: society is in constant development and is developed out of actors’ (inter)actions. This means, actors act to develop into networks, which join a new networking process as (previously developed and hence more ‘advanced’) actors to form new networks. From an ANT perspective, therefore, a society develops in this continuous loop of actors-networks (actors)-networks. In ANT, there is no absolute ‘bottom’ as there is no absolute ‘top,’ but only a continuous process of actors acting to renew and update ‘society’ which is perceived as a complex network. ANT proponents reverse social causality by 215

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focusing on the individual actors and their ways of acting and interacting. Such a conception of the social has methodological consequences. The ANT-inspired researcher refrains from making preconceived assumptions about social structures and (inter)actions in them. Rather, s/he is advised to ‘follow the actors’ and observe how the social is woven into networks (Latour, 2005, pp. 11–12, p. 68, 227). ANT broadens the repertoire of social agency. ANT researchers see the society as networks of interaction between both human and nonhuman elements, such as creatures, material objects or technology. Among the nonhuman agents, ANT researchers studied the roles played in social networks by microbes (Latour, 1988) or scallops (Callon, 1986). One might also think about the roles pets, tools of all kinds and electronic gadgets play in modern society. The concept of a nonhuman actor may seem strange, but it is logical, seeing that ANT advocates the removal of the artificial division between the natural and the social. To view nonhumans as ‘active’ actors or to say nonhumans have agency, is to acknowledge the fact that society is constituted not only of and by people, but also of and by objects, animals, artifacts and other nonhuman phenomena. Nonhuman agency interacts with (also counteracts) human agency. For ANT, agency is about the ability to exercise social influence or to make a change, whatever being or phenomenon produces that social influence or change. A nonhuman actor can therefore be simply understood as a nonhuman factor influencing the part of the social to which it is connected. What is the effect of the removal of the division between human and nonhuman agency on our understanding of social aspects of translation? Translation involves numerous nonhuman factors such as texts or translation technology with its hard- and software. Hardly any of these nonhuman factors are studied as active participants of translational networks. Jones (2009, 2011) and Abdallah (2012) were perhaps the first publications to conceptualize texts (source and target texts as well as translation drafts) in translation as nonhuman actors. Analyzing translation in mass media, van Rooyen (2019) added news, notes, memoranda, etc. Luo (2020) provided a detailed analysis of networks of texts involved in different phases of translation production. She found that a text might exist in different ‘states or forms’ (ibid., p. 140) which functioned differently as the translation process developed. Considering texts as nonhuman actors can be helpful for studying such networks as translations of the Bible or other religious or classical texts with multiple versions, drafts, adaptations, etc. Looking at texts as networks and nonhuman actors in networks is perhaps not surprising, but looking at what else can be factored in when translational networks are studied can be intriguing. Even a social cataclysm like war, a pandemic, or a disease, etc. can affect translation. Luo and Zheng (2017) and Luo (2020) expanded the categories of nonhuman actors in literary translation to include war and influenza. Luo (2020) demonstrated how World War II and the epidemic of influenza impacted negatively a translation project: by taking away resources essential to translation production, such as lilac binding cloth, paper and printers. The consequence was that the final translation text appeared quite different from the original design, and the date of publication was severely delayed (ibid.). Studying nonhuman agency in translational networks challenges anthropocentrism (and more often than not translator-centrism) and even suggests that such foci might be an illusion, at least in some cases or in some particular stages of translation production. A question is bound to arise at this point: Can all factors in translation be considered actors? Where to draw a line between actors in a translational network and its environment? Luo (ibid., pp. 91–92) suggested including only those actors that were directly involved in the formation of the network and had a non-neutral (positive or negative) impact on the translational process and its results. In this way, the boundary of the translational network can be 216

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drawn. This makes the network look, to an extent, like a system, yet the difference is that the boundary of a network is fuzzy and susceptible to change since networking is a dynamic process. Moreover, within its boundary, a network consists of complex and evolving connections of heterogeneous actors, whereas the structure of a system (for example, in Luhmann’s theory) is more definite and stable. While looking at individual actors and their trivial and minor daily actions, ANT does not miss the forest for the trees. While preserving their individuality, actors exist as, and in, congregations. These congregations are conceptualized as flexible networks. For ANT, the social is uncertain, unpredictable and ever-changing. It is composed not of systems implying well-defined structures but of networks which, after being formed, can be easily transformed. Networks can start with one goal that its actors strive to achieve and then re-focus on another; or the cast of social actors in networks may change; or the actors may play varied roles during the evolution of the network. Networks are pliable, flexible and in a constant state of flux. How do an actor and a network relate to each other? There are two aspects of the relationship: 1

2

Actors themselves can be viewed as networks which can further act to form new networks. An actor does not exist naturally; it takes a network of actors to form an actor. Luo (2020) gave an example of a ready-made car: a car is produced through a network of engineers, painters, steel, etc. The car therefore implies a network of actors (people and things) that have produced it. In this sense, it is itself a network but a network that is a ‘black box’ (an entity with hidden content), in terms of ANT. The actor, with its network(s) black-boxed, can act as a single entity, networking with other actors whose networks are also black-boxed. The car in the previous example can be viewed as a single actor which functions as a vehicle in a transport network.

The scope of considering both the actor and the network can be expanded or reduced depending on the researcher’s focus. This means that ANT does not put actors/networks in a vacuum. There is a history of socially formed phenomena, and that history is concentrated in any social actor or network. Any actor/network is surrounded by and connected to other actors/networks. Actors/networks are therefore fundamentally relational. Latour (1999) emphasized that an actor-network should not be confused with networks commonly known, such as the Internet, which transport information or knowledge faithfully and without change (p. 15). The actor-network transforms and changes inputs. Thus, for ANT-informed research, networks are social units that are traceable and describable, yet flexible both ontologically (that is, in their nature) and epistemologically (that is, as objects of study); networks are configured heterogeneously (involving both human and nonhuman agency) and they function to transform inputs to produce different outputs. The concept of ‘network’ allows researchers to study the particulars of social agency as well as the larger environment of the agency. Such conceptualization of social reality admits the established facts and respects the uncertainties and possible changes that may happen over the course of social processes. It also includes the less ‘common’ and the ‘unusual,’ and ANT claims that it is able to present the social as rich and as diverse as it practically is as compared to the concept of ‘system’ which refers to a relatively stable structure which is somewhat predictable and large-scale with only limited attention to individual agency. So, the system allows less flexibility, unpredictability and heterogeneity in observing society as permitted in ANT. 217

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In terms of methodology, ANT encourages fieldwork and the use of ethnographic methods such as participant observation and interviews to obtain first-hand data. Many studies adopted these methods (e.g., Buzelin, 2006, 2007; Kung, 2009, Haddadian-Moghaddam, 2012). Recent research has also used archival materials as a source of data (e.g., Bogic, 2010, Boll, 2016, Munday, 2016). Luo (2020) designed a methodology for ANT-guided research on translation, in which she developed a set of methodological rules based on three principles in Callon (1986) and ‘rules of method’ in Latour (1987, p. 258). The ANT-inspired TS researcher refrains from making preconceived assumptions; rather, s/he follows the actors and observes how the social is woven into networks by the actors’ acting (Latour, 2005). ANT’s research slogan is ‘follow the actors’ (Latour, 2005, pp. 11–12, p. 68, 227) supported by the principle of agnosticism (Callon, 1986, p. 200). The principle requires researchers to stay ‘ignorant’ until the social (social relation, identity, facts, etc.) is generated through a concrete and practical networking process; researchers also need to remain impartial toward social actors, their actions, and their own interpretations of the social. Moreover, the principle of generalized symmetry breaks the artificial wall between the social and the natural/ technical, so ANT researchers see society as a mixture of human and nonhuman elements (Callon, 1986). The third principle in Callon (1986) is free association. It requests researchers to respect any forms of associations that actors make, whether the associations contain things that are previously excluded as being part of a ‘society,’ and whether the structure of the associations and the ways of making the associations exceed the range of previously established knowledge. In application to translation research, the methodological rules prevent the researcher from making preconceived assumptions about translational networks and overlooking nonhuman translation agencies (Luo, 2020, pp. 5–6, 59–60). The most significant implication of ANT on TS is that it offers tools for translation production research. Buzelin (2006, 2007) pioneered the ANT-guided study of translation production in publishing companies. Subsequent studies focused on exploring the connections between the translator and other actors (such as publishers, editors, proofreaders, designers and typographers), and how they interact in the process of producing and publishing translations. Luo (2020) conducted a large-scale ANT-informed research of an English translation of the Chinese classical novel The Journey to the West. Luo (2020) demonstrated that ANT enables researchers to see: (1) translation as networks and the fluidity of such networks in that they go through various stages of production; (2) actors have multiple responsibilities and roles that tend to change from stage to stage, moreover, particular responsibilities and roles may shift from actor to actor; (3) actors occupy different levels in the hierarchy of agency during the translation production, for example, some may become an obligatory passage point, that is, they may become actors indispensable for the realization of a translation project; (4) actors shape themselves and are shaped by others while they shape a translation by networking. The research demonstrated that translation is not pre-determined; nor are translation actors’ identities. Rather, translation actors’ identities are being defined and constantly re-defined ( just as Callon [1986] pointed out) in the process of translation production when actors, translators included, make connections with other actors (people and resources). In other words, translation actors are themselves being defined when they network to define a translation. The translation process is a process of producing, shaping, and defining translation and moreover, translation actors. The fourth point has two more implications: (5) the translation (text) is only one of the products of translation, which indicates that discussing the translation process is not only discussing translation but also a more or less complex social process; and (6) actors and translation qua process and product are relationally defined during translation production, that is, actors are defined by their connections with others when 218

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they network to produce translation, and meanwhile, translation gradually takes shape when actors assemble and connect in a productive manner. ANT is a type of material semiotics because it studies the relations between physical objects and explores the making and the meaning of material relationality. Actors and translation are defined by their material relationality. Translation is viewed as a process during which some inputs (translator, source text, publisher, paper, printing machines, etc.) are turned into different outputs (translation, translation-related texts, contracts, corresponding letters, reviews and advertisements for the translation, prizes, royalties, etc.) (Luo, 2020). In this sense, (7) translation is more like transformation, with its meaning being extensively enriched and its territory being largely expanded. As has been discussed previously, actor and network are flexible structures that can be stretched (un-black-boxed) or folded (black-boxed). This means that both translation and translator can be examined as networks or as a single actor. When a researcher studies the becoming of a translator, the translator is studied as a network. The object of study includes the life of a translator, people who have influenced him/her, the events or conditions that direct the translator’s career path; his/her translations, translation methods, individual style and philosophy that make him or her distinct are studied; in other words, all actors and factors that have produced the translator qua network are investigated. When the translator is considered an actor within a translational network, the research focus shifts to the translator agency amongst other agencies within the network. Topics may include, as has been indicated above, the (multiplicity of ) roles and responsibilities of the translator which may change with the development of a translation project; the translator’s gaining or losing power over the course of the translation project; power relations between the translator and other participants in the translation project; the process of defining the translator through translation and so on. When translation is examined as a network, the process of its production is studied. This angle is the focus of translation production research (see above). Translation can be studied as an actor in networks. For example, translation can be studied as an actor contributing to constituting a national literature, to technological development or political processes, to producing objects of entertainment, to generating and circulating knowledge, etc. Such perception of the social functioning of translation is reminiscent of the macrosociological view of translation as a social system. Indeed, translation is presented as a social structure that connects with other social structures to form an overall social system. Yet there is a difference: ANT focuses on microanalysis, emphasizes actor agency and heterogeneity of actors and analyzes the dynamic evolvement of both actors and the network.

Semiotic systems Outside of traditional TS, semioticians, among others, have thought about translation in terms of systems, too. Journals like ‘Sign System Studies’ and ‘Social Semiotics’ publish work in this regard. In the European context, the French and Eastern European semiotic traditions also focus on sign systems, but Yuri Lotman is probably the foremost scholar from this tradition when it comes to the issue of systems thinking in semiotics. Sebeok and Danesi (2000) developed aspects of Lotman’s work further to also include a biosemiotic approach. Lotman’s most famous contribution to the semiotics of culture (and translation) is probably his term ‘semiosphere’ or his 1990 book titled Universe of the mind (Lotman, 1990). This semiosphere is conceptualized as a system of semiotic systems in which meaning-making is possible. It is open to and influenced by the physiosphere but not coincidental with it. Later 219

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developments in biosemiotics have refined the relationship between the semiosphere and the biosphere (Kull, 2015) to the point where these two spheres largely overlap. Lotman’s theory of culture does not suffer from the usual idealist solipsism that one finds in cultural studies. Rather, he argues that ‘[t]he transformation of the world of objects into the world of signs is founded on the ontological presupposition that it is possible to make replicas: the reflected image of a thing is cut off from its natural practical associations (space, context, intention, and so on’ (Lotman, 1990, p. 54). Semiosis is the process through which living organisms relate to an environment and create relational knowledge, i. e., knowledge that relates to that environment, by translating the environment into semiotic systems. So, for Lotman, culture is a system of systems but one that has permeable boundaries (Lotman, 1990, pp. 131–142), and it is exactly because the systems are open to influences from outside of the system that they are able to change. For Lotman, cultural change is caused by differences between the systems. He writes: It has been established that a minimally functioning semiotic structure consists of not one artificially isolated language or text in that language, but of a parallel pair of mutually untranslatable languages which are, however, connected by a ‘pulley’, which is translation. (Lotman, 1990, p. 2) In the quote above, language is synonymous with the semiotic system. He borrows a number of ideas from the physicist Ilya Prigogine to explain that changes in culture require energy, and this energy is a matter of differences between systems (Lotman, 2019). Energy, as Deacon (2013) has pointed out, is not something, but a relation of difference. This is why Lotman famously argues that semiosis is always based on at least two systems and that these two systems are related by translation processes: ‘Creative consciousness is impossible within an entirely isolated, monostructural (without the potential for internal exchanges), and static system” (Lotman, 2019, p. 76). Lotman borrows another term that is famous in the field of complex adaptive systems, namely bifurcation points (Lotman, 2019). A bifurcation point is a moment in the history of a system when the system can develop in more than one direction. In other words, the current constraints that operate on that system allow for a number of future possible states for the system. It is the scientific version of the popular ‘it could have gone either way.’ This means that there are moments in cultural history when major changes emerge from the existing systems. Introducing history into his cultural semiotics, Lotman grants that change in culture could be gradual or continuous, and he grants both kinds of change equal rights. That said, he also describes cultural changes as explosions, probably more in order to discuss the issues of energy that drive that change than to comment on the size of the changes (Lotman, 2019). Cultural change or innovation is therefore the effect of a translation process that relates at least two different systems, and it is the tension between these systems that provides the energy for change. In addition, he borrows from complex adaptive systems theory again by comparing semiotic systems to autocatalytic reactions: The idea that ‘thinking’ semiotic structures need an initial impulse from another thinking structure and that the text-generating mechanisms need a text from outside to set them going reminds us on the one hand of so-called autocatalytic reactions, that is those reactions where, in order to obtain the final product (or to hasten a chemical 220

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reaction), the final result has to be already present in some quantity at the beginning of the reaction. (Lotman, 1990, p. 3) Lotman’s semiotic theory of culture also assumes a theory of communication (Lotman, 1990, p. 20). In this sense, his is a postmodernist theory of culture in terms of Deely’s (2001) argument that ‘real postmodernism’ is not the realization that knowledge is relative but that knowledge is constructed through communication. This theory of communication operates on the assumption of a common memory between the collective culture and the individual consciousness (Lotman, 1990, p. 69). In conclusion, Lotman’s contribution to systems thinking in translation is therefore linked to his thinking on semiotic systems. Being able to think about culture in terms of both wholes and parts remains a valuable perspective. Because TS has moved strongly toward an interest in the translator (Robinson, 1991, 2001; Pym, 2009; 2012; Chesterman, 2017), systems thinking, especially complex adaptive systems thinking, provides a valuable additional perspective from which to engage with translation and translators. In addition, Lotman’s work is a clear example of the relevance of all semiotic systems, not only language, for understanding culture. Lastly, Lotman’s knowledge and use of the natural sciences foreshadow a less strained relationship between humanities and sciences.

Conclusion Translation can be described as a systemic phenomenon. It constitutes a system in itself and it enters systemic relations with larger structures, that is, it acts as an element or a subsystem of systems. When translation is examined as a system in its own right, one can see how various phenomena can be subsumed under one category – translation. Some of these phenomena may be called translation, and some may be called some other names, yet if they demonstrate the ability to mediate across (semiotic, linguistic and social) boundaries, they may be said to belong to the same species – translation. Jakobson was the first to suggest what translation as a system might include. From his linguistic standpoint, translation includes three types, intra- and interlinguistic plus intersemiotic. Later the translation system was shown to include not only verbal mediation but also extraverbal (e.g., gestures) and mediation beyond the human realm. Studying systemic or quasi-systemic properties of translation has also proved to be very productive. This has been especially fruitful with the application of sociological theories, such as Luhmann’s social systems theory, Bourdieu’s theory of social fields and the ANT. Each of these theories allowed focusing on different aspects of translation qua a system or qua a subsystem. Luhmann’s theory allows theorizing translation as a social system with a formalizable set of properties and with a definite social function and place – translation is responsible for mediation and it is a social boundary phenomenon. Bourdieu’s theory allowed seeing translation agents, their habitus and capital and their ensuing position in society, or, to be more specific, in relevant fields, including a hypothesized translation field. Finally, the ANT allows seeing the flexibility of translation quasi-systemic structures (‘quasi’ meaning ‘almost’ or ‘partly,’ not ‘apparent’). ANT emphasizes the active roles social agents may play in forming translation networks. ANT also shows various ‘translational’ operations that take place within a social project. The present chapter has surveyed some of the systemic conceptions of translation in broader terms as a social and a semiotic phenomenon. Such conceptualization of translation agrees with the recent approaches in TS as well as in the adjacent humanities which consider 221

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translation amongst their objects of study, notably semiotics and sociology. The discussed systems approaches show how studying translation moves away from isolationist theories of interlingual translation in favor of seeing it as one of the similar or comparable phenomena which can be found in the human world and beyond. It is believed that the approaches introduced in this chapter will guide the student of translation further into studying translation in relation to other phenomena both within and outside the human world, into exploring interlingual translation together or in comparison with other types and kinds of translation.

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Kung, S.C. (2009). Translation Agents and Networks, with Reference to the Translation of Contemporary Taiwanese Novels”. In A. Pym & A. Perekrestenko (Eds.), Translation Research Projects 2 (pp. 123–138). Tarragona: Intercultural Studies Group. Latour, B. (1987). Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Latour, B. (1988). The Pasteurisation of France (A. Sheridan & J. Law, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Latour, B. (1999). On Recalling ANT. In J. Law & J. Hassard (Eds.), Actor Network Theory and After (pp. 15–25). Oxford: Blackwell. Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. New York: Oxford University Press. Lefevere, A. (1992). Translation, Rewriting and the Manipulation of Literary Fame. London & New York: Routledge. Lotman, J. (2019). Culture, Memory and History: Essays in Cultural Semiotics. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Lotman, Y. (1990). Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Luhmann, N. (1995). Social Systems. ( J. Bednarz, Jr., with D. Baecker, Trans.). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Luo, W. (2020). Translation as Actor-Networking: Actors, Agencies, and Networks in the Making of Arthur Waley’s English Translation of the Chinese ‘Journey to the West’. New York: Routledge. Luo, W., & Zheng, B. (2017). Visiting Elements Thought to Be ‘Inactive’: Nonhuman Actors in Arthur Waley’s Translation of Journey to the West. Asia Pacific Translation and Intercultural Studies, 4(3), 253–265. Manzo, G. (2015). Macrosociology-Microsociology. In J. D. Wright (Ed.), International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences (pp. 414–421, 2nd edition, Vol. 14). Oxford: Elsevier. ISBN: 9780080970868 Metzer, D. (2007). Quotation and Cultural Meaning in Twentieth-Century Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Munday, J. (2016). John Silkin as Anthropologist, Editor, and Translator. Translation and Literature, 25, 84–106. Poltermann, A. (1992). Normen des Literarischen Übersetzens im System der Literatur. In H. Kittel (Ed.), Geschichte, System, Literarische Übersetzung/Histories, Systems, Literary Translations (pp. 5–31). Berlin: E. Schmidt. Pym, A. (2009). Humanizing Translation History. Hermes: Journal of Language and Communication Studies, 42, 23–48. Pym, A. (2012). On Translator Ethics. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Robinson, D. (1991). The Translator’s Turn. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Robinson, D. (2001). Who Translates: Translator Subjectivities Beyond Reason. Albany: State University of New York Press. Sebeok, T. A., & Danesi, M. (2000). The Forms of Meaning: Modeling Systems Theory and Semiotic Analysis. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Simeoni, D. (1998). The Pivotal Status of the Translator’s Habitus. Target, 10(1), 1–39. Tyulenev, S. (2012). Applying Luhmann to Translation Studies: Translation in Society. New York & London: Routledge. Tyulenev, S. (2020). Translation and (Counter-)Intelligence: The Interpenetration of Social-Systemic Boundary Phenomena. Perspectives. Available at: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/ 0907676X.2020.1726977 van Rooyen, M. (2019). Chapter 7: Tracing Convergence in the Translation of Community Radio News. In L. Davier & K. Conway (Eds.), Journalism and Translation in the Era of Convergence (pp. 155–176). Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Vermeer, H. J. (2006). Luhmann’s “Social System” Theory: Preliminary Fragments for a Theory of Translation. Berlin: Frank & Timme. Wolf, M. (2007). The Location of the “Translation Field”: Negotiating Borderlines Between Pierre Bourdieu and Homi Bhabha. In M. Wolf & A. Fukari (Eds.), Constructing a Sociology of Translation (pp. 109–119). Amsterdam & Philadelphia: Benjamins.

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Defining culture Craigg Storti’s The Art of Crossing Cultures (1990) opens with the statement: ‘Many, perhaps most, people who go abroad to live and work genuinely want to adapt to the local culture’ (p. xiii). While the percentage of people who wish to adapt may be a matter of debate, the key concept of ‘local culture’ is presented as self-evident. But neither part of the concept is. For example, what is meant by the adjective local: the country, the region, the city or the company where one has been relocated? Indeed, in C.P. Snow’s famous Rede lecture ‘The Two Cultures’ (1959), culture is used to refer to academic communities, namely the hard sciences vs. the humanities. And, with the spread of global cultural products and practices, can any given locale be exclusively ‘local’? Even more amorphous and contested than the adjective local, however, is the noun culture. Conceptualized in various, often overlapping ways, the term is used ubiquitously in both popular and scholarly settings in relation to some of the most contentious aspects of contemporary societies. As Raymond Williams (1983) comments, Culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language. This is so partly because of its intricate historical development, in several European languages, but mainly because it has now come to be used for important concepts in several distinct intellectual disciplines and in several distinct and incompatible systems of thought. (p. 87) Initial meanings of the term in most European languages had to do with agricultural processes, i.e., ‘the tending of something, basically crops or animals’ (Williams, 1983, p. 87). Metaphoric extensions emerged in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, associating culture with education and refinement. Later, in the Romantic period, it would acquire new valences in opposition to civilization, with culture construed as more organic, situated in the folk and the countryside, against which civilization was associated with excessive refinement and the cosmopolitan life of cities. This was also a time when culture was becoming nationalized, achieved in part through a process referred to by André Lefevere (1990) as 224

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‘monolingualization’ (p. 24).The association of national culture with monolingualism is naturalized in the mythology surrounding the ‘mother tongue’ that emerged in the Romantic period (see Kittler, 1990; Yildiz, 2012). Freidrich Schleiermacher [1813] 2004, for example, insisted that one express primary loyalty to one’s mother tongue, ‘just as to one nation, or else drift disoriented in an unlovely in-between realm’ (p. 59). This would have implications for the modern understanding of translation, as discussed below. Williams (1983) isolates three dominant meanings of culture since the eighteenth century: (i) The independent and abstract noun which describes a general process of intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic development from [the 18th century]; (ii) the independent noun, whether used generally or specifically, which indicates a particular way of life, whether of a people, a period, a group, or humanity in general, from Herder and Klemm. But we also have to recognize (iii) the independent and abstract noun which describes the works and practices of intellectual and artistic activity. (p. 90) The first meaning could be described as capital ‘c’ culture, or high culture, referring to the great works of human civilization. This view was reflected in anthologies of world literature, typically referred to in the nineteenth century as universal literature. Those anthologies were often titled treasuries and their contents were described as gems, underscoring their timeless value. This was further reflected in the arrangement of the texts in alphabetical as opposed to chronological order, suggesting that these works transcended the place and time of their origin. This notion of Culture is operative in Mathew Arnold’s seminal essay ‘Culture and Anarchy’ (1869), which presents Culture as an edifice, a bulwark against chaos. According to Arnold, culture is ‘the best which has been thought and said in the world’ (p. viii). Kwame Anthony Appiah (2018) describes this notion of culture as ‘a precious golden nugget’ (p. 196) to be passed down across generations, associating high culture with conservative notions of preservation and cultural inheritance. We see a rather direct connection between this concept of culture and what Lawrence Venuti (2017) critiques as an instrumentalist approach to translation, according to which the source text contains an invariant, which the translator must isolate and transfer. The second meaning, or small ‘c’ culture, refers to the belief systems and habits or life ways of a people or group. In Appiah’s formulation, ‘Our customs of dress and greeting, the habits of behavior that shape relations between men and women, parents and children, cops and civilians, shop assistants and consumers’ (2018, p. 205). This view of culture, or rather cultures, which would be popularized in the field of anthropology, was expressed in G.F. Klemm’s General Cultural History of Mankind [Allgemeine Kulturgeschichte des Menschheit, 1843–1852] and later in Edward Burnett Tylor’s Primitive Culture (1871), often described as the first work of modern anthropology. Even within this second usage, however, one can make distinctions. As Williams notes, in archaeology references to culture or to a culture are ‘primarily to material production,’ while in history and cultural studies, ‘the reference is primarily to signifying or symbolic systems’ (1983, p. 91), a distinction ‘which confuses and even more often conceals the central question of the relations between “material” and “symbolic” production’ (p. 91). How to define and where to locate ‘culture’ has been continually debated across the Humanities and Social Sciences since the emergence of Cultural Studies in the late 1950s, especially in the fields of Anthropology and Sociology, where the relationship of the material and the social realms to culture is a central concern. Following the fall of traditional 225

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Marxist approaches, which saw the material (or substructure) as a determinant of the social and cultural (as superstructure), on the one hand, and critiques of culture seen as autonomous and bounded, on the other, have made ‘the very concept of cultures as coherent and distinct entities […] widely disputed’ (Sewell, 1999, p. 53). As a result, the following positions have become commonplace: ‘Cultures are contradictory,’ ‘Cultures are loosely integrated,’ ‘Cultures are contested,’ ‘Cultures are subject to constant change’ and ‘Cultures are weakly bounded’ (Sewell, 1999, pp. 53–54). Indeed, some have even proposed that we consider culture ‘a verb’ in recognition of the notion that ‘culture is not something you think or possess or live inside of. It is something that you do. And the way that you do it might be different at different times and in different circumstances’ (Scollon et al., 2012, p. 5). Approaches that seek to rearticulate the relationship between culture as a system (langue) and culture as an individual instance (parole), or between structure and agency, have focused on ‘practice, narrative, and embodiment’ (Bonnell & Hunt, 1999, p. 26). This has led to more nuanced, dialectical, and complex articulations of the relationship between the material and the symbolic realm. William H. Sewell, Jr. (1999) advocates for studying where and how cultural coherences ‘are achieved, sustained, and dissolved’ (p. 57), recognizing that the boundedness of ‘these partially coherent landscapes of meaning “culture” is ‘only relative and constantly shifting’ (p. 58). This notion of culture as in a state of constant negotiation, one could argue, presaged the focus on mobility and movement in Cultural Studies, discussed below, exploiting and expanding the meaning of translation as a process by construing culture as always already in translation. Attempts to combine the cultural and the material have emerged in recent works in the field of cultural psychology, such as Richard Nisbett’s The Geography of Thought (2003), which traces the effects of geography on modes of thinking and cognition. Here geography is understood as culture in the broadest possible sense, encompassing ecologies, social structures, philosophies and educational systems. The posthuman turn in the Humanities over the last decade also ‘aims to widen the scholarly perspective to include other natural, cultural, and social actors than humans’ by promoting ‘research that takes into account the various complex relations of humans and nonhumans in contemporary as well as historical cultural and social formations’ (Editorial Board, 2016, p. 3). While it is tempting to contrast the unchanging nature or timelessness of high culture in the conservative imagination to the anarchic malleability and mobility of small c culture, this is not necessarily the case. Arnold, for example, argues that the goal of making High Culture accessible is innately progressive, as it ‘seeks to do away with classes.’ As commodities, objects of high culture are markers of taste, imbued with what Bourdieu refers to as cultural capital, and so become increasingly associated in the nineteenth century with social mobility. Moreover, while distinct, the notions of Culture and culture often overlap. For example, in the title of Tylor’s Primitive Culture (1871), his invocation of Williams’s second meaning is modified with the adjective primitive, suggesting a developmental scale, which is typically associated with High Culture as the pinnacle of human achievement. Or in the notion of La mission civilisatrice (the civilizing mission), which was used to justify European colonialism, the goal of spreading Culture (translatio studii) typically involved imposing the small ‘c’ cultural forms (including the language) of the colonizer as well. This is a point made by Johann Herder already in the late eighteenth century: Men of all quarters of the globe, who have perished over the ages, you have not lived solely to manure the earth with your ashes, so that at the end of time your posterity 226

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should be made happy by European culture. The very thought of a superior European culture is a blatant insult to the majesty of Nature. (qtd. in Williams, 1983, p. 89) The sleight of hand whereby the culture of the colonizer appears as universal is exposed by wa Thiong’o in his autobiographical The House of the Interpreter (2012), where he recounts an incident that occurred in his English composition class in Kenya. The instructor recommends that the students study composition ‘from the Bible.’ As his teacher explains, ‘It has the shortest sentence in English. Jesus wept. So follow the example of Jesus. He spoke very simple English’ (p. 23). This leaves wa Thiong’o puzzled: ‘Not trying to be clever or correct him, I raised my hand and said that Jesus did not speak English: the Bible was a translation’ (p. 23). The instructor dismisses the comment, leaving wa Thiong’o to observe, ‘Smith’s testy response froze questions and differing perspectives’ (p. 23). The term culture becomes even more problematic when modified by the adjective national. The idea of a single national culture mystifies the fact that these cultures are internally diverse, something most nations seek to forget, according to the nineteenth century French historian Ernst Renan. Indeed, many postwar studies of ‘foreign’ cultures, products of the emerging discipline of Area Studies, as well as the many studies that appeared to facilitate the globalization of business that intensified after the fall of communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, participated in that forgetting. Reifying the notion of a national culture, such studies typically ignore or downplay internal differences, such as class, in order to quantify and measure differences across cultures (see Hoftsteder, 1980). We see an especially egregious example of this in Edward and Mildred Hall’s Understanding Cultural Differences (1990). The section titled ‘The French’ opens with the startling admission: When we refer to the French, we mean the people of northern France, especially those who live and work in Paris and Lyon, where many major businesses are headquartered. This is where we conducted our interviews with French women and men in business and the professions. (p. 85) The fact is, culture has little respect for national borders and is quite malleable. As Appiah (2018) notes, All cultural practices and objects are mobile; they like to spread, and almost all are themselves creations of intermixture. […] The real problem isn’t that it’s difficult to decide who owns culture; it’s that the very idea of ownership is the wrong model. (p. 208) Hence, small ‘c’ culture is not a product but a process: ‘Arnold and Tylor would have agreed at least on this: culture isn’t a box to be checked on the questionnaire of humanity; it’s a process you join, a living a life with others’ (Appiah, 2018, p. 211), which is similar to the conclusion of Renan’s essay, where the historian lays the foundation for a modernist conceptualization of nationalism, not as some primordial attachment to language, territory and ethnos, but as ‘a daily plebiscite,’ by which citizens (re)commit themselves to the national polity. Recently, mobility has emerged more systematically as a lens through which to study culture (see Greenblatt, 2009; Sorensen, 2018), the result of the transnational turn taking place in a number of disciplines in the Humanities and Social Sciences as a repudiation of 227

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the ontology of the modern nation-state. This has moved questions of translation to the very center of literary and cultural studies. When seen through the lens of mobility, even works of high culture or World Literature no longer appear as fixed and static monuments; movement across languages and cultures in translation generates a wealth of new interpretations and adaptations, which, one could argue, does more to destabilize or disseminate the meaning of these works than to consolidate it. That being said, the association of culture with mobility has not put an end to synchronic studies of national cultures (see Hofstede, 2001). The focus on the mobility of culture has led not only to the increasing prominence of translation and translators in the study of global cultural phenomena, discussed below but also to the emergence of fictional translators in works of literature and film. As StrümperKrobb (2011) argues, Because of the vagueness and instability of his location between poles that are no longer stable in themselves the translator has become an icon of the fluidity and multiplicity of modern culture. And with that, the translator has become an ever more prominent figure in fiction. (p. 25) Dirk Delabastita and Ranier Grutman make a similar point in their 2005 special issue of the journal Linguistica Antverpiensia on fictional translators: Whether this is due to Deleuze’s and Guattari’s work on the ‘deterritorializing’ powers of language, or Bakhtin’s forceful critique of ‘monologic’ and ‘monoglossic’ tendencies in Western thought, or the ‘hybrid’ character of postcolonial texts and cultures, or all of the above, the times they are indeed a-changin’. (p. 11) They go on to note that ‘Translation Studies can justifiably be said to have been in the forefront of this paradigm shift’ (ibid.), although important work on the topic has come out of Comparative Literature as well (see Beebee, 2012).

Translation and culture in Translation Studies Conceptualizing the relationship between interlingual translation, the traditional focus of Translation Studies (TS), and culture is in many ways predicated on an understanding of the relationship between language and culture. For example, the fact that Stolti’s call to adapt to the ‘local culture’ makes no mention of learning the local language suggests the separability of language and culture, if not the imperialist assumption that ‘Everyone speaks English.’ The many books like Stolti’s that appeared in the rapidly globalizing post-communist world of the 1990s and 2000s were in fact designed to provide a painless introduction to other cultures, painless in that it avoided the labor-intensive activity of language acquisition or the cost involved with hiring translators and interpreters. On the other hand, the highest level on the language proficiency scale developed by the American Council for Teachers of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) is described as ‘educated native speaker,’ implying a knowledge not only of the target small ‘c’ culture but also of the great cultural achievements of that culture as integral to language proficiency. In TS, too, the relationship between language and culture is regularly debated. As Anthony Pym ([1992] 2010), contends, ‘Neither “language” nor “community” are sufficient criteria for the description of the kinds of places minimally involved 228

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in translation. A certain retreat to the bunker is necessary, in this case to the suitably vague term “culture”’ (p. 24). In the post-war period, two competing models of translation emerged, which conceived the relationship between language and culture in different ways. The one, fueled by the Allied success in breaking the Nazis’ secret code and the optimism engendered by early advances in machine translation gave new credence to the position that semantic content was easily separable from linguistic form or expression. Indeed, the extraction of content from the form was the first step in transferring a concept or message from one language into another. As A. H. Smith (1958) writes in the preface to the 1958 volume Aspects of Translation: To translate is, as Dr. Johnson defined it, ‘to change into another language, retaining sense.’ It would, perhaps, be wiser to qualify this definition, and suggest that to translate is to change into another language, retaining as much of the sense as one can; for some of the original effect is almost always lost. (p. vii) Or as Leonard Forster (1958) puts it in the same volume: ‘I want to consider translation as the transference of the content of a text from one language to another, bearing in mind that we cannot always dissociate the content from the form’ (p. 1). Those instances in which form and content are inextricably linked were posited as exceptions to the rule, requiring what Roman Jakobson (1959) referred to as ‘creative transposition’ (p. 238). Those exceptions were then consigned to the realm of art, overtly, in Jakobson’s case, or covertly, in the case of Booth and Foster, while the extraction of content from the form was presented as objective and scientific. The victory of this model in the first two post-war decades is confirmed by the shift in the framing of translation-related discourse from art to science, the latter associated with technology and know-how (see Baer, 2022). David Katan (2004) refers to this model as ‘technical,’ which assumes the existence of a global culture: At a technical level, communication is explicit, and ideas are consciously transmitted. It is scientific. In terms of language, it is the proposition or the dictionary denotative meaning that needs to be translated. This form of culture is indeed now global, with business and industry working to the same standards throughout the world. (p. 7) This model in language philosophy is referred to by George Steiner (1993) as universalist (p. 76). In such a model, translation is understood as semantic transposability or transfer, and culture, when it is treated at all, is construed as a temporary barrier to translation. While the notion of translation as transposability gained traction in the immediate postwar period, an alternative model became popular at the same time, one that held that language was profoundly shaped by culture, as represented in the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. This model is referred to by Steiner as monadist (1993, p. 77). It is interesting to note that the core writings of the linguists Sapir and Whorf appeared in the thirties and forties of the twentieth century, but the expression ‘the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis’ was coined in the fifties, a sign of its distinct salience in this period. While the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is often associated with linguistic relativism, it must be pointed out that there are strong and weak versions. According to the strong version, language determines what it is possible to think. According to the weak version, ‘language is one of the determining factors influencing our understanding of reality, but it is not the determining factor’ (Katan, 2004, p. 103). This was the view held by 229

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the US-based anthropologist Franz Boas and his student Bronislaw Malinowki, who greatly influenced Sapir and Whorf. Boas’s notion of cultural relativism assumed that ‘the form of the language will be molded by the state of that culture, but not in so far as a certain state of the culture is conditioned by the morphological traits of the language’ (Boas, 1911, p. 67), while Malinowski (1938) asserted only that ‘language is essentially rooted in the reality of the culture’ (p. 305). While both scholars held that language was essential for understanding a culture – Boas insisted that ethnographers learn the language of the group they are studying – neither held that linguistic forms determined culture or that culture determined linguistic forms. For the most part scholars in the field of TS, today ascribe to the weak version of the hypothesis, acknowledging that the embeddedness of language in culture can pose ‘serious problems for the translator’ (Hatim & Mason, 1990, p. 105). These two competing conceptualizations of linguistic relativism, which I will refer to as culture as barrier and culture as determinant, appear in various ways in writings on translation during the 1950s and 1960s when linguistic approaches were dominant. For example, in the translation strategies developed by the Canadians Vinay and Darbelnet (1958), borrowings or loan words, typically used in relation to culture-specific items, are situated under ‘direct’ strategies, that is, strategies that do not alter the source text structure; in this case, a word or phrase would be rendered as the same word or phrase, albeit transliterated, where necessary, and perhaps italicized or bolded. What they refer to as ‘equivalents,’ however, represent the replacement of a culture-specific reference with a target reference. For example, a reference to the game of cricket might be replaced by a reference to baseball. Or the expression ‘to bring one’s samovar to Tula’ might be replaced by ‘to bring coals to Newcastle.’ So, an equivalent for Vinay and Darbelnet is a solution that ‘matches’ the source text term or expression in terms of cultural relevance and familiarity. True, Vinay and Darbelnet do not use the word culture; rather they refer to ‘idiomatic expressions, clichés, proverbs, and substantive or adjectival collocations,’ linguistic units whose form has been fixed over time, hence a product of cultural history. Nida proposes a similar type of replacement when he suggests that ‘seal of God’ might be used to render ‘lamb of God’ for an Inuit audience, a solution that produces, in his formulation, dynamic in place of formal equivalence. The two models exist side by side in Jakobson’s seminal essay of 1959 ‘On Linguistic Aspects of Translation.’ The first part culminates in his oft-cited statement of total transposability: ‘Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey’ (p. 236). In the remainder of the essay, however, he investigates instances in which form and content are inseparably linked, confounding what can be conveyed. His first example involves allegorical representations whose form, in this case, their biological gender, is determined by the grammatical gender of the linguistic sign. So, in German, an allegorical representation will invariably portray death as a man due to the grammatical gender of the word Tod, whereas in Russian death will be portrayed as a woman due to the grammatical gender of the word smert’. Andrei Fedorov ([1953] 2021) discusses these issues in relation to a poem by Heinrich Heine in which a palm tree (Palme, feminine) and a pine tree (Fichtenbaum, masculine) fall in love (p. 186). In these examples, the cultural representation of the concept in works of poetry and folklore impedes the simple extraction of content from form. The next set of issues presented by Jakobson involves word play or paronomasia and poetic forms, in which form is a constitutive part of the content, therefore requiring what Jakobson (1959) refers to as ‘creative transposition’ (p. 238). The fact that he avoids the word translation here underscores this phenomenon as an exception to the extractivist rule and a retreat from the contention that form and content are inseparable, a core position of the Russian formalists, of which Jakobson was a founding member. 230

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Culture assumes a more central role in translation discourse following the so-called hermeneutic turn, which Steiner locates in the mid to late sixties, as evident in the discovery of Walter Benjamin’s, 1923 essay ‘Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers’ [The Task of the Translator], which led to the first English translation in 1968 and the first French translation in 1970. Influenced by the work of Gadamer and Iser, among others, the hermeneutic turn extended the influence of culture to the readers of a text, situated in a specific time and place, later conceptualized by Stanley Fish (1976) as ‘interpretive communities.’ In this model, culture shapes the reader’s reception of a text. Benjamin (1923), for example, notes the very different cultural associations surrounding the words for bread, Brot and pain, which in traditional linguistics-based models are viewed as very close equivalents. The notion of culture assumed greater prominence and specificity in the so-called textological turn in translation discourse. Introducing text linguistics into the teaching and study of translation focused attention on text types and genres, whose form can differ quite significantly across languages, shaped by cultural and linguistic practices rather than by the content of the message. While this approach is typically associated with the work of the Leipzig School in the 1980s, it also emerged in other contexts at other times. For example, the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin ([1979]1986) developed the notion of ‘speech genres,’ which, for him, represented an important corrective to the Saussurian model, which divided language into langue (language as an abstract system) and parole (an individual utterance). Individual speakers, Bakhtin argues, do not interact directly with the language as a system, which is an abstraction; rather, their utterances are shaped by the sociolinguistic culture of a given time and place, as manifested in various speech genres. ‘When we select words in the process of constructing an utterance,’ Bakhtin explains, we by no means always take them from the system of language in their neutral, dictionary form. We usually take them from other utterances, and mainly from utterances that are kindred to ours in genre, that is, in theme, composition, or style. Consequently, we choose words according to their generic specifications. (p. 87) Gayatri Spivak (2005) alludes to something similar when she refers to the ‘protocols of a text’ (p. 94), which are situated somewhere between langue and parole. It is interesting to note that the monograph Translation as Text (1994), co-authored by Albrecht Neubert, of the University of Leipzig, and Gregory Shreve, a US-based scholar who was trained as a cultural anthropologist, explores the notion of ‘text’ both in terms of concrete genres and, in the more metaphorical sense, of culture-specific scripts and frames, a notion that was becoming popular at the time in the fields of anthropology and sociology. The increasing acknowledgment of the role of culture in the study of translation culminated in the so-called cultural turn, which occurred in the late 1980s and early 1990s, led by scholars, such as Susan Bassnett and André Lefevere, who were trained in Comparative Literature. The cultural turn was so named as it acknowledges the determinant role of the target culture, understood broadly as the socio-political and aesthetic environment, on the selection, translation and reception of translated texts. Central to the cultural turn were the notions of patronage (who commissions or sponsors a translation and for what reasons) and of translation as rewriting, or the general transformation of texts, referred to as manipulation, according to the norms and needs of the target culture. One could say that the cultural turn was anticipated by Hans Vermeer’s skopos theory, which held that a translation should be shaped by the purpose or aim (in Greek, the skopos) of the translation, and that the cultural 231

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turn anticipated Even-Zohar’s polysystem theory, which sought to understand the shifting position of translated texts with the literary polysystem of the receiving culture, focusing in particular on the conditions under which translated texts move from the periphery to the center of the polysystem. The absolute power now granted to the target culture seemed to some as an overcompensation for the admittedly ‘subjective, ahistorical, and unsystematic’ nature of traditional source-text-oriented approaches (Kittel, 1998, p. 5). This led to the emergence of transfer studies, which sought to recognize both sides of the exchange. While it is no doubt true that, as Gideon Toury (1995) put it, translations are ‘facts of the target culture’ (p. 23), they are not exclusively so. Publishers are quick to place on the cover of the source text: ‘Translated into X languages,’ underscoring the effect of translation in transforming the source text, making it into a work of world literature, which may lead to it being re-sited in scholarly discussions and anthologies, transplanted not so much into another (target) culture but into an entirely new realm of literary (and cultural) value within the source culture and beyond. As the Göttingen school scholar Harold Kittel (1998) argues, The crux of the matter is that something new has been created in transit from (A) to (B) which is neither exclusively a source nor a target side phenomenon; it cannot be described satisfactorily or defined solely in their respective terms, nor can it be reduced to their respective limited concerns without incurring some loss. (p. 7)

Culture and translation outside Translation Studies New ways of conceptualizing translation and culture were also emerging in fields outside TS in the 1980s and 90s, in the wake of post-structuralism, especially in the field of anthropology. The postwar construal of culture, first, as a language – see Edward Hall’s The Silent Language (1959) – and then as text in the work of the cultural anthropologists Clifford Geertz and James Clifford, led quite naturally to an engagement with issues of translation, often as a metaphor for cultural exchange, but at times with implications for translation proper. For example, the theme of translation appears first as metaphor in Geertz’s essay ‘Thick Translation: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture’ (1973) and was later applied to translation practice by fellow anthropologist Kwame Anthony Appiah in the essay ‘Thick Translation’ (1993). The theme of translation was further elaborated by Geertz in his 1983 collection Local Knowledge, which includes the chapter ‘Found in Translation: On the Social History of the Moral Imagination.’ There he analyzes a work on nineteenth-century ethnography with the aim to ‘unpack’ it, ‘to circle around it as a way into what I take to be some of the central concerns of Lionel Trilling as a literary critic, if one can confine so various a man in so cramped a category’ (p. 40). The mention of a literary critic is no accident as in the essay Geertz posits as the central concern of the Humanistic disciplines how to ‘read’ other cultures, or, one might say, how to translate them into our contemporary understanding: ‘The differences do go far deeper than an easy men-are-men humanism permits itself to see, and the similarities are far too substantial for an easy other-beasts, other-mores relativism to dissolve’ (p. 41). He then goes on to outline a position between universality and monadism, to use Steiner’s terms (1983, pp. 76–77), which he characterizes as translation: ‘Professor Trilling’s nervousness about the epistemological complacency of traditional humanism is not misplaced. The exactest reply to it is James Merrill’s wrenching observation that life is translation, and we are all lost in it’ (p. 44). 232

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The notion of culture as text served to de-essentialize cultural identities, destabilizing traditional notions of authenticity, let alone purity, and re-situating culture somewhere in between language and utterance. As the anthropologist James Clifford explains in the introduction to the collection The Predicament of Culture (1988): ‘“Cultural” difference is no longer a stable, exotic otherness; self-other relations are matters of power and rhetoric rather than of essences. A whole structure of expectations about authenticity in culture and in art is thrown in doubt’ (p. 14). He then goes on to discuss contemporary processes of identity formation, which appear to implicate translation: ‘Twentieth-century identities no longer presuppose continuous cultures of traditions. Everywhere individuals and groups improvise local performances from (re)collected pasts, drawing on foreign media, symbols and languages’ (p. 14; italics added). Clifford’s engagement with translation is even more overt and systematic in his other works. For example, his 1986 collected volume Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, co-edited by George E. Marcus, contains the essay by Talal Asad ‘The Concept of Cultural Translation in British Social Anthropology,’ which is seen as a key text in postcolonial TS. In his 1997 monograph Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century, Clifford’s conceptualization of the unpredictable relationship between the origins of a cultural formation and its subsequent circulation marks an important contribution to models of translation that seek to accommodate both the source and target cultures in more complex ways. Asad’s essay, mentioned above, is important in drawing attention to the fact of interlingual translation in intercultural exchanges, as opposed to the metaphor of translation. By exposing the power dynamics in ethnographic writings produced in the Global North and reflected in the ethnographers’ translations of their subjects’ speech, Asad anticipates Edward Said’s critique of the field articulated in a speech to the American Association of Anthropologists in 1989; there he cautioned against ‘the heedless appropriation and translation of the world by a process that for all its protestations of relativism, its displays of epistemological care and technical expertise, cannot easily be distinguished from the process of empire’ (pp. 213–214). The influence of this critique of ethnographic translation has been productively adapted to the study of translation in museums (see Sturge, 2007; Silverman, 2015). Postcolonial studies have also produced an important body of work related to translation. For example, Homi Bhabha’s concept of ‘cultural translation,’ first articulated in his seminal work The Location of Culture (1994), presents translation as a metaphor for the experience of migration and the hybridity of cultural formations. While critiqued by scholars in TS as ‘sheer tautology’ (Venuti, 2019, p. 13), elitist (Trivedi, 2007), ‘evocative and yet frustratingly abstruse’ (Maitland, 2017, p. i), and as eliding issues related to interlingual translation, such as access to translation and interpreting services (Baer, 2020), the concept of cultural translation is widely cited in a variety of fields. At the same time, the concept has been brought into closer contact with the fact of translation, as evident in the monograph The Relocation of Culture (2020), by Simona Bertacco and Nicoletta Vallorani, which contains a preface by Bhabha. In contrast to Bhabha’s metaphorical use of translation, the postcolonial scholar Dipesh Chakrabarty focuses on translation proper in Provincializing Europe (2000), arguing that ‘critical and unrelenting attention to the very process of translation’ (p. 17) can challenge the universalizing claims of Western theory, in particular, Marxism, while acknowledging translation as a legitimate form of subaltern agency. At the same time, discussions in the Global North over the fate of Area Studies programs in the post-Cold War era led Japan scholar Alan Tansman (2004) to propose translation as a model of scholarship that successfully balances between theory and the archive: ‘In an atmosphere of intellectual honesty, all Area Studies 233

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work would be conceived as acts of translation, in which scholars would grapple with foreign materials in their own terms and strive to render clearer what seemed opaque’ (p. 209). While it is common to speak of a cultural turn in TS, it has also been asserted that the field of cultural studies has undergone a translational turn: ‘In a world of interdependencies and interconnections, [translation] is emerging as a fundamental new concept in the social sciences and the study of culture’ (Bachmann-Medick, 2016, p. 175). That translational turn in Cultural Studies, Bachmann-Medick (2016) argues, was predicated on the cultural turn that took place in TS, which liberated translation from traditional linguistic models to recognize it as an ‘essential practice’ (p. 175). In that sense, the translational turn represents the circulation and extension of concepts and approaches developed as part of the cultural turn outside the field of TS, which resulted in a number of important works not so much on the translation of culture as on cultures of translation, or what Pym ([1992] 2010) describes very broadly as ‘the kinds of places minimally involved in translation’ (p. 24). One of the more significant products of the translational turn in Cultural Studies is the collected volume The Translatability of Cultures: Figurations of the Space Between (1996), edited by Sanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser. Here, translation is used both to critique the concept of alterity, or ‘the other,’ and to point ‘toward a reconceptualization of the experience of alterity,’ which Budick (1996) refers to as secondary otherness (p. 1). This volume was the product of a collective research project, ‘The Institutions of Interpretation,’ the final stage of which had the working title ‘The Mutual Translation of Culture,’ an acknowledgement of the influential notion of translation introduced by Clifford. At the same time, the volume offers a philological critique of translation. The term translation within the Romance languages, as Budick (1996) argues, ‘harbors a crisis of translation, specifically a crisis in attempting to translate the other’ (p. 11). As such, translation ‘necessarily marks the border crossing where, if anywhere, one culture passes over to the other, whether to inform it, to further its development, to capture or enslave it, or merely to open a space between the other and itself ’ (ibid.) while also having the potential to stage a crisis of representation. The notion of secondary otherness reveals the debt this volume owes to semiotics, and most overtly, to the concept of a secondary modeling system that emerged among Soviet semioticians. As Aleksei Semenenko (2012) glosses the concept, ‘Secondary modeling systems (such as myth, folklore, ritual, literature, and fine arts) are formulated as those that are built upon natural language (primary system) and acquire secondary structure of a special type’ (p. 37). Less overtly, that debt is evident in the centrality of translation to the group’s understanding of the workings of culture, as laid out by the semiotician Juri Lotman in the essay ‘The Phenomenon of Culture’ (1994 [2019]). There Lotman adapts physical chemist Ilya Prigogine and philosopher Isabelle Stenger's (1984) concepts of balanced and unbalanced systems to the study of culture and the mind, positing two mutually exclusive models of translation. In the balanced model, translation takes place between two equivalent codes, which allows for perfect back-translation into the original utterance; errors occur only as a result of technological glitches. In such a model, the original utterance can be endlessly circulated, that is, back-translated without distortion or loss, but no new utterances can be produced. In the second model, translation takes place between two non-equivalent codes; in such a model, the original utterance can never be reproduced through back-translation, but only within this system can translation produce new (that is, non-same) utterances. Lotman goes on to associate this model with the non-equivalent hemispheres of the human brain, positing it as the essence of creative thought. Here, otherness, understood as the incommensurability of semiotic codes, is presented as central to the workings of culture, not as a threat 234

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or aberration. For Lotman, culture becomes synonymous with what he conceptualizes as the semiosphere in which unbalanced translation is the norm. Adjacent fields have also been influenced by the cultural turn in TS and the translational turn in Cultural Studies. Mary Louise Pratt’s notion of contact zones, for example, has been very productive in literary and cultural studies (Pratt 1992; see also Apter, 2005). It incorporates translation explicitly among the various processes of exchange and transformation that occur within distinct cultural zones and is similar to Gloria Anzaldúa’s (1987) and Walter Mignolo’s (2000) conceptualization of ‘borderlands’ and ‘border thinking,’ respectively. We see a similar conceptualization of translation as a dynamic cultural zone in the collected volume Between Languages and Cultures: Translation and Cross-Cultural Texts (1995), edited by Anuradha Dingwaney and Carol Maier, and in Anthony Pym’s work on translators as cultural intermediaries inhabiting spaces he refers to as ‘intercultures’ (see Pym, 1995, 2000). The push to historicize translation theories and practices and to embed them in distinct socio-historical contexts has also led to the emergence of the concept of cultures of translation (see Menocal, 2003; Nelson, 2007; Baer, 2011; & Newman & Tylus, 2015), as well as the Cultural Politics of Translation (Mazrui, 2016). In the field of sociolinguistics, scholars have begun to theorize the existence of different linguistic regimes, which construe the relationship between language and culture and, by extension, translation in different ways. British linguist Michael Halliday, for example, posits two different regimes of multilingualism, which he refers to as glossodiversity, whereby different words signify basically the same concept or thing, and semiodiversity, whereby different words signify different concepts or things, as with Benjamin’s pain and Brot. The former is associated with a model of translation as transposability, while the latter acknowledges the fundamental incommensurability of conceptual worlds, or in Clifford Geertz’s formulation, ‘thought-worlds’ (Geertz, 1983, p. 45). In glossodiversity, culture is a discrete barrier to be overcome or removed in translation in order to facilitate or restore transposability, while in semiodiversity, culture is the environment that shapes language use, which fundamentally problematizes the notion of translation as transposability across environments. In a brilliant work of postmodern transfiction, In Translation (1994), Annemarie Jagose stages the confrontation of these two regimes of multilingualism. In the novel, the narrator’s aunt is presented as the very embodiment of glossodiversity; she travels the globe, sending the narrator postcards of her in various exotic locations, but remains ‘always and without doubt, my aunt, uninflected by foreign language and unfamiliar vegetation’ (p. 30). She then contrasts the aunt’s relationship to language to her own: How impervious she would be to the yammer of two, or is it three, unknown tongues filtering up from the yard, to the elusive authority of the Japanese/English dictionary always open on my desk, its sly offering of one word for another. I imagine her taking my place at the card table, as once I took hers, her unchanging sense of herself—E. R. Morrow—easily filling these rooms. I imagine her dispatching my day’s translation in the half hour before breakfast, scarcely pausing where I have spent uncertain hours adjudicating between ‘maid’ and ‘hired help’, between hair as black as a ‘crow’s’ or a ‘raven’s’ wing. (p. 31) Such poststructuralist construals of multilingualism recognize language as a kind of semiotic environment or eco-system, one that is not given but that is historically and culturally constructed. 235

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New directions As noted above, modern understandings of translation have been predicated on the existence of a world order that assumes (monolingual) nation-states, and by extension, a one-toone correspondence between territory, language and culture, producing the ‘monolingual addressee’ as the assumed reader of translations. The concept of monolingualism and its relationship to the modern nation has been historicized and provincialized in works such as Friedrich Kittler’s Discourse Networks 1800 / 1900 (1990), Yasemen Yildiz’s Beyond the Mother Tongue (2012), and David Gramling’s The Invention of Monolingualism (2017), and challenged in work on multilingual cities as distinct sites of translation (Simon, 2006, 2012) and on the related concept of metrolingualism (Pennycook & Emi Otsuji, 2015), in Douglas Robinson’s (2019) monograph on transgender and the translingual addressee, and in recent scholarship on translation and migrancy (see Polezzi, 2012; Bertacco & Vallorani, 2020; and Nergaard, 2021). In all these approaches, culture is performed in specific contexts by socially embedded individuals using a variety of linguistic and other semiotic resources, often involving code-switching and translation. As Pennycook and Otsuji (2015) argue, ‘Rather than assuming connections between language and culture, ethnicity, nationality or geography, metrolingualism “seeks to explore how such relations are produced, resisted, defied or rearranged”’(p. 3). Such scholarship demonstrates not only that languages are not contained by national borders, but that translation occurs within nations, not only between them, and that the relationship of language to culture is in a state of constant negotiation. The embedding of translation within complex systems, as discussed in Marais (2014), further challenges the conception of translation in binary terms as the relationship between a source and target text. When translation is embedded in a complex, multi-polar system, binaries break down. The existence of relay translation, for example, suggests a relationship that is, at a minimum, triangulated, as does the influence of international publishing conglomerates, where a translation into a major world language, a dominating language, to use Pascale Casanova’s term, can shape the subsequent translations of that work into minor or dominated languages. The influence of Latour’s Actor-Network-Theory on TS is significant for its inclusion of non-human actors, challenging any simple binary of the material and the symbolic, leading Kobus Marais (2014) to posit the physical world as ‘the basic’: ‘The world is physical, out of which emerge chemical, biological, psychological, and social phenomena. […] There is no “spirit’ or “soul” or “culture” apart from the physical’ (p. 10). This is echoed in Cronin (2017): ‘The environment is not exterior to but constitutive of who we are,’ leading Cronin to call for greater interdisciplinarity: ‘The longstanding division between the human and social sciences and the natural and physical sciences is no longer tenable in a world where we cannot remain indifferent to the more than human’ (p. 3). The current climate crisis compels a rethinking not only of the economics of the language industry but also the narratives we create about the relationship of nature to culture, which now threatens the Earth with extinction. As Cronin (2017) argues, ‘Translation as a body of ideas and a set of practices is central to any serious or sustained attempt to think about this interconnectedness and vulnerability in the age of human-induced climate change’ (p. 1). This is somewhat different from the notion of eco-translatology, which developed in China and applies ecological notions of selection and adaptation to understand contexts and practices of translation (see Xu, 2009; Liu, 2011). Central to Cronin’s eco-translation is the making visible of processes, like translation, that ‘are often sacrificed to the ends of immediacy, transparency and instantaneity’ (Cronin, 2017, p. 3). 236

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This reframing of translation should also generate a rethinking of translation history and translation theory, in particular. For example, early postwar models of translation, which advocated for the separation of semantic content from linguistic form could be described as extractivist, corresponding to what Cronin (2017) glosses as a ‘non-reciprocal, dominance-based relationship’ to the source (p. 4). Indeed, the second move in Steiner’s hermeneutic motion is described by Steiner himself as ‘incursive and extractive’ (Steiner, 1993, p. 313). The studies produced by the cultural turn in TS might also be seen as extractivist from the perspective of eco-translation in the sense that the target culture is construed as appropriating the source text for its own purposes. In this model, the source text (and by extension, perhaps, the source culture) is constructed as a natural resource which is then processed, or ‘manipulated,’ in the terminology of the cultural turn scholars, to produce commodities adapted for target culture users. The capaciousness and malleability of the concepts of “translation” and “culture” can be considered both a weakness and a strength. On the one hand, it makes these concepts vulnerable to metaphorical drift and vagueness. On the other hand, it is perhaps what has allowed these concepts to fuel two of the most dynamic interdisciplinary fields of the late twentieth century: TS and Cultural Studies. Furthermore, over the past few decades, we have witnessed a welcome convergence of approaches to the study of translation and/in culture and of culture and/in translation in the fields of TS, Cultural Studies and Sociolinguistics. These interdisciplinary approaches, which have generated new imbrications of translation and culture, are able to better address some of the most pressing and interrelated issues of our time: the phenomenon of mass migration for political, economic and climatic reasons, and the looming climate crisis, which make issues of diversity, equity and inclusion especially urgent. In profound ways, the interdisciplinary and transnational approaches discussed above are challenging the ontology of the modern (monolingual) nation-state and the longstanding binary of the material and the symbolic, making possible the emergence of ‘a new epistemology of translation studies’ (Marais, 2014, p. 15) predicated on new understandings of culture and its relationship to translation.

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Introduction Bourdieu’s social theory has provided a set of theoretical concepts with which to analyze the role of translators and interpreters as social and cultural agents and as active participants in both the production and reproduction of social and discursive practices. Bourdieu’s body of research has introduced a theoretical and methodological framework to the field of translation and interpreting studies originating in the social sciences. His work has made a significant contribution to attempts within the field to focus attention on translation as a socially situated practice and on translators and interpreters as social and cultural agents actively participating in the production and reproduction of translated texts and their distribution within fields of knowledge and power. (cf. Simeoni, 1998; Simeoni, 1998; Casanova, 1999/ 2005, 2002/2010; Heilbron, 1999; Heibron & Sapiro, 1999; Gouanvic, 2005, 2007; Inghilleri, 2005, 2014; Sela-Sheffy, 2005; Wolf & Fukari, 2007; Sapiro & Bustamante, 2009; Torikai, 2009; Meylaerts, 2010; Sapiro, 2010, 2013; Valero Garcés & Gauthier Blasi, 2010; Voinova & Shlesinger, 2013; Wolf, 2013; Krebs, 2014; Vorderobermeier, 2014; Xu & Chu, 2015; Guo, 2016; Hanna, 2016) The primary focus of this chapter is on the photographic archive Bourdieu compiled during his fieldwork in Algeria during its War of Independence against the French during the mid-fifties and early sixties (1954–1962) at the University of Algiers where he worked as a lecturer and researcher from 1958 to 1960. It considers his ethnographic study on the impact of the forced displacement of the rural population through the lens of intersemiotic translation. Latour and Callon’s work on networks and objects informs my reading of Bourdieu’s use of the photographs in relation to other objects, networks, and human subjects in this early research, though I do not include any comprehensive comparative analysis of the different functions these artifacts play in their respective sociological approaches.1 A further reason for not including Actor-Network Theory is that the chapter foregrounds the role that habitus plays in this early research and Latour’s theory does not incorporate individuals’ acquired dispositions in its methodology.2 In their co-authored book, Le déracinement (1964), only recently translated into English as Uprooting (2020), Bourdieu and his research partner, Algerian scholar and native of Kabylia, DOI: 10.4324/9781003161448-17

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Abdelmalek Sayad, used the term corporeal habitus to explain how the Algerian rural population was pre-adapted to domination and cultural differentiation due to over one hundred and thirty years of French colonization which, they argued, made it difficult for many of these farmers and their families to navigate these displacements rapidly or effectively. (2020, p. 109) The corporeal habitus contains a tacit dimension; its practical comprehension of the world is different from intentional acts of conscious decoding and cannot be easily expressed. The scientist turned philosopher Michael Polanyi called this inarticulacy of cultural predispositions and logics ‘tacit knowing’ which he believed to be an essential element of a theory of knowledge. The idea that ‘we can know more than we can tell’ was central to this undertaking (Polanyi, 1966, p. 4) and was relevant whatever the form of knowledge, from traditional skills and intuitions to scientific systems, poetic and religious insights and the understanding of moral values. Polanyi proposed that we understood the meaning of entities not by looking at them but by dwelling in them (‘indwelling’). He contrasts tacit knowledge with unbridled lucidity, the latter which ‘can destroy our understanding of complex matters.’ Repeat a word several times, attending carefully to the motion of your tongue and lips, and to the sound you make, and soon the word will sound hollow and eventually lose its meaning. By concentrating attention on his fingers, a pianist can temporarily paralyze his movement. We can make ourselves lose sight of a pattern or physiognomy by examining its several parts under significant magnification. (ibid., p. 18) The sociologist and translation scholar Esperança Bielsa discusses this phenomenon (without identifying it as such) in a recent article in regard to a later work by Sayad on the sociology of migration originally published in French as La double absence: Des illusions de l’émigré aux soffrances de l’immigre (1999) and later in English as The Suffering of the Immigrant (2004). The book is a collection of Sayad’s writings which were published posthumously – a promise fulfilled by Bourdieu who helped organize and edit the chapters and wrote the Preface. The first chapter of the book is comprised of a personal narrative delivered by a Kabyle man who describes his life in France and Kabyle to Sayad. Referencing this narrative, Bielsa speaks to the importance of ‘attending to the experience of migration as expressed by the emigrants themselves, and especially to what in their discourse resists understanding.’ She calls for a more sophisticated appreciation of translation within sociology as a ‘key process of transformation’ and a greater self-reflexivity on the part of sociologists regarding their own linguistic materials and conditions, and those of their research subjects (Bielsa, 2021, pp. 7–8). Sayad begins the chapter with the following sentence: ‘The text we are about to read is a translation, which is as literal as possible, of the discourse of a Kabyle emigrant recorded in France in 1975 on two different occasions: before and after a holiday in Kabylia.’ (Sayad, 2004, p. 7) His use of the phrase ‘as literal as possible’ both hides and reveals a truth that Sayad wants the reader to understand – that the words of this narrator, despite the rich description he provides of his and his family’s life trajectory, resist the full apprehension of others. Published over three decades after Le déracinement, the set of texts that appear in the collection indicate how the impact of the war and the history of colonialism continue to permeate the Algerian population. As the narrator says, France gets under your skin. Once you’ve got that in your head, it’s all over; you can’t work in the fields any more, you have no desire to do anything else: leaving is the only 242

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solution you can think of. From that moment on, France is inside you, and it will never go away. It’s always before your eyes. It’s as though we were possessed. (ibid., p. 12) In their ethnographic work in Algeria, Bourdieu and Sayad sought to combine sociological study with ethical-political commitment while further elaborating what would become two key concepts in Bourdieu’s reflexive sociology: habitus and field. The photographs, which number in the hundreds, featured heavily in the fieldwork phase of his research, yet they scarcely appear in the research output from this period, except as illustrations on book covers or magazines in connection with his articles. They appear to have had an almost exclusively ‘private’ function serving mostly as memory supports for his written output (Frisinghelli, 2009, pp. 512–514). From this one might conclude that Bourdieu did not perceive the photographs as a valid form of evidence, sociologically speaking, of the ruptures of the habitus he witnessed and documented in Algeria, despite acknowledging his own heightened and sometimes unexpected emotional response to them. Paradoxically, though Bourdieu the ethnographer/photographer sought a more proximal engagement with the world of persons and objects and was very attentive to the expressiveness of gesture and body, it is significant that the photos as photos, especially of humans, suggest an aloofness between him and his subjects, taken from faraway, behind, in secret or at a respectful distance. Viewing the photographs as intersemiotic translations affords us an opportunity to examine them and Bourdieu’s complex relationship to them critically within his conceptual approach where they acted as overlapping entities in a nexus of methodological reflexivity, elucidating the relationship Bourdieu wished to emphasize between the human, the non-human and the environment, constituted and reconstituted under colonialism.3

The logic of practice: No ideas but in things In his book, Pascalian Meditations (2000a; and see Bourdieu, 2007), Bourdieu develops a critique of scholastic reason and reasserts the importance of habituation in the reproduction and legitimation of the social order. In a postscript to the first chapter, he performs what he calls ‘an exercise in reflexivity’ where he traces the origins of his disillusionment with philosophy and subsequent embrace of sociology and ethnology – despite having earned a philosophy degree from the elite Parisian École Normale Supérieure – to his time in Algeria at the height of the war, calling his presence there ‘one of those chance events of existence’ (2000a, p. 41). He first arrived in 1955 to fulfill his national service which coincided with the Battle of Algiers that took place from late 1956 to late 1957, an intensely violent campaign of urban guerrilla warfare carried out by the National Liberation Front (FLN) against the French Algerian authorities. Bourdieu describes at length in this book his reasons for not pursuing philosophy as his principal tool of research. On the second page of the Introduction, he states, ‘It is the typical illusion of the lector, who can regard an academic commentary as a political act or the critique of texts as a feat of resistance, and experience revolutions in the order of words as radical revolutions in the order of things’ (ibid., p. 2, italics in original). Later, in the first of two postscripts to the first chapter he includes part of a passage from a letter written in November of 1944 by Wittgenstein to his longtime friend and fellow philosopher Norman Malcolm where Wittgenstein recalls a conversation between the two the year before: You & I were walking along the river towards the railway bridge & we had a heated conversation in which you made a remark about ‘national character’ that shocked me by its primitiveness. I then 243

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thought: what is the use of studying philosophy if all that it does for you is enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of logic, etc., & does not improve your thinking about the important questions of everyday life, if it does not make you more conscientious than any…journalist in the use of the DANGEROUS phrases such people use for their own ends. You see, I know that it’s difficult to think well about ‘certainty’, ‘probability’, ‘perception’, etc. But it is, if possible, still more difficult to think about your life & people’s lives. And the trouble is that thinking about these things is not thrilling, but often downright nasty. And when it’s nasty then it’s most important. – Let me stop preaching. What I wanted to say was this: I’d like very much to see you again; but if we meet it would be wrong to avoid talking about serious non-philosophical things. Being timid I don’t like clashes, & particularly not with people I like. But I’d rather have a clash than mere superficial talk. (Norman Malcolm 2001: 35; italicized excerpt in Bourdieu ibid., p. 43) Throughout his career and in much of his writing Bourdieu would return to his experiences in Algeria citing ethical and political reasons alongside the contradictions that emerged due to his lower social class origins relative to the French intelligentsia of his day. These were two of the primary motives for developing his reflexive sociology and applying it to what Wittgenstein refers to above as ‘the important questions of everyday life.’ As his longtime colleague and collaborator Loïc Wacquant makes clear, however, reflexivity for Bourdieu was not primarily ‘a moral focus on the private experiences of the sociologist, but an effort to control sociologically the distortions introduced in the construction of the object, first by the position and dispositions of the sociologist within academic space (and not the class structure at large), and second by the mere fact of taking up a contemplative stance vis-à-vis the social world, that is, by adopting a “scholastic point of view” on society’ (Wacquant, 1990, pp. 682–683, italics in original). Though other social theorists have invoked the idea of reflexivity (Bourdieu & Wacquant 1992, pp. 36–46; and see Kenway & McLeod, 2004), Wacquant argues that Bourdieu’s brand of reflexivity is distinct: First, its primary target is not the individual analyst but the social and intellectual unconscious embedded in tools and operations; second it must be a collective enterprise rather than a burden of the lone academic; and, third, it seeks not to assault but to buttress the epistemological security of sociology. (ibid., p. 36, italics in original) Bourdieu Takes as his unit of analysis neither the “actor” (as in various brands of rational-choice theory) nor the “situation” (as constructivists of diverse stripes do) nor the “structure” (as structuralists or functionalists advocate), but the relation between the two states of history represented by habitus – history incarnate in the body as dispositions – and by fields – history “frozen” in the form of institutions or an objective space of positions. (Wacquant, 1990, pp. 684–685, italics in original) The body is accorded a centrality in Bourdieu’s theory as the carrier of the classificatory schemes of culture, i.e., the practical taxonomies that are produced by perceiving

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historical subjects and which position individuals and groups within a particular society. He writes: The source of historical action, that of the artist, the scientist, or the member of government just as much as that of the worker or the petty civil servant, is not an active subject confronting society as if that society were an object constituted externally. This source resides neither in consciousness nor in things but in the relation between two states of the social, that is between history objectified in things, in the form of institutions, and the history incarnated in bodies, in the form of that system of enduring dispositions that I call habitus. The body is in the social world but the social world is also in the body. (Bourdieu, 1990, p. 190) This idea of the relationship between the body and history objectified in things to a certain degree echoes Merleau-Ponty’s view that the physical body is an important part of what makes up the subjective self. As he states in Phenomenology of Perception (Merleau-Ponty, 2005, p. 474), ‘The inside and outside are wholly inseparable. The world is wholly inside, and I am wholly outside myself.’ The overlap is no coincidence. Bourdieu engaged explicitly with phenomenology and particularly the writings of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. Wacquant goes as far as claiming Bourdieu as Merleau-Ponty’s sociological heir although Bourdieu ‘innovates in ways that are sometimes incompatible with the spirit and the letter of the phenomenologist’s work.’ (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 20 n 35) Indeed, Bourdieu’s anti-dualist understanding of the socialized body and the ontological complicity that obtains between the individual and the social world was built, in part, on their respective phenomenological understanding of experience. But Bourdieu would go beyond the subjectivist apprehension of practical sense to investigate the social genesis of its objective structures and conditions of operation. Bourdieu and Wacquant were critical of Merleau-Ponty for failing to fully account for and examine the social structures and political conditions from which habitual actions emerge and neglecting to identify the social relations of power that allow some actions and frameworks to acquire greater legitimacy and recognition than others. By way of example of their differences, Wacquant reproduces the quote below which appears in Merleau-Ponty’s work The Structure of Behavior (1963) to demonstrate that for Merleau-Ponty the football field in question remains a purely phenomenological form, grasped strictly from the standpoint of the acting agent. For the player in action the football field is not an “object,” that is, the ideal term which can give rise to an indefinite multiplicity of perspectival views and remains equivalent under its apparent transformations. […] The field itself is not given to him, but is present as the immanent term of his practical intentions; the player becomes one with it and feels the direction of the “goal,” for example, just as immediately as the vertical and the horizontal planes of his body. It would not be sufficient to say that consciousness inhabits this milieu. At this moment, consciousness is nothing other than the dialectic of milieu and consciousness. (Merleau-Ponty, 1963, pp. 168–169) In this example, Merleau-Ponty reinforces his belief that ‘there are no things, only physiognomies’ and that science (including sociology) by substituting its own conception of ‘objectivity’ reinterprets the human world of persons, objects, politics and everyday life from a

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reality lived in to a manufactured artifact. For Wacquant and Bourdieu, however, this is precisely what is missing from his view, that is, it lacks an adequate sociological analysis of the link between internal and external structures, ‘between the sense of the game of the player and the actual constellation of the field’ (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, pp. 21–22). For them, the concept of field is an instrument for constructing an object. The notions of pre-reflective ‘practical sense’ (habitus) and the underlying, objective configuration of the ‘rules of the game’ (field) are interrelated, though differentiated.

Habitus, field theory and socio-analysis As mentioned previously, one of the earliest uses of the term habitus by Bourdieu appears in Uprooting [Le déracinement], their ethnographic study of uprooted Algerian farmers that documented the impact of colonialism on the traditional way of life of over 2 million rural dwellers forcibly resettled as a result of the French military’s relocation practices. As the war unfolded, the French army reverted to earlier imperial policies of controlling the land (transformed into ‘forbidden zones’) and regrouping the rural populations to prevent them from aiding members of the National Liberation Army (ALN) and the guerilla troops of the National Liberation Front (FLN) who operated in these regions. While at the start its aim was to evacuate the locals to forced resettlement camps for strictly military reasons, the camps would eventually become a testing ground for the restructuring of Algerian society. In spite of the ban declared in the beginning of 1959 on displacing populations without the permission of the civil authorities, the resettlements multiplied: in 1960, the number of resettled Algerians reached 2,157,000, a quarter of the total population. If besides the resettlements, one takes into account the exodus towards the cities, the number of individuals who found themselves outside of their customary residence in 1960 can be estimated at three million at least, that is, half of the rural population. The population displacement is among the most brutal that history has known. (Bourdieu & Sayad, 2004, p. 448) The term ‘depeasantization’ used throughout the book refers to the process whereby Algeria’s agrarian communities were stripped of the ‘social and cultural means to make sense of the present and get a hold of their future’ by the French colonial government. (ibid., p. xiii; and see Bourdieu 2000b, 1979/1963) As reported by Bourdieu, It is no doubt on the basis of the particular case of adjustment between habitus and structure that critics have often seen a principle of repetition and conservation in a concept, habitus, which originally forced itself upon me as the only way to understand the mismatches which were observed in an economy like that of Algeria in the 1960s (and still today in a number of ‘developing’ countries) between the objective structures and the incorporated structures, between the economic institutions imported and imposed by colonization (or nowadays by the constraints of the market) and economic dispositions formed by agents in the precapitalist world. […] I was thus led to question the universality of so-called rational economic dispositions and, by the same token, to address the question of the economic conditions – and cultural conditions – of access to these dispositions, a question which, paradoxically, economists

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fail to address, thereby accepting notions such as rational action or preferences, which are in fact economically determined and socially shaped as ahistorical universals. (Bourdieu, 2000a, pp. 159–160) As this statement suggests, the concept of habitus in their ethnographic work in Algeria became a valuable analytical tool with which to examine critically the aim of the French state to weaken the peasants’ ties to place and culture through a policy of deterritorialization and impose Western rational economic theory on their traditional way of life. During this period of their fieldwork, theories of acculturation which had emerged in anthropology in the early years of the twentieth century (Redfield et al., 1936) were re-igniting debates over how or whether France should or could integrate its colonized subjects. In some formulations, acculturation theory was combined with modernization theory, the dominant paradigm in the social sciences by the 1950s and 1960s, which relied on Weberian and Parsonian models of a progressive transition from a ‘pre-modern’ to a ‘modern’ society. These combined theories helped give credence to the idea that French colonial officials should follow a more ‘enlightened’ economic development policy which included greater economic assistance to the peasants, ideas that received support from an influential book, L’Algérie en 1957, by French anthropologist Germaine Tillion, who was serving as adviser to the French GovernorGeneral at the time of its publication. (Go, 2013, p. 52) Their research in the field compelled Bourdieu and Sayad to take a different stance. In Uprooting they argue that acculturation is never the simple result of contact between two civilizations and that only by relating it to the specific context of colonialism could the cataclysm suffered by Algerian society be understood fully in terms of acculturation: The specific effect of colonial intervention consists precisely in [the] pathological acceleration of cultural change: by ceaselessly confronting the dominated society with a fait accompli, by making the most fundamental choices for it, colonial policy, whose forced resettlement enterprise by dint of its coherence was the sharpest expression, prevented a dialogue between conservation and alteration, between assimilation and adaptation, which ought to constitute the very life of a society. (Bourdieu & Sayad, 2020/1964, p. 19, italics in original) Their aim was to make the material and moral dislocation of the rural peasants and their families comprehensible through empirical observation, not by theory abstracted from reality. They set out to examine what they considered to be the main interrelated causes of the disintegration of the peasant farmers’ traditional way of life. First, the colonial expropriations of land, which since the late nineteenth century had been forcing thousands to migrate to the cities and to France, and second, the French policy during the war years, when millions of people were resettled in government-built camps. According to sociologist Julian Go, a likely influence on the approach to their research was the French sociologist, anthropologist, and ethnologist George Balandier whose influential publication, The Colonial Situation (1966/1951), argued that a sociology of colonialism should treat colonialism as a totality of relationships between colonial peoples and colonial powers, and between the cultures of each of them. Go suggests that this perspective was behind Bourdieu’s understanding of colonial society as a system whose internal necessity and logic were important to understand. (Go, 2013, pp. 53–55) The analysis offered in Uprooting of the relation between the war, land expropriation, forced resettlement and peasants’ corporeal habitus, can be usefully augmented when seen 247

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through the lens of a ‘phenomenology of landscape’ (Tilley, 1997), which examines embodied human experience and perception of the physical environment as a complex of physical, social, and psychological elements. For example, in an essay entitled, ‘The Landscape of War’ (2009/1917) written by one of the earliest proponents of field theory, social psychologist Kurt Lewin distinguishes physical space and behavioral space in exploring soldiers’ perceptions of the transformations of the physical terrain on which wars are fought. He suggests that, while in peacetime landscapes tend to be viewed as expansive, appearing to ‘proceed[s] to infinity in all directions alike’ (Lewin, 2009/1917, p. 201), in war the same landscape is seen as bounded, ‘a border zone emerges, whose character as such intensifies rapidly in the direction of the enemy.’ In this brief essay, written in 1917 while recovering from World War I war wounds, Lewin considers the psychological shifts in perception that soldiers must make from ‘peacetime conditions’ to ‘combat conditions’ in relation to their physical environment (ibid., p. 202). He notes, for example, [E]ven something as barbaric as the burning of floors, doors, and furniture is utterly incomparable to similar treatment of house furniture under peacetime conditions. For even if these things tend not to have lost their peacetime traits completely, the character that attaches to them as things of war nevertheless comes to the fore far More emphatically, and this often results in their classification under quite different conceptual categories. (ibid.) What Lewin understates in his essay is the fact that once soldiers internalize ‘combat conditions,’ classifications must be readjusted to fulfill their aim of victory over their enemy, and the landscape itself becomes a thing of war. This was reflected in the scorched-earth policy implemented by the US military throughout the Vietnam war which caused massive physical destruction of Vietnam’s topography by aerial bombardment that included the spraying of napalm and Agent Orange to eliminate forest cover for the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops, as well as the crops that might be used to feed them. This policy, combined with the fact that in Vietnam no border zone ever emerged that established a clear boundary between peacetime and wartime conditions, not only led to the indiscriminate killing of millions, the majority civilians, but it no doubt contributed to the post-war trauma suffered by soldiers on both sides as well. In Algeria, the army applied a similar scorched-earth tactic: burning forests, annihilating food reserves and livestock or destroying homes to force the peasants to abandon them and their land. According to the French publisher and artist Jean-Phillipe Talbo-Bernigaud who did his two-year military service in Algeria during the war, First the men climbed onto the roofs and threw the tiles onto the ground, while others broke the pots, jars, and unbroken tiles. […] At the end of the day, this technique, a little slow, had been perfected: stores of wood and branches were crammed into the houses and set on fire; in general, the frames did not hold out and the roofs collapsed quite quickly. All that was left was to put on a few finishing touches with a club. (Talbo-Bernigaud qtd. in Bourdieu & Sayad, 2004, pp. 446–447) The transformation and obliteration of the peasant’s homes, normally linked to gradual changes in the way of life and cultural norms, were imposed from the outside by authorities who refused to recognize the models and values that dominated peasant life expressed 248

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Figure 13.1

Aïn Aghbel, Collo.

through the traditional dwelling places which include an enclosure, courtyard, absence of openings, etc. The above photo (Figure 13.1) appears to show researchers from the French National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies (INSEE) and/or students from the University of Algiers, who worked with Bourdieu’s team, documenting the remnants of the hereditary homes after their destruction. The destruction of farms and villages that had served as traditional boundary markers across the Algerian rural landscape and their replacement with resettlement camps controlled by the French military, with no concern for the peasants’ traditions and daily routines, is a central theme of Uprooting, a title which connotes rupture and estrangement – both products of symbolic violence. Yet, despite the cultural and linguistic variations that had always existed across the regions of Algeria, responses to the enforced re-settlement and to the war itself were swift and pronounced by the rural population. The resistance was particularly evident during the early stages of the war when the army’s primary objective was to ‘clear’ the zones that were hard to control. Bourdieu observed this reaction firsthand, ‘Perhaps the crucial sociological fact is that the war is actually tantamount to a language. It has given the people a voice, and the voice is saying “No.”’ (Bourdieu, 2012, p. 42) Despite everything, the local population offered ferocious resistance. Many of them seem to have preferred risking a sudden and brutal death to overcrowding, subjugation, 249

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and a slow death in the huts, tents and shantytowns of the forced resettlement camps. […] The women rounded up during the sweeps that mostly destroyed their meshtas [winter encampments] were forcibly marched to the village re-settlement, sometimes four or five times because they always took the path back to their douars (hamlets). (Bourdieu & Sayad, 2020, pp. 1–2) What Bourdieu and his team witnessed in their empirical observations of actual existing camps were the manifestations, according to Wacquant, of the ‘manufactured disjuncture between symbolic, social and physical space – cognitive categories, social relations and the built environment […] designed to “disculture” its residents and prepare them for city living while effectively denying them access to it’ (ibid., p. xiv). The somberly ironic image above of the girl carrying brushwood for roofing new settlements (Figure 13.2) embodies this fissure and reveals the power of intersemiotic translation to take a seemingly innocent ‘grammatical’ image and expose its harsh ‘ungrammatical’ truth. By putting this photo on the cover of their book Uprooting, the image of the child is re-interpreted as the casualty of manufactured artifacts of science insinuating itself into the human world of persons, objects, politics, and everyday life, a schismatic reality to be lived in by the displaced population.

Figure 13.2

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Cheraïa, resettlement center under construction.

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The discordant dispositions and positions experienced by the rural peasants due to their displacement would later be described by Bourdieu (with reference to his own life’s trajectory) in his posthumously published Sketch for a Self-Analysis (2004) as a cleft habitus [habitus clivé]. Drawing on the psychoanalytic notion of the ‘splitting of the self,’ he suggests that a form of hysteresis occurs when habitus falls out of alignment with the field in which it operates and produces a fragmented self, torn by contradiction and internal divisions, generating suffering. (Bourdieu, 2000a, p. 160; and see Friedman, 2016, Threadgold, 2020) Bourdieu’s experience in Algeria during the war illustrated that the habitus was by no means a kind of ‘infallible instinct, capable of producing responses miraculously adjusted to all situations’ (Bourdieu, 2000a, p. 159). At the same time, he maintained that it was not the fate that some people read into it, and that a break in habitus could lead to the resistance of a prevailing social or political order, forcing individuals into a new space where an enhanced form of reflexivity could occur.

Translating Algerians – photography as a way of seeing Bourdieu’s photographic focus in his Algerian research was on the politics of the everyday and its occurrence under war and colonization. It included a range of objects that interacted with and were intrinsically linked to the conditions these systems created. Besides human subjects, the photos include clay pots, cinder blocks, fragments of domiciles, barbed wire, animals, resettlement camps, urban sites and rural landscapes to illustrate how the interplay between the human and the environment and the verbal and the visual is constituted, and how it enhanced his understanding of the phenomena under study. He used photographs as accompaniments to his written field notes, direct observations, recordings, statistical surveys, questionnaires and oral interviews (the one thing he did not keep was a diary). Some photographs he took to later serve as mnemonic devices to help him in his written work to recall details of things, including features of the visual landscape, whose significance he may have disregarded at the time. In other situations, he took a photo of an object of interest to his research that he could not remove from its location (e.g., building rubble, cooking and storage items). The photographs were also crucial to Bourdieu as a safeguard against imposing his own interpretations on what he saw or heard from his informants. In his commentary on the photographs, the sociologist Les Back offers the view that the barrier the camera’s lens places between the world and the ethnographer can guard against paralysis and resignation and keep the writer on the task of taking in what is happening. (Back, 2009, p. 481) The same might be said of Bourdieu’s use of the camera in Algeria regarding his feelings toward his subjects. Whatever and wherever emotions can be discerned in his photographs, they are above all, understood to be part of a scientific record, the aim of which is to reflexively construct the object of his sociological research. This is evident in his interview with the sociologist Franz Schultheis where Bourdieu recalls interviews with some of the male villagers who had lost their homes and livelihoods and were living in the resettlement camps of Ain Aghbal, Collo When they told me things, it would sometimes take me two or three days to understand it all, complicated place names or tribes, numbers of lost cattle, and other lost commodities, and I was totally overcome by it all; in this respect any help was good, and photography was really a way of trying to cope with the shock of this devastating reality. (Bourdieu, 2003, p. 7)

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Wacquant has suggested that Bourdieu’s photography was a means to anchor and facilitate the emotional work necessary to carry out first-hand observation. He writes, Through the photographic prism, one discerns better how the project of a total science of society, capable of embracing all aspects of reality, visible and invisible, embodied, and objectified, and of laying bare the social causes and reasons for its unruly course, not only made intellectual sense. It met a vital existential need and harnessed the impetuous civic urges of Bourdieu by giving him a concrete task and an urgent mission in which to lose himself. (Wacquant, 2004, pp. 402–403) Taken together, the photos from Bourdieu’s Algerian research inform and are informed by data gathered in their fieldwork. On one level, they act like an initial transcription of a recording of an oral utterance that can later be enriched in layers by listening in increasingly careful ways, i.e., looking at the photographs under greater magnification and more sensitive color contrasts and other techniques. Alternatively, some photographs remain themselves complete, without fine grain detail, serving as a sketch that recalls the content of observation (things, people, animals, etc.), an excavation of fieldwork memory: ‘Yes, I was there in that dense thicket of reality, and I thought and felt this and that.’ A sketch can also act as a reminder of the context of observation to be able to reconstruct the moment. In Bourdieu’s ethnographic practice, the photograph – and the camera itself – also become tools to clarify or confirm the accuracy of a literal sketch containing words, lines, doodles, etc. In this case, the sketch is used not simply to remind but to focus down upon the sketch-in-the-making which is used to tell others later ‘what was there in that place’ and its structural features. Lastly, images, fleeting or otherwise, can be brought to the fore after enhanced reflection and serve as metaphors for parts of the conceptual framework related to the fieldwork. For Bourdieu, it was the full picture of the habitus brought into conflict with the landscape of war that contained the necessary sought-after revelation of underlying truth. As the sociologist Craig Calhoun notes, Bourdieu saw his job as ‘neither to impose his own concepts nor simply translate those of the people he studied. He must struggle, as the philosopher Bachelard (an important influence on Bourdieu) put it, to “win” the facts of his study.’ (Calhoun, 2003, p. 280) Bourdieu wished to find or produce a grounded sociological voice in which that might be achieved. Through his early ethnology, he sought to create that voice, and photography was part of that constructive process – the ethnographer as a translator. He wished to present his perceptions of the rupture in the habitus and its reality for the peasants as part of a transformational process that would give all Algerians a stake in the future, an approach that would give weight to the power of reproduction without simply affirming it. The images, many of them fleeting, hurriedly snapped, blurred, taken at funny angles or obscure, were a part of this understanding conceived of as moments of revelation. The Algeria archive can be categorized initially into those images that were more structured by Bourdieu in the sense of his noting in the scene the possibility of a semantic contrast where ‘different, dissonant realities merged into each other’ (Bourdieu, 2003, p. 13) and, at the same time, had time and enough freedom of movement to position himself carefully to frame that visual moment as significant. Many of his urban photographs are of that kind; the city – unlike rural human spaces – is crowded yet architecturally organized and provided plenty of self-structuring visual choices from the outset. Some of the photographs that fall into this first type can be quickly interpreted and are perhaps superficial, yet worth noting; others border on the kitsch, comprised of a juxtaposition of the traditional and the modern, 252

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for example, a woman in a burka on a motorcycle or two traditional turbaned Arab men sitting on the side bumper of a car. It is important to note, however, that Bourdieu primarily thought of his photographs as private mnemonic tools. Where they stray into familiar, or even over-familiar, representational structures it is simply because he was employing the more-or-less everyday skills of an amateur photographer, and not a professional photographer’s compositional skills and selective discernment. The aesthetics didn’t matter so much as only he would see them and even that was for limited purposes, though their pictorial quality was not unimportant to Bourdieu. He discarded many photographs early on, using just a few for his book covers and other works in print, and the rest he kept in a box for most of his life, unseen by anyone but him. Any scrutiny in the present of his compositional intent must therefore be understood as the basic acquired skills of a very keen but amateur photographer, despite having equipped himself with professional-level cameras. A second type of photograph found in the collection is what might best be called fleeting images, the kind made with almost no time to compose; caused by the pressures of the seized moment, a constricted situation or the socially taboo. These were fleeting in the sense that they were threatened by temporal or spatial proximity, inadequate or uneven lighting, camera shake or blurred by lateral or vertical camera movement (slow shutter speed). None were due to carelessness but to exigency. These types of images were opportune and spontaneously informative, as opposed to arranged and pre-conceived, though they lacked compositional eloquence and were even sometimes malformed or distractedly lop-sided. Such fleeting images are more plentiful in urban photographs than in the countryside. While many of his urban photographs are produced fairly methodically, Bourdieu also appears to have deliberately set out to capture the fleeting and the random, recording whatever passed before his camera from an unchanging position, as in the case of a series he made in the main square of Place Ettoute in the city of Blida, forty-six kilometers (twenty-nine miles) from Algiers, by situating himself opposite a café at a street intersection. His position remains stable – directly opposite the corner location of Café D’Orient – while his street subjects and their direction of movement change unpredictably. Bourdieu shot almost twenty photographs in this way, seeing its standardization of the image capture as part of a science-based methodology. One above of a man waiting to cross, looking sideways, faces Bourdieu, while the camera also embraces not only the Café but also the back of a young soldier in uniform walking diagonally away from the camera and the waiting man (Figure 13.3). There is no effort to center either of these figures and it is difficult to judge from the juxtaposition of the man and the soldier what, if any, relationship or interaction, deliberate or accidental, there might have been between them. The same austere conditions obtained for all the other photographs in the series where in each case different pedestrians – in one a woman wearing the full niqab, in another a man carrying on his shoulders a very tall basket, and in the one below (Figure 13.4) two young girls, one with a silver pot under her arm – are also caught on camera as one by chance turns to the other to speak. The girls are slightly blurred by motion and poor focusing, as are both the woman and the man with the basket. Other photos in the series include a young child being guided across the intersection by an older child; a man wearing a long coat passing the crossing; and another of two men – one possibly a street vendor, the other in uniform. These are in noticeably better focus than some of the others suggesting that the use of the camera’s rangefinder may have been better suited to some situations more than others. He shot a similar series, also in Blida, of a newspaper kiosk where groups of children and adults often crowded around the magazine displays. 253

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Figure 13.3

Blida.

(Frisinghelli, 2003, p. 212) His concern with the scientific record moved him to include the random and unexpected as part of the corpus, though it was Bourdieu himself who provided the ‘fixed point’ in this moving world. A third type of photograph found in the archive are those that represent the front view of human figures and introduce a more formal element, the principle of frontality, which he would elaborate in relation to his ethnographic research in Béarn, the rural village where he was born and raised, where the function of photography in his study of the relations between men and women in peasant society there is a primary focus. (Bourdieu & Bourdieu, 2004, p. 605) Bourdieu’s interest in the Béarn research is exclusively sociological – any consideration of the technical or aesthetic qualities of the photographs is peripheral, as is the affective relationship between photographer and subject.4 In his essay ‘The Social Definition of Photography’ (1990/1965, p. 77) the reasons for these omissions are clear: Only in the name of naïve realism can one see as realistic a representation of the real which owes its objective appearance not to its agreement with the very reality of things (since this is only ever conveyed through socially conditioned forms of perception) but rather to conformity with rules which define its syntax with its social use, to the social definition of the objective vision of the world: in conferring upon photography a guarantee of realism, society is merely confirming itself in the tautological certainty that an image of the real which is true to its representation of objectivity is really objective. 254

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Figure 13.4

Blida.

Despite the absence of any direct commentary on the photographs he took in Algeria in these early writings, his experience of talking and thinking through how images are produced strongly informs his engagement with photography in relation to the peasants in Béarn. His reflections on ‘fleeting images’ versus ‘frontal images’ in the following quote, for example, speak directly from his attentive, though unarticulated, engagement with photography in Algeria. His remarks reflect the kind of practice he embraced in the photos he took in Blida discussed above and in the photograph below taken in the village of Aïn Aghbel, Collo, one of the centers of forced resettlement. To look at the other without being seen, without being seen looking and without being looked at, to ‘steal a glance’ as the phrase goes, and, moreover, to photograph them in that way, is to steal the other’s image. By looking at the person who looks at me (or photographs me), by arranging my posture, I offer myself to be looked at as I want to be seen; I give the image of myself that I intend to give and, quite simply, I give my image. Bourdieu and Bourdieu (2004/1965, pp. 610–611, italics in original) The only direct references to the Algerian fieldwork in either of these writings are found in endnotes where he describes Kabyle society as one based primarily on honor and dignity in which one is constantly and inescapably exposed to the gazes of others and, where the ‘man 255

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Figure 13.5

Aïn Aghbel, Collo.

of honor’ is a man who ‘faces up, who holds his head high and looks others in the face, with his own face uncovered’ (ibid.: 614, n.15) (Figure 13.5). The young men in the above photograph differ from the Béarn peasant in certain respects, although both face the camera and keep a respectable distance from it while their gazes converge on the camera lens so that the whole image points to the absent center. In the Algerian photo, however, the young men do not all adopt the fixed rigid posture associated with a frontal pose. The man with the t-shirt who stands front and center and the two in the row behind on either side of him, one with a beret and the other wearing a white shirt and sunglasses, come the closest, though the crossed legs and hands on the man in the t-shirt indicate a degree of non-conformity. The other three in the front deviate by offering an image of themselves with almost exaggerated relaxed postures including the young man holding a cigarette between his lips, almost provocatively, signaling perhaps the present and the future Bourdieu saw in these young men– on the one hand, the involuntary relocation to the resettlement camps, and on the other, their refusal of this imposition.

The relationality of things The significance of Bourdieu’s photographic archive today relates directly to what new viewers bring to it. In Algeria and in Béarn, Bourdieu was working in a world where ethnographic methods were at odds with quantitative methods like social surveys, structured questionnaires and official statistics. At that time, sociological qualitative research tools found it difficult to maintain equal recognition with these others and Bourdieu’s commitment

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to scientific rigor and experiments, with new techniques like photography to augment established forms of ethnography, was part of that engagement. Under these conditions, Bourdieu’s use of photography as a tool of research remained at the tentative, experimental stage and confined to a supporting role. He consciously avoided making claims for its validity in terms of data capture. Indeed, he made a clear division between the hard ethnographic data scrupulously recorded in Uprooting and the informal means he used to re-enforce and situate this research. These days scholars might approach the archive from several sociological perspectives, alternatively understanding it as an example of the humanistic tendency evident in the decades of the fifties and sixties or relating it to post-colonial theory and/or political practice (Robbins, 2009). The photographs can be viewed as an ‘objective’ record of a certain historical rural reality in a period of economic transition from a rural to an urban commercial phase. They can also be seen today, as Bourdieu intended, as historical evidence of the intensified acceleration of the transition from an agricultural to a modern commercial economy, placing that fact in the context of colonial control and the internationally evident independence movements characteristic of that same period. Bourdieu’s stated concern that his collection might become contaminated by any involvement of aesthetic considerations confirms what we know of his occasional forays into aesthetic and moral juxtapositions and visual ironies. Hence the absence of any real acknowledgment of the scale of his photographic archive. He felt its limitations and experimental nature and, while willing to take from it occasionally in the promotion of his research through publication, he remained mostly silent about its existence. In terms of Bourdieu’s reflexive sociology, his practice was to submit himself to the collection of images in person, enacting or embodying the fundamental sympathy he felt for the peasants, encoded in his interest and evident in his collection of other data pertinent to their predicament. At the same time, he sought to augment that process with the willfully non-interpersonal method of visual data collection as displayed in his work in the Place Ettoute in the city of Blida. There was, therefore, an arc in his photographic strategies from the personal, with choice and intimacy, to the – as far as possible – impersonal and distant. There is another factor – a more significant one – that may explain why the photographs were kept in the dark for so many decades, with their status as legitimate objects of study willingly neglected. Early in his career, Bourdieu had introduced several ‘objects’ into his emerging system of relational concepts, for example, history, field, habitus, body, institutions and dispositions. As discussed at the beginning of this chapter, with regard to philosophy Bourdieu sought to reveal the limits of theoretical knowledge and to illustrate through empirical investigation the gap between the ‘logic of theory’ and the ‘logic of practice.’ In this endeavor, he was driven by a similar motive as the pragmatist philosopher John Dewey who decades earlier had criticized philosophy’s ‘pretension to be peculiarly concerned with ultimate reality, or with reality as a complete (i.e., a completed whole), with the real object’ (Dewey qtd. in Inghilleri, 2014, p. 190). Over time Bourdieu increasingly viewed the real object in relation to the scientific record as reflexively constructed by the sociologist. To restrict scientific observation to the point of view of the agents, he argued, was to ‘[treat] as an instrument of knowledge what ought to be the object of knowledge’ (Bourdieu, 1992, p. 247). He rejected the idea of social actors as conscious, calculative rational beings involved in individual actions, decision-making processes, or expressions, though he allowed for the possibility of ‘rational choice’ under specific circumstances. In making this case, he turned the social into a scientific object and attributed

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the study of the object to sociologists themselves. Bourdieu’s idea of the ‘real’ was not as things appeared to the naked eye, as he suggested, One cannot be content either with the primary vision or with the vision to which the world of objectification gives access, one can only strive to hold together […] the point of view of the agents caught up in the object and the point of view on this point of view which the work of analysis enables one to reach. (Bourdieu, 2000, p. 189, italics in original) My aim in this chapter is to recover the photographs by placing them on an epistemologically equal footing with other ‘objects’ that were assigned a value in Bourdieu’s research. This directed my attention toward the Latourian conceptualization of translation, creating a space for Bourdieu’s photographs to ‘establish themselves as spokesmen’ within the expansive network of his ethnographic work and ‘express in their own language what others say and want, why they act in the way they do, and how they associate with each other’ (Callon, 1986, pp. 222–224). The photographs presented here are not viewed as incommensurable modes of action, but as quasi-objects (or quasi-subjects) assembled within a network of similar objects, e.g., cameras, field notes, observations, tape recorders, interviews, diagrams, landscapes, etc. The content of the photographs presented for analysis is also part of that network: human subjects, silver buckets, sheaves of brushwood, tall baskets, cinder blocks, a cigarette, a beret, a uniform and the landscape itself. The purpose of that network as reported here is not to ‘objectify’ Algeria in time as some kind of externally manageable essence, but to consider the network and the objects within it as themselves the origin of social action, as expressions of the conditions of colonialism operating under the French in Algeria at the time, things which ‘[i]n addition to “determining” or “serving as a backdrop” for social action, [they] might authorize, allow, afford, encourage, permit, suggest, influence, block, render possible, forbid, and so on.’ (Latour, 2005, p. 72). As components of a never-ending process of semiosis, Bourdieu’s photographs take their place within a wider network of signification, highlighting the value and significance of employing multiple means for accomplishing the task of meaning-making. As I maintain elsewhere with reference to visual art and other types of artifacts (Inghilleri 2022, 2016; and see Genevieve Warwick (2019) ‘Crying Laocoon: the visual arts of translation,’ The Translator 25(4), pp. 311–334.), an expanded role for intersemiotic translation would be an important step toward recognizing the tacit dimension of communication and the multiple modalities in which narrative content can be framed. The diverse group of artists I discuss in this work – Mark Rothko, Kazemir Malevich, Jacob Lawrence, and Willem De Kooning – each found ways to fuse the discursive with the aesthetic, drawing attention to the politics of the everyday and the materiality underpinning their message, however abstract. In different ways, their work invites a withdrawal from the literal into a more sensual form of encounter with the viewing public where it is accepted on these terms. In his last book, Meanings, Polanyi discusses art as an extension of perception. He writes, We are accustomed to regard our perception of objects as our response to them but, we may instead regard perception as an act of tacit inference aiming at a correct interpretation of the traces made in our body by external objects. Understanding perception in this way, as an integration of experience, we may understand the artist’s vision also as an integration of experience which, like perception, can succeed or fail – or can achieve partial success. The artist himself will judge in the first place whether his product is a 258

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true response to his experience. Then his readers or viewers will respond to his meaning by the experience the artist’s work evokes in them and will accept it as true if they are deeply moved by it. (Polanyi & Prosch, 1976, pp. 145–146, original italics) Mark Rothko once gave voice to the enduring fear that his paintings would be misunderstood and violated by an uncaring public. A picture [he wrote] lives by companionship, expanding and quickening in the eyes of the sensitive observer. It dies by the same token. It is therefore a risky and unfeeling act to send it out into the world. How often it must be permanently impaired by the eyes of the vulgar and the cruelty of the impotent who would extend their affliction universally. (Rothko quoted in C. Rothko, 2006, p. xix) Yet, despite the challenges of denotation and reception that Rothko alludes to here, art and artifacts can avoid some of the problems of signification that arise in translations presented solely in spoken or written form by allowing the unsaid and the unseen to proceed with fewer obstacles, opening the possibility of illuminating meaning in a new way by revealing the direct presentation of structures of feelings waiting there to be pierced or punctured. Though a more elaborate discussion is beyond the scope of this chapter, Roland Barthes’ reflections on photography in his influential book Camera Lucida (1981) provide some additional insight here. Writing from the observer’s perspective (in this case his own) of a photograph, Barthes distinguishes between the studium – the historical, social or cultural meanings we extract from a photograph through semiotic analysis based on a learned affect or acquired taste that informs that interpretation, and the punctum – uncoded meaning which “whether or not it is triggered, it is an addition, it is what I add to the photograph and what is nonetheless already there.” (Barthes, 1981, p. 23) In terms of their effect on the individual, Barthes’ punctum is somewhat akin to Bourdieu’s habitus clivé. The feelings they induce about previously taken-for-granted assumptions create uncertainty; they are experienced as an ‘accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me).’ (ibid., p. 27). It was always Bourdieu’s stated intention regarding the Algerian photographs that they speak for themselves; they had an important metonymic function for him. Like Barthes’ meaning of the punctum, they served as visual embodiments of the split habitus he observed in the rural population during the war. In an interview with Franz Schultheis, it was proposed to Bourdieu that there was an affinity between the objectification achieved in photography where a distance is created and time may stand still for a moment, and the ethnological approach he had been exploring in the development of his research at that time. His response went somewhat deeper than the question: P.B.: “Yes, I am sure you are right there; in both cases there was this objectifying and loving, detached and yet intimate relationship to the object, something similar to humour. There are a number of photos that I took in the Collo region, in a pretty dramatic situation. I was in the hands of people who had the power over life or death – my life, but also the lives of the people who were with me. It is a series of pictures of people sitting, discussing, and drinking coffee under a big olive tree. In this case, taking photos was a way of saying to them, “I’m interested in you, I’m on your side, I’ll listen to you, I’ll testify to what you’re going through’.” (Schultheis, 2007) 259

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A prime motivation in his early work in Algeria was to expose the social and economic injustices he witnessed in the colonial system, particularly toward the rural peasants. In his Algerian photographs, the camera lens became the medium of a dialogue, one which did not assume any affinity between the photographer and the photographed but portrayed a willingness to testify to their truths. At the same time, the struggle he gives voice to in this conversation reveals a paradox in his theoretical explorations between his situatedness within his own colonizer culture’s understanding of reality and his wish to remain a detached and un-situated sociologist. In this sense, the photographs reveal something about the young Bourdieu as well – the humanist and the scientist, standing at a crossroad.

Notes

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Bourdieu, P., & Sayad, A. (2020/1964). Uprooting (Le Déracinement): The Crisis of Traditional Agriculture in Algeria, P. A. Silverstein (Ed.), (S. Emanuel, Trans.). Cambridge: Polity Press. Buzelin, H. (2005). Unexpected Allies. The Translator, 11(2), 193–218. Calhoun, C. (2003). Pierre Bourdieu. In G. Ritzer (Ed.), The Blackwell Companion to Major Contemporary Social Theorists (pp. 274–309). London: Blackwell. Callon, M. (1986). Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: Domestication of the Scallops and the Fishermen of St. Brieuc. In J. Law (Ed.), Power, Action and Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge (pp. 196–233). London: Routledge Kegan & Paul. Casanova, P. (1999/2005). The World Republic of Letters (M. B. Debevoise, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Translation of La République Mondiale des Lettres. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Casanova, P. (2002/2010). Consecration and Accumulation of Literary Capital: Translation as Unequal Exchange (S. Brownlie, Trans.). In M. Baker (Ed.), Critical Readings in Translation Studies (pp. 285– 303). London & New York: Routledge. Friedman, S. (2016). Habitus Clivé and the Emotional Imprint of Social Mobility. The Sociological Review, 64(1), 129–147. Frisinghelli, C. (2003). Comments on the Photographic Documentations of Pierre Bourdieu. In F. Schultheis & C. Frisinghelli (Eds.), Picturing Algeria (pp. 201–213). New York: Columbia University Press. Frisinghelli, C. (2009). Photographs in Context: Notes on Handling an Archive and Looking at the Exhibition Pierre Bourdieu’s Photographic Documentary Account in Algeria, 1957–1961. The Sociological Review, 57(3), 512–521. Go, J. (2013). Decolonizing Bourdieu: Colonial and Postcolonial Theory in Bourdieu’s Early Work. Sociological Theory, 31(1), 49–74. Gouanvic, J-M. (2005). A Bourdieusian Theory of Translation, or the Coincidence of Practical Instances. Field, ‘Habitus’, Capital and ‘Illusio.’ The Translator, 11(2), 147–166. Gouanvic, J-M. (2007). Objectivation, Réflexivité et Traduction: Pour une Re-lecture Bourdieusienne de la Traduction. In M. Wolf & A. Fukari (Eds.), Constructing a Sociology of Translation (pp. 79–92) Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Guo, T. (2016). Surviving in Violent Conflicts: Chinese Interpreters in the Second Sino-Japanese War 1931– 1945. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Hanna, S. F. (2016). Bourdieu in Translation Studies: The Socio-Cultural Dynamics of Shakespeare Translation in Egypt. London & New York: Routledge. Heilbron, J. (1999). Towards a Sociology of Translation: Book Translation as a Cultural World-System. European Journal of Social Theory, 2, 429–444. Heilbron, J., & Sapiro, G. (Eds.) (1999). Traduction: Les Eschanges Littéraires Internationaux. Special Issue of Actes de Recherche en Sciences Socials (144 pp.). Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Inghilleri, M. (2005). The Sociology of Bourdieu and the Construction of the ‘Object’ in Translation and Interpreting Studies. The Translator, 11(2), 125–145. Inghilleri, M. (2014). Bourdieu’s Habitus and Dewey’s Habits: Complementary Views of the Social? In G. M. Vorderobermeier (Ed.), Remapping Habitus in Translation Studies (pp.185–201). Amsterdam: Rodopi. Inghilleri, M. (2016). What Is Red?: The Art of Interpreting Trauma. In F. Massardier-Kenney, B. Baer & M. Tymockzo (Eds.), Translators Writing, Writing Translators (pp. 77–96). Kent, OH: Kent University Press. Inghilleri, M. (2022). Migration, Materiality and Structures of Feeling. In S. Petrilli & M. Ji (Eds.), Emotions in Translation: An Inter-Semiotic Approach (pp. 97–115). London & New York: Routledge. Kenway, J., & McLeod, J. (2004). Bourdieu’s Reflexive Sociology and ‘Spaces of Points of View’: Whose Reflexivity, Which Perspective? British Journal of Sociology of Education, 25(4), 525–544. Krebs, K. (2014). Cultural Dissemination and Translational Communities: German Drama in English Translation 1900–1914. London & New York: Routledge. Kung, S-W. C. (2009). Translation Agents and Networks, with Reference to the Translation of Contemporary Taiwanese Novels. In A. Pym & A. Perekrestenko (Eds.), Translation Research Projects 2 (pp. 123–138). Tarragona: Intercultural Studies Group. Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the Social. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lewin, K. (2009/1917). The Landscape of War ( J. Blower, Trans.). Art in Translation, 1(2), 199–209. Malcolm, N. (2001). Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir, 2nd edition. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1963/1942). The Structure of Behavior (A. L. Fisher, Trans.). Boston, MA: Beacon Press. 261

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Merleau-Ponty, M. (2005/1945). Phenomenology of Perception (C. Smith, Trans.). New York: Routledge. Meylaerts, R. (2010). Habitus and Self-image of Native Literary Author-translators in Diglossic Societies. Translation and Interpreting Studies, 5(1), 1–19. Polanyi, M. (1966). The Tacit Dimension. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Polanyi, M., & Prosch, H. (1976). Meaning. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press Redfield, R., Linton, R., & Herskovits, M. (1936). Memorandum for the Study of Acculturation. American Anthropologist, 38(1), 149–152. Robbins, D. (2009). Gazing at the Colonial Gaze: Photographic Observation and Observations on Photography Based on a Comparison Between Aspects of the Work of Pierre Bourdieu and JeanClaude Passeron. The Sociological Review, 57(3), 429–447. Rothko, C. (2006). Introduction. In C. Rothko & K. Prizel Rothko (Eds.), The Artist’s Reality (pp. xi–xxxi) New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Sapiro, G. (2010). Globalization and Cultural Diversity in the Book Market: The Case of Literary Translations in the US and in France. Poetics, 38, 419–439. Sapiro, G. (2013). Translation and Identity: Social Trajectories of the Translators of Hebrew Literature in French. TTR: Traduction, Terminologie, Redaction, 26(2), 59–82. Sapiro, G., & Bustamante, M. (2009). Translation as a Measure of International Consecration Mapping the World Distribution of Bourdieu’s Books in Translation. Sociologica, 2–3, 1–45. Sayad, A. (2004). The Suffering of the Immigrant. Cambridge: Polity Press Ltd. Schinkel, W. (2007). Sociological Discourse of the Relational. The Sociological Review, 55(4): 707–729. Schultheis, F. (2007). Sociological Investigations: From Photographic Evidence to Thick Description in the Work of Pierre Bourdieu (M. O’Neill, Trans.). Available at: https://translate.eipcp.net/transversal/0308/ schultheis/en.html (Accessed: June 2022) Sela-Sheffy, R. (2005). How to Be a (Recognized) Translator: Rethinking Habitus, Norms, and the Field of Translation. Target, 17(1), 1–26. Simeoni, D. (1998). The Pivotal Status of the Translator’s Habitus. Target, 10(1), 1–39. Talbo-Bernigaud, J-P. (1960). Les Zones Interdites. Les Temps Modernes, 177, 709–726. Threadgold, S. (2020). Bourdieu and Affect: Towards a Theory of Affective Affinities. Bristol: Bristol University Press. Tilley, C. (1997). A Phenomenology of Landscape. Oxford: Berg Publishers. Torikai, K. (2009). Voices of the Invisible Presence: Diplomatic Interpreters in Post-World War II Japan. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Valero Garcés, C., & Gauthier Blasi, L. (2010). Bourdieu y la Traducción e Interpretación en Los Servicios Públicos: Hacia una Teoría Social. MonTI. Monografías de Traducción e Interpretación, 2, 97–117. Voinova, T., & Shlesinger, M. (2013). Translators Talk about Themselves, Their Work and Their Profession: The Habitus of Translators of Russian Literature into Hebrew. TTR: Traduction, Terminologie, Redaction, 26(2), 29–57. Vorderobermeier, G. M. (Ed.) (2014). Remapping Habitus in Translation Studies. Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi. Wacquant, L. J. D. (1990) Sociology as Socioanalysis: Tales of “Homo Academicus.” Sociological Forum, 5(4), 677–689. Wacquant, L. J. D. (1992). Toward a Social Praxeology: The Structure and Logic of Bourdieu’s Sociology. In P. Bourdieu & L. J. D. Wacquant (Eds.), An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (pp. 1–59). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Wacquant, L. J. D. (2004). Following Pierre Bourdieu into the Field. Ethnography, 5(4), 387–414. Warwick, G. (2019). Crying Laocoon: The Visual Arts of Translation. The Translator, 25(4), 311–334). Wolf, M. (2013). The Habsburg Monarchy’s Many-Languaged Soul. Translating and Interpreting, 1848–1914. (K. Sturge, Trans.). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Wolf, M., & Fukari, A. (Ed.) (2007). The Sociology of Translation: Outline of an Emerging Field. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Xu, M., & Chu, C-Y. (2015). Translators’ Professional Habitus and the Adjacent Discipline: The Case of Edgar Snow. Target, 27(2), 173–191.

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Prelude: the task of the copyist The narrator of Herman Melville’s classic story Bartleby, the Scrivener is an elderly lawyer who employs a motley crew of farcical characters in a Wall Street office mainly concerned with ‘rich men’s bonds and mortgages and title deeds’ (Melville, 1853/1978, p. 110). The lawyer’s name is not disclosed, and his employees are introduced by means of nicknames: Turkey and Nipper serve as copyists, and Ginger Nut serves as an office boy. Due to an increase in workload, the lawyer seeks to hire an additional clerical hand, and the position is swiftly filled by Bartleby, who does receive a name, but whose identity remains otherwise elusive. At first, the new copyist seems silent and withdrawn, but diligent and trustworthy. Yet, three days after his initial appearance, an incident transpires. In response to the lawyer’s simple request to examine the accuracy of a paper, Bartleby replies: ‘I would prefer not to’ (Melville, 1978, p. 119). Despite several implorations, the situation is not resolved, and Bartleby’s act of defiance turns out to be more than an isolated event. Gradually, all of his employer’s requests are met with the same response, and Bartleby no longer performs any work. Intrigued and concerned, the lawyer does not immediately end the clerk’s employment but seeks to learn more about Bartleby’s life outside the office. His questions go unanswered, and eventually, he infers that the scrivener has been living on the premises. Bartleby is offered money and urged to leave, but he refuses. Exasperated, the lawyer moves out and sets up an office elsewhere. The new tenants of the building do not appreciate Bartleby’s obstinate presence, and he is removed by the police. He is imprisoned as a vagrant and soon dies in confinement. Throughout the story’s extensive reception history, Bartleby’s peculiar preference no longer to engage with the dictates of his environment has repeatedly been interpreted as an everyman’s rebellion, or ‘an appropriate resistance to much of the world’ (Widmer, 1969, p. 458). In recent years, the political significance of the character was specifically invoked in the context of the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement (Castronovo, 2014). During the protests, a man assisting at the People’s Library – a structure spontaneously set up at Zuccotti Park and later destroyed by police intervention – was photographed wearing a t-shirt reading ‘I prefer not to,’ and Bartleby was hailed as a ‘patron saint of civil disobedience’ (Martyris, DOI: 10.4324/9781003161448-18

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2011; Edelman, 2013, p. 101). The setting of Melville’s story, an office on Wall Street facilitating the smooth operations of the financial-judicial complex, and Bartleby’s stubborn inhabitation of space at the heart of the alienating metropolis, provide ample parallels to explain the character’s appeal as an emblem of the 2011 occupations. Yet what truly consolidates the analogy between Bartleby and Occupy is the perplexing absence of clear demands. As David Graeber has argued: rather than producing ‘specific demands and proposals,’ OWS’s self-organized political forums had ‘created a crisis of legitimacy within the entire system by providing a glimpse of what real democracy might be like’ (Graeber, 2013, p. xvii). One could hardly argue that Bartleby’s refusal to engage in work or felicitous conversation constitutes an immediate democratic revelation. Yet, his actions do initiate a crisis of legitimacy in the sphere of social conduct and employment relations. Before Bartleby’s determined withdrawal forces the lawyer to retreat from the Wall Street building, his peculiarity of expression had already subverted the office’s communicative conventions: Bartleby’s colleagues start to adopt, perhaps involuntarily, the vocabulary of preference (Krips, 2012, p. 312). Thus, a paradigm of predilection rather than obligation comes to permeate the culture of work. When Turkey answers a request to withdraw from the lawyer’s desk with ‘if you prefer that I should,’ a certain brazen assertion of equality seems to accompany the expression of civility. The lawyer fears that Bartleby’s speech has ‘turned the tongues, if not the heads’ of both himself and his workforce (Melville, 1978, p. 135). Thus, by the mere choice of words, Bartleby avoids the trappings of the system that surrounds him, and ‘clears the ground, opens up the place, for true activity’ (Žižek, 2006, p. 342). Consequently, Bartleby’s disengagement has been interpreted as a model of ‘radical political action’ (Krips, 2012, p. 312). The copyist refuses to verify the accuracy of his writing and to conform to the logic of conversation. A ripple in discursive conventions announces a revolution. Is this at all plausible?

Linguistic relativity and political correctness In a highly influential and equally controversial paper, Benjamin Lee Whorf argued that concepts such as time and matter are ‘linguistically conditioned,’ and therefore not fully congruent across different language communities (Whorf, 1944, p. 214). Furthermore, he posited that differences in conceptualization could be related to differences in habitual behavior. For instance, the lexicogrammatical tendency, observed in many Indo-European languages, to ‘split time into quantifiable substances’ would have led to ‘a culture that values recordkeeping, accounting, schedules, and historical sequencing’ (Ahearn, 2017, p. 90). One can contrast this outlook with cyclical, undifferentiated conceptions of time, inspiring ‘cultural values that stress preparation, endurance, and intensity,’ as supposedly encountered among the Native American Hopi tribe (Whorf, 1944; Ahearn, 2017, p. 90). Whorf was a student of Edward Sapir, who, even though generally wary of linguistic determinism, at times marveled at ‘the tyrannical hold that linguistic form has upon our orientation in the world’ (Sapir, 1927/1964, p. 128). Employing a similar vocabulary of domination, Whorf, considering the relationship between ‘language patterns and cultural norms,’ argued that ‘the language is the factor that limits free plasticity and rigidifies channels of development in the more autocratic way’ (Whorf, 1944, p. 213). The notion that the particular features of any one language significantly affect its speakers’ worldview is commonly known as the hypothesis of linguistic relativity. As John A. Lucy has argued, questions about linguistic relativity can be classified into three types; one can distinguish the semiotic level, the structural level, and the

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functional level (Lucy, 1997, p. 292). His explanation of the three types is worth quoting at length: The first, or semiotic, level concerns how speaking any natural language at all may influence thinking. The question is whether having a code with a symbolic component (versus one confined to iconic-indexical elements) transforms thinking. If so, we can speak of a semiotic relativity of thought with respect to other species lacking such a code. The second, or structural, level concerns how speaking one or more particular natural languages (e.g. Hopi versus English) may influence thinking. The question is whether quite different morphosyntactic configurations of meaning affect thinking about reality. If so, we can speak of a structural relativity of thought with respect to speakers using a different language. [….] The third, or functional, level concerns whether using language in a particular way (e.g. schooled) may influence thinking. The question is whether discursive practices affect thinking either by modulating structural influences or by directly influencing the interpretation of the interactional context. (Lucy, 1997, p. 292) Most research into linguistic relativity occupies itself with fairly specific issues limited to the structural level, such as the ‘variability of colour perception and terminology’ (Ahearn, 2017, p. 103). However, all three types of linguistic relativity are ultimately interrelated, as can be aptly illustrated with reference to a celebrated work of speculative fiction: George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949/1987). The bulk of the novel is set in the fictional superstate of Oceania, the official language of which is Newspeak, a means of communication ‘devised to meet the ideological needs of Ingsoc, or English Socialism’ (Orwell, 1987, p. 312). The language is designed to consolidate the power of a hegemonic social group, whose members seek to make it impossible for the state’s subjects to conceive of unorthodox thoughts. Thus, thought is manipulated through language planning, an applied illustration of the functional level of linguistic relativity. An example from the novel concerns the naming of the four major government agencies regulating Oceania’s affairs: The Ministries of Truth, Peace, Love, and Plenty are respectively concerned with propaganda, war, policing, and starvation (Orwell, 1987, p. 6). Further obfuscation is achieved by means of the relevant Newspeak abbreviations: Minitrue, Minipax, Miniluv and Miniplenty seem to suggest bijou institutions rather than totalitarian strongholds.1 Integrating and shortening compounds is a common feature of Newspeak vocabulary, as euphonic ‘short clipped words’ are designed ‘to make speech, and especially speech on any subject not ideologically neutral, as nearly as possible independent of consciousness’ (Orwell, 1987, p. 321). Abbreviation is one of the techniques that must ensure a ‘cutting out of most of the associations’ that words tend to evoke (Orwell, 1987, p. 320). In short, Newspeak develops by means of morphological and syntactical manipulation. The relation between thought and reality is therefore allegedly altered on the structural level. In an effort to reduce the risk of inducing an accurate perception of Oceania’s state of affairs, speech is not only made as opaque as possible but also heavily restricted: the vocabulary of Newspeak grows ‘smaller instead of larger every year’ (Orwell, 1987, p. 322). The reduction of the language’s scope must ensure that it becomes impossible to translate between Newspeak and Oldspeak, which largely corresponds to English (Orwell, 1987, p. 322). Consequently, no voice from the past can threaten to provide insight or inspire dissent. The final aim of Newspeak’s development is to make language completely independent of thought, and perhaps even ultimately absent.

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At this point, the notion of semiotic relativity suggests that, in the absence of a symbolic repertoire, the perceptive capacity of humanity as a species will be fundamentally altered. In the dystopian universe of Nineteen Eighty-Four, this change is expected to be one for the worse. People could be reduced to the status of fearful, confused and submissive herd animals. Conditions in Orwell’s Oceania have often been compared to real-world situations in totalitarian dictatorships, particularly Mao’s China (Quo, 1988). Mao initially envisaged the transition to communism as ‘a process rooted in grassroots structures of authority’ and ‘laid great stress on spontaneous action, rather than the mere mechanical execution of orders’ (Schram, 1968, p. x; Boggs, 1977, p. 120). For the revolution to be successful, however, the people’s spontaneity had to be guided by a set of values and principles able to counteract the oppressive ‘patterns inherited from the past’ (Schram, 1968, p. x). Consequently, the proletariat had to be subjected to processes of ‘thought-reform’ that would empower them to take up their historical role (Schram, 1968, p. x). In short, the recognition of the role of the masses in the production of ideas ultimately led Maoist China to ironically ‘amalgamate all the elements of social practice under the strict jurisdiction of the party line’ (Barker, 2002, p. 20). The stance that the party line must at all times be protected from deviant speech, thought and behavior came to be known as ‘political correctness’ (Hughes, 2010, p. 63). In the late 1960s, the phrase was associated with the American New Left, but it remained relatively marginal until the late 1980s when it surfaced on university campuses across the United States (Hughes, 2010, p. 3, 63). While still predominantly relevant to the realm of Anglophone academia, the current variety of political correctness targets ‘offensive language, prejudiced attitudes, and insulting behaviour toward the marginalized’ (Hughes, 2010, p. 8). The strategy mainly consists of introducing ‘new, neutral, and unfamiliar lexical forms’ while simultaneously ‘[diminishing] the currency of established demeaning vocabulary’ (Hughes, 2010, p. 16). As a political strategy, it constitutes a normative set of communicative practices mobilized to further a particular agenda. The taboos and proscriptions of the politically correct paradigm therefore form a ‘progressive orthodoxy,’ a developing mode of heightened awareness of the part language plays in either sustaining or challenging existing inequalities (Hughes, 2010, p. 46). Today, political correctness is a controversial concept, which tends solely to be invoked as an accusation. A telling example concerns gender expression and the use of pronouns. In recent decades, the idea of binary and fixed gender identity has come to be thoroughly questioned on the grounds of its perceived lack of inclusiveness and stifling rigidity. Third-person pronouns in particular have become an important symbolic battleground for the expression and recognition of gender diversity. On the Internet, a space where the boundaries of self are continually in flux, a variety of non-traditional pronouns (such as ey/em/eir and xir/xim/ xyr) circulates; user preference, as well as an eagerness to engage in a certain community, defines the pronoun of choice (Oakley, 2016, p. 5). Online as well as in real-world settings, it is increasingly common for people to announce the pronouns they favor. Across the globe, lawmakers are aware of the increased attention paid to gender. In Canada, for instance, Bill C-16 (assented to in 2017) was proposed as an extension of the Canadian Human Rights Act, which protects people from discrimination on the grounds of factors such as race, sex, and marital status. The extension sought to add ‘gender identity or expression’ to the list of ‘prohibited grounds for discrimination’ (Wilson-Raybould, 2016). The Act not only protects against violence and unfair economic treatment but also sets out to punish ‘hate propaganda’ (Wilson-Raybould, 2016). The drive to protect gender expression from hate propaganda has met with considerable critique, most notably on the part of Jordan Peterson, a Canadian 266

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academic and clinical psychologist, who rose to international fame as a vocal opponent to the bill’s implementation. He argued that the bill, when made law, would create a pathway toward ‘compelled speech’ (Peterson, 2017). The government would supposedly be able to punish people in case they, for instance, refuse to refer to people using their preferred pronouns. Perceived as such, the bill could radically endanger free speech and, therefore, critical thought. Peterson thus envisaged a direct pathway from perceived political correctness to totalitarian domination. The presupposition is that if a government can compel patterns of speech, it will ultimately have the force to impose unqualified obedience. Peterson’s claims have been characterized as unfounded, harmful, and lacking ‘any basis in reality’ (Stacy, 2020, p. 347). Furthermore, his position has been described as a classic ‘slippery slope’ argument (Taylor, 2019). The slippery slope in question involves all three types of linguistic relativity: the symbolic order could supposedly disintegrate into indistinct chaos as an effect of shifting norms of language use and the introduction of novel concepts. The validity and appropriateness of the argument can be questioned from multiple angles, but it is striking that similar arguments are often made in an affirmative and aspirational tone, particularly at the intersection of gender, activism, and translation.

Resistance and representation According to the sociologist Alberto Melucci, ‘it is enough to structure reality using different words for the power monopoly over reality to crumble’ (Melucci, 1996, p. 358). This conviction has been echoed in discussions of activist translation practices, particularly in relation to prefigurative politics (Baker, 2016a, p. 5). Prefigurative politics involves ‘the embodiment within the ongoing political practice of a movement, of those forms of social relations, decision-making, culture and human experience that are the ultimate goal’ (Boggs, 1977, p. 100). In other words, prefigurative politics refers to ‘the practice of instituting modes of organization, tactics and practices that reflect the vision of society to which the social movements aspire’ (Flesher Fominaya, 2014, p. 10). In response to such definitions, Mona Baker has argued that prefigurative experiments have largely been restricted ‘to organizational and interactional’ models; she suggests that ‘extending the powerful concept of prefiguration to the use of verbal, visual and aesthetic languages’ can enable activists and researchers ‘to construct an alternative world in the here and now,’ and thus to restructure reality by means of semiotic interventions (Baker, 2016a, p. 6). One of Baker’s examples addresses translational practices within the YouTube interview series Words of Women from the Egyptian Revolution (Baker, 2016b; Mortada, 2016). The Words of Women collective expresses ‘its commitment to a queer and transfeminist politics’ by replacing ‘the masculine o and feminine a with x’ in the Spanish subtitles it provides with its videos (Mortada, 2016, p. 134). The collective had considered adopting a recognized strategy regarding Spanish gender-neutral subtitling, namely replacing the masculine o and feminine a with @. Challenging the patriarchy would thus consist in the replacement of both todos and todas with tod@s. However, it is increasingly common for members of the queer community to completely reject the binary, and sensitive to such orientations, Words of Women decided to use an x, opting for todxs rather than tod@s. The choice was made in order to fully break with the possibility of interpreting @ as ‘a visual combination of the masculine o and feminine a’ (Mortada, 2016, p. 134). Occasionally, such changes were made regardless of whether the speakers in the videos ascribed to the rejection of the gender binary. While the translators showed concern about imposing ‘queer politics on the speaking subject,’ they decided in favor of ‘general 267

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nonconformity,’ given that the erosion of the ‘hetero-normative binary’ was central to ‘the landscape of the revolution and the vision of the world’ the collective aspired to create (Mortada, 2016, pp. 134–135). As mentioned in the previous section, the envisaged link between shifting linguistic conventions and major alterations to the structure of society can be decried as a slippery slope argument completely detached from reality; a paranoid and revisionist fantasy begat from an obsession with the specter of political correctness. Here, however, the same line of thought is mobilized to explain strategic decisions formed in a spirit of progressive, radical imagination. Regardless of whether the envisaged scenario inspires anguish or ambition, the crucial premise is an adherence to the postulates of profound linguistic relativity. Changes in conceptualization and expression are seen as prefigurative of changes in human experience and behavior, and ultimately, of changes affecting our understanding of reality and the human animal’s position within it. However, a more modest assessment of the activist subtitling strategy presented above could argue that no hyperbolic hypotheses are needed to either justify or denounce experiments with the linguistic representation of gender. Without speculating on eventual outcomes, giving linguistic form to the nonbinary position can simply be interpreted as an attempt to attract increased visibility and recognition. In this sense, Words of Women’s subtitling strategy is reminiscent of earlier feminist translation practices responding, for instance, to the assumption that the masculine pronoun can be apolitically upheld as the generic pronoun. Since the 1970s, feminists have argued that ‘generic he is sexist in its implication that the generic person is male by default’ (Curzan, 2014, p. 117). Proposed alternatives have generally fallen into two categories: the difference is either erased or highlighted. The first category can be exemplified by the increased use of they as a singular generic pronoun (Curzan, 2014, p. 120). In contrast to using he or she, this pronoun allows one to avoid differentiating along the lines of gender, and consequently not to prioritize either the masculine or the feminine. The second category, which is geared toward equal representation rather than undifferentiation, takes recourse to constructions such as he or she, or to a more assertive use of generic she, from the viewpoint that it is only fair to prioritize the underrepresented. Feminist translation, particularly its Quebec incarnation, is often highly critical of language conventions deemed patriarchal and aims to redress patterns of speech ‘perceived as inherently misogynist’ (von Flotow, 1991, p. 72). Resistance to received pronominal representations has been a central concern in attempts to refashion the English ‘he/man language’ into an instrument fit to produce ‘womanspeak,’ and thus to ‘make the feminine visible in language’ (De Lotbinière-Harwood, 1990, pp. 9–10, 12). It is no coincidence that pronouns take center stage in feminist and queer translation. Pronominal categories, functions, and conditions of use vary widely between languages. Next to issues of grammatical and natural gender, one encounters, for instance, culture-specific distinctions of number and formality, which pose common problems that are ‘widely discussed in translation studies’ (Munday, 2004, p. 209). Linguistic features that require translational creativity are more amenable to formal experimentation, as persistent non-equivalence enlarges the scope of conceivable intervention. Pronouns are also central to any communicative situation, meaning that innovative pronominal translation strategies are easily registered and propagated. Furthermore, activist translation often wishes to textually intervene in a social or political debate without fully renouncing the expectations of accuracy that come with ‘the translational mandate’ (Gould & Tahmasebian, 2020b, p. 4). Pronouns are traditionally considered function words rather than content words, meaning that one can potentially tamper with them for provocative purposes, without radically compromising, for instance, the plot of a literary narrative or the punch of a political manifesto. 268

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In other words, small lexicogrammatical elements can be an effective means of representational dissent, because they can strike an effective balance between what Maria Tymoczko has called ‘the metonymies of translation and the metonymies of resistance’ (Tymoczko, 2006, p. 453). Translators negotiate between the different linguistic and cultural norms operating in a source and a target system, and this requires the construction of approximate fidelity by association, and thus the choice to prioritize certain conceptual and contextual relations over others. Similarly, political resistance, to be at all recognizable, is dependent on representations of the structures against which it reacts, and therefore never constitutes a complete or absolute act. Accordingly, engagement through language requires the construction of approximate loyalty to one’s guiding principles, or the choice to prioritize particular defiant gestures at the expense of others. Whereas the clichéd advice to pick one’s battles wisely is often interpreted to mean that one should only commit to confrontations when the stakes are high and the issues major, the conflicting demands of textual imitation and ideological innovation shrink the repertoire of the activist translator considerably and necessitate an appreciation of seemingly minor modifications as indicative of a broader horizon of possibility. The scope of illustration, however, is narrower than the envisaged horizon, meaning that statements to the effect of ‘if we can fix the language, we can fix the world’ are often received with skepticism (Halmari, 2011, p. 830). In order to mitigate skeptical misgivings, the theory and practice of text-based activism must always rely, whether implicitly or explicitly, on a foundational belief in a strong version of linguistic relativity.

Preferred sites of struggle As the previous section illustrates, Translation Studies (TS) research on activist approaches is remarkably often concerned with issues of gender, sex, and sexuality. The Translation Studies Bibliography (TSB), a database aiming to provide a relatively comprehensive overview of research in the field, tags the publications it indexes with relevant keywords.2 Thirty-eight records in the database are identified as relating to activism or a committed approach, and seven of those publications’ titles make explicit reference to feminist or queer perspectives, which amounts to a sturdy 18 percent. The keywords search admittedly leads to a limited set of results. It does not retrieve seminal works such as Translation/Interpreting and social activism (Boéri & Maier, 2010), or major companion titles such as The Routledge handbook of translation and activism (Gould & Tahmasebian, 2020a). However, those collections also include multiple contributions concerned with, for example, non-sexist translation strategies (Castro Vázquez, 2010), or translation and LGBTQ+ activism (Baldo, 2020). Importantly, much relevant work is not directly concerned with subversive translation strategies within the text, as discussed above, but rather with women, queer, and allied translators’ active role in social and intellectual movements, particularly as disseminators of radical ideas whose political orientation determines the choice of transgressive textual material to translate, at times in defiance of censorship (Castro & Ergun, 2018). Both strands of activism, however, can supplement, reinforce and inform each other. The sustained interest of translation scholars in issues of gender is remarkable, but not surprising. Sherry Simon identifies a variety of shared factors that have shaped this lasting relationship, such as ‘the questioning of universal standards of meaning and value,’ and ‘deep suspicion of rules defining fidelity’ (Simon, 1996, p. 8). The ‘transdisciplines’ are perceived to have ‘played strong roles in bringing once “marginal” concerns – women and translation, to put it simply – into the purview of more traditional academic disciplines’ (von Flotow & Scott, 2016, p. 349). Particularly central to the alliance between both fields has been a 269

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shared resistance against ‘binary terms and either/or logic’ (Chamberlain, 1988, p. 462). The epistemic implications of mutually exclusive, polar categorizations such as male/female and original/translation have been consistently questioned in translation and gender studies, in search of knowledge models that can more accurately capture the variety of human experience, and in opposition to the value hierarchies and exclusionary mechanisms that seemingly neutral dichotomies tend to entail. Thus, whereas research into activist approaches to translation can hypothetically address a limitless variety of issues, certain concerns consistently take center stage. Privileged fields of enquiry take shape in response to conceptual and contextual proximity, meaning that the principle of metonymical selection guiding the practice of translation and the politics of resistance is also at work in the realization of research agendas. There are myriad ways to conceptualize the relationship between socio-political transformation and textual intervention, but some claim exceptional centrality. Research into the intersections of activism and translation has not only formed a continued alliance with gender studies but also with postcolonial studies. Postcolonial criticism aims to assess the economic, political, cultural, and epistemological legacy of imperial expansion and colonial settlement, whether it be in terms of resistance, dissolution, renewal, or continuation. Intercultural encounters require linguistic mediation, and it is therefore obvious that translation and colonialism go ‘hand in hand’ (Bassnett & Trivedi, 1999, p. 3). It is equally uncontroversial that translation ‘shapes, and takes shape within, the asymmetrical relations of power that operate under colonialism’ (Niranjana, 1992, p. 2). And if translation tends to serve as a tool of domination and erasure in a colonial context, it can also be argued that ‘translation, by its very nature, is activist within the postcolonial context, as it is often ideologically charged with the need or desire for linguistic or cultural representation of minority or marginalised societies’ (Bandia, 2020, p. 516). Thus, translational activism in a postcolonial context frequently involves the reclamation of agency in the production of representations of the self and the other. It is often illustrated with reference to the literary field. Nigerian Europhone writers, for instance, employ hybrid strategies such as the infusion of orality in the written text or the insertion of untranslated vernacular vocabulary into texts produced in English to establish ‘a linguistic system through which to appropriate the language of colonialist imposition,’ and thus to ‘emancipate their respective cultures from the stranglehold of Western imperialism and create for the citizenry a language that resonates with their sociocultural and political realities’ (Ajayi, 2021, p. 85). One will note here, once again, the importance of linguistic relativity as a presupposition of textual activism: the demand for change is inspired by a belief in the notion that certain forms of linguistic expression only allow for certain forms of thought and practice. As an academic approach, postcolonialism has gradually come under increased scrutiny for two main reasons: its perceived vagueness and its alleged detachment from lived reality. Not only is it often left unstated whether postcolonial should refer to a ‘concept, trend, discourse, idea, field of study, theory, condition’ or a combination of such designations; arguably its institutionalized mode of expression also ‘tones down the most noisily horrid of situations, and avoids with tone and skill the most serious colonial issues,’ Palestine being a case in point (Madiou, 2021, p. 1, 5). In TS, the postcolonial label has been primarily questioned on grounds of excessive conceptual fuzziness, particularly in relation to inconsistent and unstable dichotomies such as Western/non-Western and center/periphery (Susam-Saraeva, 2015). Nevertheless, the postcolonial paradigm continues to attract considerable attention in the discipline, not in the least because of a shared interest in the in-between that destabilizes rigid delineations separating concrete geographical spaces as well as tropological spaces of cultural interchange (Bennett, 2012). Thus, a thorough questioning of the concept of boundaries 270

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fortifies the metonymical proximity of translation and colonization, thereby fulfilling the same mediating role the concept of binaries performs for translation and gender. More often than not, academic writing on anti-patriarchal and on anti-imperialist sites of struggle is theoretically and practically intertwined. Theoretically, one finds a shared reliance on poststructuralist approaches to representation. Practically, one encounters a shared concern for addressing historical injustices that operate along multiple axes of identity, and for constructing alternatives to hegemonic positions of power. The subject of translation and activism has not only been studied with reference to matters of identity and culture but has also found ample application in relation to new media technologies. Activism tends to be a collective endeavor. The ascendance of the internet and the new means of content creation and interaction it facilitates has been credited with removing spatial and temporal communicative constraints, and thus with fostering the inception and maintenance of ‘international solidarity networks’ (Sadler, 2022, p. 28). Online social media can be viewed as ‘a means to reach the masses’ and as an ‘aid against censorship, a way of combatting biased media or redressing power imbalances within news journalism’ (Desjardins, 2017, p. 25). In this sense, one observes ‘the empowering impact of recent advances in technology in many areas of social and professional life, including translation’ (Baker, 2018, p. 463). The ludic activities of Chinese fansubbing communities that operate outside of the state’s ideological and commercial imperatives, for instance, have been characterized as a form of ‘technology-facilitated activism’ (Wang & Zhang, 2017). Activism in this sense is mostly illustrated with reference to audio-visual translation. Affordable editing tools and dissemination technologies facilitate the appropriation and manipulation of material that was, until the advent of the personal computer, difficult to interfere with (Pérez-González, 2010). Multimodal material affords translators a broad repertoire of potential strategies for politically committed intervention. On the one hand, it can be seamlessly edited so as to inconspicuously alter messages presented in the source content. On the other hand, noticeable semiotic friction across multiple modalities can be introduced in order to parody or subvert aesthetic-ideological assemblages. Notably, the combined focus on audiovisual translation and new media in activist TS typically involve a third component, namely non-professional translation. It has repeatedly been argued that non-professional translation practices are largely overlooked in TS (Marais & Feinauer, 2016, p. 3). In the context of committed approaches to audiovisual translation, however, they often take center stage (Pérez-González & Susam-Saraeva, 2012). This should come as no surprise, given that the independent, subversive appropriation of media products is, perhaps by definition, seldom commissioned. Most examples so far have been primarily occupied with translated text as a site of activist engagement. However, translation is not only a linguistic practice but also an embodied phenomenon. While this aspect can easily escape notice when considering written artifacts, it is hard to disregard in processes of spoken mediation. Consequently, in research on interpreting, the description of activist practices has mostly been concerned not with the finer details of the linguistic exchange, but with principles of communication and modes of organization. International networks of volunteer translators and interpreters, such as Babels, have been active participants in alter-globalization initiatives such as the World Social Forum and its European offshoot. Recurrent counterhegemonic civil society gatherings have proven a fruitful testing ground for the application of political principles to interpreting practice (Boéri, 2012). In line with the aspiration to provide a linguistically inclusive environment at such multilingual meetings, and in order to uphold standards of participatory decision-making during deliberations, Babels ‘collectively and publicly resisted unfair decisions by facilitators’ 271

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and ‘temporarily interrupted their linguistic service to represent the voices of marginalised participants’ (Doerr, 2021, p. 164). The desire to uphold certain values and principles in communicative practice marks the central importance of a comprehensive ethical framework for particular instances of politically charged interpreting (Boéri & Delgado Luchner, 2020). A submission to the ‘reign of ethics,’ however, is not necessarily something to ‘rejoice about’ (Rancière, 2006, p. 2). At the extreme, the ethical imperative implies that communication comes to serve as an ideological auxiliary with the sole purpose of reinforcing organizational conformity. Indeed, the last statement on Babels’ website announces their decision not to participate in the 2016 World Social Forum, on the grounds of ‘political, strategic, and procedural’ differences with the gathering’s organizing committee (Babels Coordination, 2016). At first, the forums’ ambition to illustrate the possibility of ‘another world’ stimulated the attempt to fashion ‘another communication’ (Stephansen, 2016, p. 34). After highly normative expectations of ethical conduct could not be met, however, communication broke down completely. The explicit link between social change and change in communicative practice indicates, in tandem with a politically correct belief in a pragmatic form of linguistic relativity, the importance of performativity in activist translation practices (Tymoczko, 2010, p. 252). Language, it seems, has the capacity to change the world, but only if the extralinguistic conditions are receptive, if not conducive to its attempts.

Translation chains While seeking to broaden the purview of TS by prioritizing dynamic processes over their static outcomes, Kobus Marais argues that translation can be conceptualized in terms of ‘negentropic semiotic work,’ which entails that meaning is made by ‘imposing constraints on the semiotic process’ (Marais, 2019, p. 4). What we recognize as translation, then, is the temporary imposition of order in a system of signification that is otherwise permanently in flux. The notion of meaning as the result of a momentarily coordinated set of constraints not only serves to expand the notion of translation beyond a focus on purely linguistic processes but is also helpful in understanding received conceptions of translation that are limited to spoken or written communication. Material constraints such as the availability of a page to write on, and anatomical constraints such as the shape and size of our vocal cords, determine the form our messages take, and therefore the content they can encompass. Cultural and linguistic constraints, which narrow down the potential set of meanings to which a particular community is receptive, can involve a broad range of phenomena, such as literacy rates, politeness prescriptions, culture-specific concepts, and scholarly theories, for instance about the nature of translation. A common understanding of translation tends to involve the expectation that a particular semiotic product is, to a large extent, recognizable as a reproduction. This expectation, in turn, is the main constraint that determines translation practice. The concept of activism in translation may seem to suggest a more liberatory and disinhibited approach, but in fact committed to change tends to impose additional constraints. While the introduction of new media technologies, for instance, offers a variety of novel affordances for the production of meaning, they also force one to adapt to new social, material, and therefore economic constraints, which serve as requirements to enter the conversation. And, as illustrated above, political commitment may result in the decision not to translate at all. More principles to uphold entails more restrictions to adhere to, and scrupulous conformity to norms thus seems to perennially define the position of the translator. In a landmark article, Daniel Simeoni 272

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confronts translators’ ‘rigorous subjection to norms,’ and questions whether the profession requires its practitioners to be ‘plain submissive’ (Simeoni, 1998, pp. 6–7). He associates today’s translator’s remarkable servility with the plight of ‘the scribes of ancient or premodern civilizations,’ who ‘have always occupied subservient positions among the dominant professions of the cultural sphere’ (Simeoni, 1998, p. 7). Similarly, David Bellos decries descriptions of translation based on notions such as faithfulness, fidelity, and loyalty, and connects their persistence to the observation that historically, translation was often practiced by slaves (Bellos, 2011, pp. 131–132). Historically, translators were often poorly paid, if at all, and were directly dependent upon the whims of more powerful actors for sustenance. Such historical observations may serve as etiological, and partly figurative explanatory factors for current discussions of the translator’s status, but they also draw attention to a considerable lacuna in the literature on translation and activism, namely the scant discussion of economic constraints, and how they affect the concrete working conditions of translators today. In line with the focus on non-professional engagement, much writing on activism in translation is concerned with voluntary work. Volunteering is seen as a choice and a morally rewarding practice, and is, by definition, not remunerated. Consequently, questions of economic or financial constraints tend not to be addressed directly, even if it is acknowledged that the ‘involvement of non-professional agents’ fundamentally challenges our understanding of ‘the current organization of labour in the translation industry’ (Pérez-González, 2012, p. 163). Activist translators themselves are of course highly aware of the financial challenges they face and may seek to implement innovative solutions. The Spanish collective Guerrilla Translation, for instance, performs both ‘income-generating and not-for-profit translations,’ and allocates resources on cooperative principles, ensuring that non-commercial endeavors are also compensated for, in an attempt to ensure the ‘livelihood of its members’ (Fernández, 2021, pp. 61–62). However, especially in high-risk contexts, dire political, as well as financial conditions, may preclude the possibility of new initiatives or continued engagement. Mona Baker has drawn attention to the fact that activists often ‘have to cope with severe forms of repression and high levels of destitution,’ which diminishes their capacity to experiment with semiotic material in search of effective representations of an alternative future (Baker, 2020, p. 6). Beyond contexts of active conflict, and the threat of severe repression, material and financial constraints affect the volunteering sector as a whole. As a rule, volunteers are not compensated for their work, despite the generation of considerable value potential. In this respect, dubious practices by humanitarian organizations have recently come under increased scrutiny, particularly as regards unpaid human labor that is used to develop commercial machine translation tools (Baker & Piróth, 2020). Large corporations thus benefit financially from people’s altruistic motivations. A similar pattern of value extraction and, arguably, exploitation, can be seen in profit-oriented companies’ attempts to utilize the crowd, as in the case of social media platforms soliciting translation suggestions and corrections from their users (Zwischenberger, 2022). Such practices pose an evident threat to the translation profession, as services somewhere offered for free, are hard to elsewhere sell. The translator sector is growing at an unprecedented rate, but this has not resulted in increased financial rewards, and many translators across the globe ‘struggle to make a decent living’ (Moorkens, 2020, p. 232). Today, translators often find precarious employment through digital labor platforms, where social protections and bargaining power, and therefore financial security, are far from guaranteed (Fırat, 2021). A major source of concern in the sector is the widespread implementation of machine translation. Excepting a restricted set of use cases, full-scale replacement of human translators is not on the horizon (Way, 2020). However, technological changes do 273

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affect the nature of the profession, as the continual acquisition of specialized skills is required for translators to ‘maximize their agency and relevance’ (Moorkens, 2017, p. 473). The increased reliance on machine translation, which is costly to implement, also enlarges the competitive advantage of companies with access to considerable capital, and the translation industry has consequently taken on the appearance of a ‘fringed oligopoly,’ in which ‘a small number of major firms controls a large share of the market,’ while smaller players must face the pressures of fierce and unrelenting competition (Larsonneur, 2021, p. 261). Evidently, these developments are not conducive to improved working conditions for translators. Translation has now indeed become an industry, and strategies to negotiate workers’ positions, financial and otherwise, can therefore be expected to include industrial action. In the pre-digital era, the strike figured as a blunt but effective tool in a variety of industries, but the refusal to perform work is most likely to be an ineffective strategy in the language industry. The atomized nature of translation practice, which tends to be characterized by isolation, and which increasingly depends upon geographically dispersed freelance work mediated by impersonal platforms, may prevent coordinated collective action, which is furthermore not univocally deemed desirable by translators themselves (Moorkens & Lewis, 2019, p. 16). Interpreters are in some settings less directly affected by the alienating impact of constant digital labor, and could therefore perhaps be more confident in the effect their bodily absence can have on the functioning of particular institutions and organizations. However, the impact of collective action seems to be generally minimal. In December 2015, The Guardian published a newspaper article entitled: ‘Home Office interpreters threaten boycott over pay cut: Immigration services could be disrupted if mass action by up to 2,000 interpreters goes ahead in January’ (Taylor, 2015). The article speaks of a boycott rather than a strike because the interpreters are employed on a freelance basis, meaning that they can refuse to accept assignments, but not halt a continuous flow of ongoing operations. The mention of immigration serves as a reminder that interpreting work is often essential to vulnerable individuals, which may force those engaging in the boycott to face a difficult dilemma of solidarity. Furthermore, the wording of the title is revealing: ‘services could be disrupted’ is a phrase used when buses are late due to weather conditions. The interpreters’ action is represented as a minor, temporary inconvenience, or annoyance. In the previous section, Babels’ discussion not to interpret at the 2016 World Social Forum was discussed. One of the reasons cited by Babels was the absence of a ‘meaningful provision for a solidarity fund for interpreting’ (Babels Coordination, 2016). The World Social Forum, however, took place regardless. If language work is seen as an expendable service, the pressure collective action can generate is limited, and the refusal to work largely remains a symbolic gesture. Beyond the strike or the boycott, classic strategies for worker’s action include the option of sabotage (Taylor & Walton, 1971). If the means of production cannot be seized, they can be destroyed or obstructed. Similar obstacles to those raised above, however, preclude this type of direct action in the translation domain. Translators tend not to have access to the concrete material assemblages that support the complex technological environments in which they are only virtually embedded. Furthermore, a considerable proportion of translation workers may find destructive engagement objectionable. Disruptions could be caused, however, without resorting to concrete vandalism. In response to social media platforms’ exploitative reliance on free labor, as discussed above, one could envisage a conscious decision to only provide such platforms with erroneous information. The wilful corruption of data collection processes is a conceivable method of data activism, a means of socio-political engagement which considers, beyond infrastructure, the circulation of information and knowledge as a primary site of potential intervention (Milan & van der Velden, 2016). Such practices, however, would be 274

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short-lived. It is generally inconceivable that a majority of voluntary crowd workers would resort to sabotage, meaning that individuals who partake in such actions could quickly be identified and banned from participating in the relevant online environments. Without the likelihood of coordinated collective action, isolated dissent can be recognized and eradicated, and personae non gratae can be swiftly removed and replaced. Gaining leverage in a domain of activity is exceptionally hard when the particular labor someone provides is not only considered largely expendable but also easily replaceable. Translation is a porous profession, and its current incapacity to foster collective action is directly related to the absence of its prerequisite, a solid sense of collective identity. It is an open question whether this situation can be remedied. Accreditations, associations, and professional organizations may play an important role in the consolidation of a collective identity among a select number of individuals active in the field, but ultimately, they do not, cannot, and should not determine the scope of concrete translation work. So much activity takes place at the edges of the profession, that it may just as well be considered to constitute its center. Working toward a sustainable sense of community among those involved in translation work could primarily start with a dismissal of internal divisions. At present, the increased reliance on machine translation has caused considerable ‘automation anxiety’ among professional translators, and negative sentiments toward the technology and its economic implications are common (Vieira, 2020). It is imperative, however, that engineers and researchers involved in the technology’s developments are recognized as workers in the same industry, rather than antagonists. In 2016, machines already translated ‘roughly 100 times more than the total production of the global human translation workforce’ (van der Meer, 2020, p. 288). Behind those machines, however, is a workforce as well, and its position is often as precarious as that of other translation professionals. The impact of machine translation also involves the rise of new translation tasks and concurrent job descriptions. Postediting tasks, for instance, now constitute an important part of the market, and effectively working with machine translation output requires considerable experience and expertise (Temizöz, 2016). It is therefore important that workflow differences are not perceived as legitimate grounds for labor devaluation. Slight differences in status perception are unavoidable in any field of work, including the translation profession. Conference interpreters, for instance, are commonly considered to be the most skilled and valued members (Dam & Zethsen, 2013). There is nothing inherently objectionable about the recognition of merit and achievement, as long as the resulting hierarchy does not serve to justify the exploitation of less visible, and less recognized workers. Similarly, current concerns about automation often result in the advice that translators seek out niches that supposedly require a higher amount of creativity. Translation is then contrasted with occupations such as localization and transcreation. Academia does not have to uncritically accept that such marketing terms refer to essentially distinct practices, even if the terminology chimes with established theoretical nuances (Pedersen, 2014). In the field of TS, the concept of translation has found ever-expanding applications, whereas in industry, its scope seems to become increasingly narrow. This conflicted development is worthy of reflection, not in the least in terms of its effect on the mutual recognition of those engaged in language labor. An inclusive view of translation and the activities it entails is essential for the formation of strong alliances that can withstand the pressure of economic constraints. However, the many varieties of work recognizable as translation also preclude the formation of definitive conceptual boundaries. Not even to mention the complexities of ephemeral oral messages, the notion that most translation processes consist of a single source and target text, generated by a single pair of individuals, has long been discredited by the proliferation of practices such as 275

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indirect and collaborative translation (Assis Rosa et al., 2017). Translation is a mimetic activity and is therefore concerned with processes of repetition and expansion that are essentially unbounded. Consider, for instance, the phenomenon of the internet meme, a derivative unit of cultural replication central to twenty-first-century digital culture, which poses particular challenges to the remnants of conceptions that limit translation to a circumscribed process of linguistic transfer (Maitland, 2017, pp. 38–40). Internet memes are not static objects, they depend on recognizable but modifiable visual ‘contours,’ and thrive on the capacity to be repeatedly ‘altered and repurposed (Pelletier-Gagnon & Diniz, 2021, p. 4). They are exemplary of an ever more ‘accelerative culture,’ in which inertia is continually challenged by processes of transformation, adaptation, and appropriation (Urban, 2001). The recognizability of memes serves as means of social unification, while their malleability makes them suitable for varied purposes of discursive contestation, and in this respect, they have become an important tool of cultural critique and political protest (Soh, 2020). The sphere of memetic production is characterized by the convergence of different media and modalities, and by a prosumer model to which the professional/non-professional distinction is largely irrelevant, as are notions of ownership and attribution. Yet, does the use of memes by corporations as part of their branding strategy mean that cognitive labor is monetized, without workers being compensated? And what essentially separates subtitling, for instance, from the modification of linguistic elements in popular meme formats consisting of visual and textual elements? The conventual conceptual limits of what constitutes translation, professional or otherwise, rest on tacit institutional agreements, but the reality of semiotic activity increasingly pushes for a revision of received restrictions. In this sense, an inclusive yet anchored view is important to curtail further division, but the collective perspective required to engage in coordinated political action can ultimately not be realized by means of a concrete conception of the activities that constitute translation work. Only a broader engagement with the conditions that characterize today’s precariat, namely ‘unstable labour arrangements, lack of identity, and erosion of rights,’ can provide the basis for a sustainable committed position (Standing, 2019). The potential role of academia is self-evident in this regard. Energy invested in the study of activism and translation can be directed toward considerations of the position of language labor as a field of economic rather than cultural struggle. These concerns are not mutually exclusive, but at present, the balance leaves room for adjustment.

Departure At various points, this chapter has stressed a belief in linguistic relativity as a central component of activist engagement with language. Broadening conceptual horizons, subverting representations, and adapting modes of communication to ethical ideals are seen as endeavors charged with political significance. The conviction that representation can function as an effective tool of social transformation is predicated on the assumption that linguistic structure and social structure are thoroughly intertwined. In many instances, this assumption goes hand in hand with a desire for intersemiotic correspondence – equivalence, if you will – between language and social reality: text and context are envisaged to run parallel if only enough pressure is exerted from either side. Accepting this premise, however, does not mean that one can overthrow the symbolic order and its social equivalent in a single revolutionary speech act. Resistance to the system encoded in any means of communication proceeds by minor interventions that signify more radical aspirations. Metonymic choices thus connect minor engaged practices to the major belief systems they announce. This also means, 276

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however, that much activism, particularly of the linguistic variety, is performative in nature: it only seems to be effective – or even possible, perhaps – when certain contextual conditions promise its felicitous reception (Tymoczko, 2010). In this sense, activist translation and its academic description are always partly means of preaching to the converted. This does not imply a lack of efficacy. As culture is mimetic in nature, imitation governs much social interaction, and the communally converted tend to inspire, at least, a sense of curiosity. It does mean, however, that there is seemingly no escape from the oppressive accumulation of norms that accompanies much ethically inspired behavior, linguistic or otherwise. Norms require conformity, as one can hardly preach in the absence of a set of scrupulously observed principles. Much work on activism in translation has focused on a principled rejection of the binaries and boundaries of old, in favor of a vision of an in-between that can accommodate plurality and diversity. Large commercial enterprises such as fashion labels and popular tv shows tend to propagate a similar discourse, and it can hardly go unnoticed that, for some time now, ‘difference, diversity and destabilization [have been] the dernier cri of the transnational corporations’ (Eagleton, 2003, p. xvi). In tandem with our hyperconnected mediascape, difference opens up the space for discourse, and, as Jodi Dean has argued in her discussion of ‘communicative capitalism,’ it might exactly be ‘the intense circulation of content’ that ‘forecloses the antagonism necessary for politics’ (Dean, 2005, p. 54). Similarly, Franco Berardi speaks of ‘semiocapitalism,’ a mode of production that is no longer primarily concerned with material commodities, but with the proliferation of ‘signs, figures, images, projections, [and] expectations’ at a speed and volume that strains the mind and stifles the body (Berardi, 2011, p. 77). If communication itself is compromised, and part of our predicament, it might not be unwise to take a step back from accentuating differences and ever more nuanced discursive positions. A different gesture might be needed to enact a productive rupture in signification. As Slavoj Žižek has argued, Bartleby’s defiant choice to passively prefer rather than to actively resist might provide a point of departure. Consider the refreshing effect of Bartleby’s ‘I prefer not to’ when applied to a set of recognizable contemporary interactions: “There are great chances of a new career here! Join us!”—“I would prefer not to”; but also “Discover the depths of your true self, find inner peace!”—“I would prefer not to”; or “Are you aware how our environment is endangered? Do something for ecology!”—“I would prefer not to”; or “What about all the racial and sexual injustices that we witness all around us? Isn’t it time to do more?”—“I would prefer not to.” (Žižek, 2006, p. 382) What is it that Bartleby’s politics offer, beyond the apparent dismissal of any particular engagement? First, in the study and practice of activism, a common notion circulates that ‘formulating requests implies accepting those who are in power’ (Woolf, 2012, p. 141). One cannot ask, or even demand, changes from an exploitative system without acknowledging the mechanisms of communication considered legitimate within its dominion. Bartleby, in a possible interpretation of the character’s significance, is ungovernable, precisely because he interprets every command as a request, thus never accepting a subordinate enunciative position. Furthermore, he does not offer an alternative ideological framework or set of norms that would justify his preferences, and that would therefore simply subject him to another set of rigid principles. Principles tend to be unnegotiable, but preferences might change. More importantly, perhaps, Bartleby’s road to mute martyrdom exposes structures of domination that tend to operate beneath the surface. By occupying a position without conforming to 277

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the normative expectations that come with it, a process is set in motion that subjects him to increasingly coercive measures of control. While Bartleby commits no acts of violence or vandalism, the enigma of his apparently unproductive presence eventually leads to police intervention and imprisonment. That is to say, the unpredictability and confusion introduced by the preference not to engage prompts the imposition of excessive constraints. It is no wonder, then, as was mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, that Bartleby came to serve as a fictional figurehead of the OWS movement. The use of excessive force against mostly passive protesters was a major catalyst for the occupation’s early growth. OWS, as the story goes, was instigated by an announcement on the website of Adbusters, an activist, non-profit media foundation known for its culture jamming campaigns. Culture jamming ‘reacts to the loss of control over information and representation’ by relying on ‘guerrilla communications tactics’ to ‘reclaim independent thought and public spaces from the control and influence of ubiquitous media culture’ (Kuehn, 2015, p. 226). The concept is closely related to that of détournement, denoting a technique to artistically unsettle the collective imagination, often by means of confounding bricolages or ensembles of pre-existing cultural material, in order to illustrate ‘the limitations of existing social practices’ and thus to ‘reveal the inadequacy of the present’ (Bonnett, 1999, p. 25, 28). As it involves the appropriation and modification of media products, culture jamming has been discussed in terms of semiological or memetic ‘warfare,’ yet contrary to the hyperbolic assumption of impact suggested by such designations, the practice has also been questioned on the grounds that its supposedly crucial output can easily be ‘recuperated by commercial interests and integrated back into the market system’ (Carducci, 2006, p. 118). In a market system that thrives on semiocapitalist production, the creation of supposedly subversive material perhaps adds little more than yet another set of messages from which value can be extracted. If a countercultural message can be understood, it can be appropriated, repackaged, and resold. At this point, however, one is reminded of the absence of clear demands characterizing OWS. What truly startled the media reporting on OWS, was people’s dedication to the occupation, and its global success, despite the absence of an integrated set of principles and demands. Surely, a critique of the politico-financial complex was central to the movement, but no definitive set of ideals guided its expansion. On the one hand, the absence of a solid core made the movement inclusive of a broad variety of expressions of disaffection and discontent. On the other hand, it spelled its swift demise. Similarly, Bartleby the Scrivener refuses to provide an intelligible representation of himself, refuses to enter the cycle of production and consumption (he barely eats), and ultimately dies an early death. Neither the literary figure nor the protest movement that irked Wall Street had any major direct consequences, but their prolonged afterlife illustrates that they place, after all, continued demands on the socio-political imagination. In the story, Bartleby’s unaccountable presence threatens to steer his highly structured environment toward disorder, and the forceful reaction of a repressive apparatus is a direct consequence of his true occupation: Bartleby is engaged in entropic work. The core of his intervention is not the refusal to work, but the persistence he displays in maintaining his position. If he does not budge, everything else has to. That is to say, rather than contributing to the ongoing stream of representations that characterizes his environment, he minimizes constraints imposed on the semiotic process and thus creates the space for incongruent interpretations to arise. For a brief moment, the information does not circulate, the tradosphere is interrupted, and communication can only be reinstated by disproportionate measures on the part of a system confronted with potential disintegration. The final question, then, is why Bartleby is known as the scrivener, despite abandoning his tasks as a copyist after mere 278

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days. While this question might lack a comprehensive answer, it does serve as a reminder of the fact that labor, or work, is a cultural category. The recognition of a profession, its principles, and its normative expectations of conformity, are among the most pervasive social constructs that structure public space. If, earlier in this chapter, it was argued that energy invested in the study of activism and translation could be directed toward considerations of language labor as a field of economic rather than cultural struggle, the first step may be to examine this distinction further; not to performatively reject the binary or to create another space in between both perspectives, but to assess the conditions of their profound interdependence.

Notes

References Ahearn, L. M. (2017). Living Language: An Introduction to Linguistic Anthropology, 2nd edition. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell. Ajayi, F. (2021). Translation, Resistance and National Consciousness in the Nigerian Postcolony. In A. Almanna & C. Gu. (Eds.), Translation as a Set of Frames (pp. 80–94). Abingdon: Routledge. Assis Rosa, A., Pięta, H., & Bueno Maia, R. (2017). Theoretical, Methodological and Terminological Issues Regarding Indirect Translation: An Overview. Translation Studies, 10(2), 113–132. Babels Coordination (2016). Babels Will Not Participate in WSF 2016: Notification Letter to IC & OC of WSF 2016. Available at: http://www.babels.org/spip.php?article568 Baker, M. (2016a). Beyond the spectacle: Translation and Solidarity in Contemporary Protest Movements. In M. Baker (Ed.), Translating Dissent: Voices from and with the Egyptian Revolution (pp. 1–18). Abingdon: Routledge. Baker, M. (2016b). The Prefigurative Politics of Translation in Place-Based Movements of Protest. The Translator, 22(1), 1–21. Baker, M. (2018). Audiovisual Translation and Activism. In L. Pérez-González (Ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Audiovisual Translation (pp. 453–467). Abingdon: Routledge. Baker, M. (2020). Translation and Solidarity in the Century with no Future: Prefiguration Vs. Aspirational Translation. Palgrave Communications, 6(23), 1–10. Baker, M., & Piróth, A. (2020). Volunteerism in Translation: Translators Without Borders and the Platform Economy. In E. Bielsa & D. Kapsakis (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Globalization (pp. 406–424). Abingdon: Routledge. Baldo, M. (2020). Activist Translation, Alliances, and Performativity: Translating Judith Butler’s Notes Towards a Performative Theory of Assembly into Italian. In R. Gould & K. Tahmasebian (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Activism (pp. 30–48). Abingdon: Routledge. Bandia, P. F. (2020). Afterword: Postcolonialism, Activism, and Translation. In R. Gould & K. Tahmasebian (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Activism (pp. 515–520). Abingdon: Routledge. Barker, J. (2002). Alain Badiou: A Critical Introduction. London: Pluto Press. Bassnett, S. & Trivedi, H. (1999). Introduction: Of Colonies, Cannibals and Vernaculars. In S. Bassnett & H. Trivedi (Eds.), Postcolonial Translation: Theory and Practice. London & New York: Routledge. Bellos, D. (2011). Is that a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything. London: Penguin. Bennett, K. (2012). At the Selvedges of Discourse: Negotiating the “in-Between” in Translation Studies. Word and Text, 2(2), 43–61. Berardi, F. (2011). After the Future (G. Genosko & N. Thoburn, Eds.) (A. Bove, M. Cooper, E. Empson, G. Mecchia & T. Terranova, Trans.). Oakland: AK Press. 279

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Boéri, J. (2012). Translation/Interpreting Politics and Praxis: The Impact of Political Principles on Babels’ Interpreting Practice. The Translator, 18(2), 269–290. Boéri, J., & Delgado Luchner, C. (2020). Ethics of Activist Translation and Interpreting. In K. Koskinen & N. K. Pokorn (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Ethics (pp. 245–261). Abingdon: Routledge. Boéri, J., & Maier, C. (2010). Translation/Interpreting and Social Activism/Compromiso Socialy Traducción/ Interpretación. Granada: ECOS. Boggs, C. (1977). Marxism, Prefigurative Communism and the Problem of Workers. Radical America, 11(6)/12(1), 99–122. Bonnett, A. (1999). Situationist Strategies and Mutant Technologies. Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 4(2), 25–32. Buts, J. (2019). Political Concepts and Prefiguration: A Corpus-Assisted Enquiry into Democracy, Politics, and Community. [Doctoral dissertation, University of Manchester, UK]. Available at: https://www. research.manchester.ac.uk/portal/files/156332957/FULL_TEXT.PDF Buts, J. (2020). Translation and Prefiguration: Consolidating a Conceptual Encounter. Perspectives, 28(2), 224–237. Carducci, V. (2006). Culture Jamming: A Sociological Perspective. Journal of Consumer Culture, 6(1), 116–138. Castronovo, R. (2014). Occupy Bartleby. The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, 2(2), 253–272. Castro Vázquez, O. (2010). Non-Sexist Translation and/in Social Change: Gender Issues in Translation. In J. Boéri & C. Maier (Eds.), Translation/Interpreting and Social Activism/Compromiso Social y Traducción/Interpretación (pp.106–120). Granada: ECOS. Castro, O., & Ergun, E. (2018). Translation and Feminism. In F. Fernández & J. Evans (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Politics (pp. 125–143). Abingdon: Routledge. Chamberlain, L. (1988). Gender and the Metaphorics of Translation. Signs, 13(3), 454–472. Curzan, A. (2014). Fixing English: Prescriptivism and Language History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dam, H. V., & Zethsen, K. K. (2013). Conference Interpreters – The Stars of the Translation Profession? A Study of the Occupational Status of Danish EU Interpreters as Compared to Danish EU Translators. Interpreting, 15(2), 229–259. Dean, J. (2005). Communicative Capitalism: Circulation and the Foreclosure of Politics. Cultural Politics, 1(1), 51–74. De Lotbinière-Harwood, S. (1990). About the Her in Other. In L. Gauvin (Ed.), Letters from Another (pp. 9–12). Toronto: Women’s Press. Desjardins, R. (2017). Translation and Social Media: In Theory, in Training, and in Professional Practice. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Doerr, N. (2021). Social Movements and Translation. In Z. G. Capan, F. dos Reis & M. Grasten (Eds.), The Politics of Translation in International Relations (pp. 151–171). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Eagleton, T. (2003) Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic. Malden: Blackwell Publishing. Edelman, L. (2013). Occupy Wall Street: “Bartleby” Against the Humanities. History of the Present, 3(1), 99–118. Fernández, F. (2021). Translating the Crisis: Politics and Culture in Spain After the 15M. Abingdon: Routledge. Fırat, G. (2021). Uberization of Translation: Impacts on Working Conditions. The Journal of Internationalization and Localization, 8(1), 48–75. Flesher Fominaya, C. (2014). Social Movements and Globalization: How Protests, Occupations and Uprisings are Changing the World. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Gould, R. R., & Tahmasebian, K. (Eds.) (2020a). The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Activism. Abingdon: Routledge. Gould, R. R., & Tahmasebian, K. (2020b). Introduction: Translation and Activism in the Time of the Now. In R. Gould & K. Tahmasebian (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Activism (pp. 1–9). Abingdon: Routledge. Graeber, D. (2013). The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement. London: Penguin. Halmari, H. (2011). Political Correctness, Euphemism, and Language Change: The Case of ‘People First’. Journal of Pragmatics, 43, 828–840. Hughes, G. (2010). Political Correctness: A History of Semantics and Culture. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Krips, H. (2012). Politics of Overconformity: Bartleby Meets Žižek. Communication and Critical/ Cultural Studies, 9(3), 307–316. 280

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15 Anthropological approaches Peter Flynn

Preamble: contextualizing the chapter When I was asked by the editors to write a chapter on anthropological approaches to translation, my knee-jerk reaction was to ask: ‘shouldn’t it be the other way around, i.e., translational approaches to anthropology?’ Should translation not be surely subsumed under anthropology as the larger area of study and human concern? Even though anthropologists may be unfamiliar with developments in Translation Studies (TS) over the last few decades, translation has been no stranger to them. As the anthropologist, George Marcus notes, ‘[c]ultural translation, which is what ethnography is, never fully assimilates difference. In any attempt to interpret or explain another cultural subject, a surplus of difference always remains, partly created by the process of ethnographic communication itself.’ (Marcus, 1998, p. 18). Cultural translation, in turn, has been a much-written-about topic in TS in recent years, but to go as far as to equate it with ethnography might be considered rather strange. That ethnography, such a vital aspect of anthropology, is called cultural translation should have set a considerable number of bells ringing among TS scholars. It certainly has been noted1 (see D’hulst, 2008 & Conway, 2012, inter alia). The wording in Marcus’s quote and the intensity of the undertaking it implies can easily be conceived as a possible research agenda in TS. In fact, culture and recently cultural translation, have been the cornerstone of debate in TS since the cultural turn (Snell-Hornby, 2006). This turn proved to be more of a turning away from rather than an engagement with what it was putatively opposed to, namely purely linguistic approaches to translation, whatever that might mean. Such antagonistic moves are not uncommon in TS or in any other discipline, for that matter, but this proves problematic in a semiotics of translation where all aspects of meaning-making would have to be brought into play, including those niggling pragmatic meanings of words in given contexts that are the cause of so much debate. All this might lead to a discussion about who came first and to often-voiced remarks about academic overspecialization and lack of communication between disciplines. But rather than go on that wild goose chase, I am forced to return to the topsy-turvy position I had been placed in when asked to write a chapter on anthropological approaches to translation and, while noting the plural in approaches, try to come to terms with the request. This first means getting my bearings in seemingly uncharted waters. A perusal of the brief sent to the authors DOI: 10.4324/9781003161448-19

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and a document setting out the editors’ rationale for the book helped. First, translation is defined by the editors as ‘the work performed to constrain a semiosic process.’ This is a very broad, though somewhat unusual, definition of translation that in itself opens various avenues of investigation, not to mention those viewed from an anthropological perspective. The term ‘work’ first requires further definition. Where are we to turn: to physics, to Marx or the arts? We can move from physics and the energy transferred from one form or place to another, to Marx and his view that work in human terms is not a necessary evil but something that can be creative and fulfilling and then to the arts and to poesis and the notion of a poem as being a ‘made’ thing, even though some of the elements involved in its making still seem to elude us. These views seem to coalesce at a given level, but any form of work will still have to be viewed contextually, which means bringing in all the elements involved in order to avoid a purely mentalist view of the term suggested by the word’s energy and poesis. Given that semiosic process is probably endless, layered and multidirectional, discovering what the nature of the work performed is, along with the constraints that (types of ) work assert, is of vital importance in arriving at any idea of translation in a pragmatic contextual sense. It is worth pointing out in passing that this new definition of translation resonates quite strongly with Clifford Geertz’s take on culture and the line of inquiry he planned to pursue in relation to it: The concept of culture I espouse, … is essentially a semiotic one. Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning. (Geertz, 1973, p. 5) The recognition, pursuit and investigation of layered semiotic complexity and its subsequent transfer are inherent in both. Work is also present in both, though more explicit in the second: spinning. This raises the question as to where we should find (or invent perhaps) the (conceptual) tools to work with to complete the task, and place is not an unimportant aspect of discovery or invention. It is not inconceivable that already existing tools and models in TS will serve to come to grips with this new definition of translation 2. The job here, however, is to go casting about in the world of anthropology for other sets of tools and models and the general approaches that engender them. These tools are available and either stem directly from semiotics or compliment a general semiotic view of cultural and ecological practices. This of course brings along with it the question of the relation between nature and culture. This relation has been discussed in depth in anthropology. The references are too numerous to mention here but in terms of groundwork, Geertz (1973, pp. 33–83) is certainly still relevant as is Ingold (2018). As Geertz argues, humans didn’t arrive all of a piece: forms of culture have ‘moulded man somatically; and they are, therefore, necessary not merely to his survival but to his existential realization’ (Geertz, 1973, pp. 82–83). Though Geertz’s reasoning can be termed anthropocentric, the interconnections he makes between nature and culture keep the door open for possible semiotic processes and exchanges beyond the human. In a similar vein, before the turn of the century, Ingold had set out to show how every human being – at once a living organism bound with other organisms in what ecologists would call the ‘web of life’, and a person bound with other persons in a network of social relations – participates simultaneously in two systems, respectively ecological and social.. (2018, p. 94) 284

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In this respect, the editors had already informed us that calls for expanded definitions of translation meant ‘defining translation not only in linguistic and anthropocentric terms but as a semiotic process that takes place in and between all (living) organisms – human and non-human alike.’ So, the topsy-turvy position I believed I was in initially proved to be a wholly different position altogether. Although I was left to discover what anthropological approaches to translation might consist in, which also means asking which branches of anthropology might be fruitful to include and explore, I found out that anthropology and its broader concern with humanity (Eriksen, 2001) had been placed within an even broader and more vital concern, that of the ‘interconnectedness of all human and non-human activities,’ translation then being encompassed by biosemiotics (Marais, 2019) or the notion of eco-translation (Cronin, 2017), notions which, to be fair, are also familiar to anthropologists albeit in other forms or guises, something we will turn to as the chapter unfolds. Next to this, the requested piece would be part of Chapter 4 Representamen translation. I take this to be a sub-element of a general semiotics of translation that has a particular focus within the whole. It involves considerations with regard to translating signs or sign vehicles (Peirce, 1940, p. 80). According to Peirce, a ‘representamen’ or sign ‘is something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity’ (Peirce, 1940, p. 99). In the context of this chapter, anthropology would then stand to somebody for a (particular) view or set of views on translation. But we cannot forget the proviso visible in the words ‘in some respect or capacity.’ This ushers in degrees of (in)completeness, overlap and partiality3 and the constant presence of context in tying down meaning, whatever way we choose to define it. This incompleteness is visible in the Marcus quote at the beginning of this subsection but equally so in Maria Tymoczko’s notion of the ‘metonymics’ of translation, albeit in relation to the translation of oral literature: The way in which a literary text represents metonymically features of its literary system and ultimately features of its whole culture is what makes translating a text of a marginalized culture so difficult. (Tymoczko, 1999, p. 46) Moreover, an anthropologist reading this quote might be tempted to reverse the sentence and say in the context of this chapter that translation would stand to somebody for a (particular) view or set of views on anthropology. Both readings are possible in the Marcus and Tymoczko quotes. This might point to shared methodological and conceptual moves both in the various branches of anthropology and in areas of TS, all of which hinge on our understanding of translation and the complexity it attempts to describe and tentatively explain over time. But we’ve already been advised by the editors to steer clear of literary-centric and anthropocentric takes on translation, be they from anthropology or TS, which means steering by the bearings we’ve been given for the purposes of this investigative voyage.

Association through juxtaposition: Semiotics, Anthropology and Translation Studies In what follows, an outline will be made of anthropological approaches to representamen translation that would prove useful to translation scholars who are interested in a semiotics of translation encompassing human and non-human activities. As anthropologists (and translation scholars) have long been interested in semiotics as such, it seems advisable to proceed by first tracing this interest among anthropologists in order to show how they have harnessed 285

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(Peircean) semiotics to help them frame and explain the cultural complexities they observe in the field. The next move is to trace other forms of observation and analysis that do not specifically adhere to semiotics in the stricter sense but nonetheless have a semiotic remit (viz. symbolic anthropology, for example). As the editors stress ‘interconnectedness of all human and non-human activities’ in the semiotic process, the third move is to examine how anthropologists have dealt with this in their work. The final and at this stage very tentative move would be to link these three areas of inquiry to TS. This will involve a form of association by juxtaposition, as it would be arrogant at this stage to challenge basic understandings of what translation is in anthropology and TS. Making these moves means returning to semiotics or at least using it as a point of departure. On the face of it, semiotics offers us a unified theory of and approach to understanding signs and sign systems of all types and their meaning in their various contexts. A unified theory is an attractive prospect, especially within TS, which is becoming increasingly fragmented both in terms of theory and objects of study (Marais, 2019). In making a case for semiotics and for a unified theory of translation as early as 1994, Gorlée notes that TS ‘is marked by an eclectic attitude, displaying a syncretism of ‘borrowed’ methods, paradigms and models, often with a linguistic (sociolinguistic, ethnolinguistic, etc.)’ bias (Gorlée, 1994, p. 11). Arguably, the same can be said of anthropology but then moving in the opposite direction, whereby an extraneous premodifier constrains the radius of action of the main noun or as Kapferer points out, ‘anthropology is becoming increasingly an adjunct discipline – Business Anthropology, Design Anthropology, Medical Anthropology, Neuroanthropology, and so on’ (Kapferer, 2013, p. 814). However, he also says that, There is virtually no limit to what the discipline can encompass, and the debates that constitute the intellectual life of the space that anthropology embraces refract many of those that take place within and across those areas of intellectual inquiry that otherwise form separate disciplines or enclaves within the modern university. (Kapferer, 2013, p. 813) So, are there any benefits to be gained from proposing or finding a unified theory for so vast an intellectual undertaking? By contrast, TS is a relatively recent university discipline with perhaps less ambitious goals and cannot rely on the long history and steady accumulation of knowledge that anthropologists can fall back on. This is rather paradoxical, as there are works tracing the long history of translation theory and practices (Robinson, 1997, Weissbort & Eysteinsson, 2006, D’hulst & Gambier, 2018). Moreover, theorizing about translation is quite an ancient practice compared to that in anthropology. But until very recently, this theorization has been conducted in a scattered and inconsistent way, in contrast to anthropology within which there has been a concerted shared effort at theorization for more than a century. A unified theory of translation based on semiotics might indeed prevent things from falling apart in the discipline but there do not seem to be that many urgent calls to do so. This might have something to do with semiotics itself. As Glick remarks, Though it has its own widely cited central theorists, theoretical schools, and areas of study, it is not widely institutionalized as a formal discipline in academics. Perhaps for this reason, semiotic theory and practice extends across many distinct areas of social life… Indeed, it is clear that not all those conducting semiotic work are aware of other theorists and the applications and debates to which their work is tied. (Glick, 2013) 286

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In a similar vein, Rigney points out, ‘“Semiotics” refers to an interdisciplinary branch of scholarship that is concerned with the systematic study of the production and reception of signs in society.’ (Rigney in Beller & Leerssen, 2007, p. 421). Pointing to the period when “the history of semiotics coincided with that of structuralism’ (Rigney in Beller & Leerssen, 2007, p. 423) and its manifest concern with difference in signification invariably expressed in terms of binary oppositions, Rigney goes on the say the following: Semiotics has perhaps been the most important movement in twentieth century culture studies. In its heyday of the 1970s and early 80s, it seemed that semiotics was going to provide a paradigm for many disciplines and a new framework for looking at culture. Despite promising beginnings and concerted efforts to establish it as a “meta-discipline” within the study of culture, semiotics as such is something we hear less of nowadays. (Rigney in Beller & Leerssen, 2007, pp. 423–424) Was it because of this huge remit of study, which is not far removed from that of anthropology, that it has not become a university discipline or a ‘meta-discipline’ in its own right, except in certain well-known places like Tartu? Or was it because of its entanglements with structuralism and the overly narrow confines of binary thinking? It is clear that semiotics has not gone away, but on a more particular note, perhaps ironically and certainly not intentionally, we are also confronted by fragmentation here in TS from the outset. Though consistently present, semiotics is not the main focus of attention but rather translation and more specifically a (bio)semiotics of translation and possible anthropological approaches to it. We will now turn to various areas in anthropology in an attempt to discover approaches to translation within them that draw directly on semiotics or resonate with them.

Semiotic anthropology and translation In tracing the emergence of semiotic anthropology (Singer, 1985, 2012), a line is usually drawn from Malinowski’s work and contemporary interconnections with Peircean thought (see Ogden & Richards, 1923) to Firth’s writings, on through a re-evaluation of Peircean semiotics and the founding of semiotic anthropology by Singer in 1976, followed by important contributions to semiotic anthropology by Michael Silverstein. Silverstein’s readings of Peircean semiotics, especially his understanding of indexicality, have found their way into various areas of linguistic anthropology and contemporary sociolinguistics. To outline recent developments in semiotic anthropology, we would have to quote Merz (2007) verbatim to do any justice to the topic. However, we will limit ourselves only to those developments that are important for translation. Firstly, she notes the challenge of locating ‘cultural analyses in a broader contextual framework” that go beyond “standard linguistic and cultural analyses … that focus on symbolic or conventional meaning.’ (Mertz, 2007, p. 339). She then traces the move from symbolic anthropology, largely associated with Geertz, and its overlap with and shift toward semiotic anthropology. She notes how, according to Geertz, cultural analyses of meaning should also include ‘political, economic and stratificatory realities’ (Mertz, 2007, p. 340). Similarly, she points to how Victor Turner, though he ostensibly analyzed symbols … of culture… also argued for the importance of social and historical context (Mertz, 2007, p. 340). Let us now turn to Turner’s work. Turner is well known for introducing the terms liminal and liminoid (Turner 2020) to the humanities but also offers us other important distinctions that can help deepen our understanding of meaning-making (semiosis) in translation. The 287

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importance of Turner’s distinctions in meaning-making is first that they emerge from observation (a constant in anthropological theorization) and are not merely language-based. For example, Turner says that he likes ‘to think of ritual as performance, enactment, not primarily as rules and rubrics.’ (Turner, 1982, p. 79). So, the focus here is on the process, a point stressed by the editors of this volume in relation to semiotics. Turner considered all aspects of ritual, including the objects and non-verbal symbols used in its performance, as vital to meaning-making. He posited three kinds of meanings that emerge in ritual performance: Exegetical meaning, or an explanation of a word or symbol, Operational meaning, or the way a symbol is used and Positional meaning, or how a symbol is used to make sense of the world as part of a complex of symbols (Turner, 1967). Turner viewed ritual and its performance as part of the redressive machinery that attempts to restore peace in ever-evolving social dramas (a term he coined that resonates with Goffman’s dramaturgy, but which views social interaction from another perspective) (Turner, 1982, p. 10). He draws a line between ritual and the emergence of other ‘aesthetic’ genres that open up spaces to reflect on the human condition (‘social metacommentaries’ according to Geertz in Turner 1982, p. 79) and by extension on our relation to the world: ‘new communication techniques and media may make possible new modes of self-understanding.’ (Turner, 1982, p. 79). Turner also considers ritual as work, which brings us back to the definition of translation proposed by the editors above as ‘the work performed to constrain a semiosic process.’ Turner discusses the concept of work in relation to ritual in some detail before concluding the following: perhaps it would be better to regard the distinction between “work” and “play” or better between “work” and “leisure” … as itself an artifact of the Industrial Revolution, and to see such expressive genres as ritual and myth as being at once work and play…” (Turner, 1982, p. 32) Some interesting connections can be made with regard to a semiosis of translation if we examine these three types of meaning and the notion of work. Until a couple of decades ago, meaning in translation was coterminous with words or with text at the most (Exegetic meaning). It was disembodied and contextless, as a result of which there could only be one (often contested) meaning, mainly that of the dictionary. The ‘work performed to constrain the semiosic process’ hence moved outward from the sentence as a basic unit of symbolic meaning in the encompassing framework of a language system within which meaning unfolds. But work is understood here as being both physical, in the traditional sense, and symbolic, and this is not merely in the narrow Peircean sense of the symbol. In the enactment of a ritual and, by analogy, of any genre, participants use language and other semiotic materials and tools to achieve certain communicative and other purposes. The three types of meaning discerned by Turner (exegetic, operational and positional) emerge together from that performance. As Mertz remarks elsewhere: Ecclesiastics’ maxim does not hold here: there is no ‘time’ (or medium or locus) for seemingly separate things to be performed separately, inter alia, because, in the complexity of communication, things are never that separate. (Mertz & Yovel, 2000, p. 9) In translational terms, exegetic meaning is given by the translator/interpreter in the process of translational interaction itself, be it court interpreting or translating for the theatre (see the discussion of Pike’s notions of emic an etic below). Such meaning-making can take 288

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on various forms well known to translation scholars, such as explicitation, implicitation, attempts at ‘equivalence,’ etc. Operational meaning is built into and emerges from achieving the interaction in numerous ways, for example in the way interpreters prepare, orient themselves and gesture toward co-participants or engage with tools and other aids while interpreting (Duflou, 2016), or in how translators use tools and draw on other semiotic materials during their work (see Cronin, 2002 on ‘exosomatic’ aspects of translation). Positional meaning becomes visible in the larger context of shared or differentiated translation and interpretation practices and related artifacts and also finds expression there in terms of translatorial ethos (Flynn, 2007). In translational terms, exegetic and positional meanings are where we can locate difference and incompleteness in relation to symbols and semiosis, as pointed out by Marcus and Tymoczko (supra). All of these meanings emerging from translation hinge on an engagement with Otherness. Using Turner’s distinctions allows us to tie together the various elements of translation as a social practice in a cogent way and provide a broader and deeper understanding of translational semiosis that is not only language-based but socially and culturally situated. In this respect, it is safe to assert that, until recently, translation scholars were mainly concerned with exegetical meaning. But it is also important to point out that the work performed to constrain the semiosic process, and the meaning-making involved, whether it is inter- or intra-systemic, is first and foremost constrained by the genre4 within which the semiotic activity is taking place and not by the overarching semiotic system in which it is couched as such (Bakhtin & Medvedev, 1985, p. 133; Vološinov, 1986, p. 90). In terms of genre, different sets of higher order (semiotic) ‘orienting frameworks, interpretive procedures, and sets of expectations’ (Hanks, 1987, p. 670) are brought into play, depending on whether we are asked to translate a manual for a power tool or a play by Racine. This all precedes any language system considerations regarding grammar, word choice, etc. Following Mertz, who traces the shift from symbolic to semiotic anthropology (Mertz, 2007, pp. 340–341), we now turn to the work of Michael Silverstein, who according to Mertz ‘refocussed the field’s attention on the importance of pragmatic and indexical aspects of language and culture.’ Silverstein also addresses translation as an actual practice within anthropology (Silverstein in Rubel & Rosman, 2003, pp. 75–105). An exploration of Silverstein’s work does, however, bring us back to what might be called a lingo-centric perspective, but it is important to pause for a moment and consider Silverstein’s view. Rather early on in his chapter, he makes the following rather provocative statement regarding the practice of translation in anthropology: This ideological focus on denotational translation 5 – coherent language-as-used to represent states-of-affairs involving things-in-universes-of-references – provides the benchmark as well as starting point for millennia of wishful as well as wistful theorising about “translation” and its various (im)possibilities. (Silverstein in Rubel & Rosman, 2003, p. 76) This quote is followed by a highly technical discussion on how to achieve these ideal conditions, through a ‘calibration’ of linguistic systems (once advocated by Whorf ), for the translation of deixis and inter-linear glosses, a typical element in any ethnography and something that Nord would categorize under documentary translation (Nord, 1997, pp. 47–50). This technical discussion on calibration is somehow reminiscent of Koller’s detailed taxonomy of equivalences (Koller, 1976). It is also worth mentioning that Koller also wrote on ‘semiotic equivalence’6 (Koller, 2004), but unfortunately the debate on equivalence in TS had long 289

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since fizzled out. Silverstein then moves on to what he calls translation as transduction. He takes time to explain the term and why it is appropriate to account for iconic and indexical aspects of language use in translation: These indexical and iconic values of words and expressions in co(n)textualized texts constitute a distinct area of problems we must consider for the would-be translator, because they rely on a different approach to “translation” than the clear-cut areas of Saussurean and deictic denotation, one that takes account of rather distinct semiotic properties. (Silverstein in Rubel & Rosman, 2003, p. 83) In transduction, ‘one form of organized energy is asymmetrically converted into another kind of energy’ (Silverstein in Rubel & Rosman, 2003, p. 83) and this energy is housed in iconic and indexical aspects of language use, some of which is lost during the conversion process as result of ‘friction’ etc. These problems have been tackled in TS in various ways, mainly by being circumvented and cast in other terms, often under the label of culture-specific items or related notions like realia, for example. But the remit of culture-specific items is a lot smaller than that of indexicality and iconicity. Tackling such items separately as culture-specific terms somehow dismembers the discourse to be translated in unhelpful non-inclusive ways. This leaves us with a disparate set of parts that do not fit back together once reassembled, much like what happens when a curious young lad disassembles a watch: So, if the original source-language word or expression communicates such contextual information indexically, then to transduce it into the target-language word or expression is to find a way to index something comparable in the way the resultant target text communicates to its intended receivers. (Silverstein in Rubel & Rosman, 2003, pp. 87–88) Silverstein considers indexical and iconic aspects of language to be ‘transducable,’ at least in principle, otherwise, he would not have said so. Perhaps culture-specific items would be more the focus of and the object of contention in the third category Silverstein proposes in relation to translation, i.e., that of ‘transformation.’ Culture-specific items are subject to a whole range of translation tactics7 in practice, including non-translation and are categorized in various ways in the TS literature. According to Silverstein ‘transformation’ results in ‘configurations of cultural semiosis of a sort substantially or completely different from those one started with.’ (Silverstein in Rubel & Rosman, 2003, p. 91). He also considers what is also known in TS as adaptation (Cattrysse, 2014) as a form of transformation and considers transformation as ‘the result of a kind of misfire of intent with respect to translation and transduction’ (Silverstein in Rubel & Rosman, 2003, p. 91). Whereas within Translation Studies such forms of non-translation would fall under the category of ‘borrowing’ or ‘loanwords’ or, in the most positive sense, be considered as forms of foreignization, the non-translation of cultural terms in ethnographic writing results in such terms being associated with and becoming emblematic of the anthropologists who discovered them. This is a consequence of non-translation that is probably unique to the genre of ethnography and also illustrates Silverstein’s notion of transformation perfectly: Scientifically unsystematic practices of generations of anthropologists-as-ethnographic“translators” have turned source-language/culture material willy-nilly into signs of the 290

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structures of power and influence of the professional and scholarly worlds in which the discourse of ethnography is carried on as a central social practice. (Silverstein in Rubel & Rosman, 2003, p. 91) Although he believes that the avoidance of transformation is impossible in any form of translation, he still asserts in an endnote to the above comment that within anthropology there is not a route to complete intercultural translation in my narrow sense such that anything goes; the point is that there is some interlinguistic translation, and that there are plausible transductions as well. And that we should be doing them. (Silverstein in Rubel & Rosman, 2003, p. 101) It could nevertheless be argued that transduction (and transformation) is just another, rather idealized, way of talking about a very common, though consistently difficult, aspect of translation practice and translation theorization8. The problem here is twofold. First, the iconic and indexical aspects of language use cannot be immediately separated from their symbolic ‘anchoring’ or from what Silverstein terms the Saussurean denotations they share language to use with. They all co-occur. Translators are highly aware of this, but the question is whether the problem has been theorized in these terms before. Despite Silverstein’s narrow take on the remit of translation, alongside the symbolic, he does stress the importance of iconicity and indexicality in language and hence the importance of transduction and transformation as elements of or coinciding with ‘translation.’ But this is where he stops, in part: I expect that for semiotic systems unlike human language … transduction and transformation play the unrecognized – or at least untheorized! – major role in what is sometimes loosely called “translation” (and of course this is true as well for all those aspects of text-in-context itself that are not conformingly Saussurean.) … Perhaps then the translation metaphor in these other realms – for that is what it is – does more harm than good, since it misconstrues that vast gulf that exists between language and these other systems in the way of manifestation of semiotic capacities. (Silverstein in Rubel & Rosman, 2003, pp. 93–94) He therefore argues that each semiotic system should have its own means of description – which is often the case, viz. music, painting, etc. – but also its own categories of ‘translation.’ He even challenges the notion of cultural translation by arguing that cultures cannot be ‘translated’ since ‘most of their manifestations are non-linguistic’ (Silverstein in Rubel & Rosman, 2003, p. 94). He goes on to point out the following: For the critical and inevitable point about “translating cultures” is that at beginning and end of these processes we are dealing with textual objects9 experienceable and intelligible only within – or as the mathematicians would say, “under” – a culture, and hence if we are to understand the nature of the three T’s, we have to understand something of such textual objects in culture. (Silverstein in Rubel & Rosman, 2003, p. 94) This is a highly interesting, but at the same time sobering, consideration for advocates of cultural translation in TS. Whereas the concept was considered a kind of liberation in TS, 291

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Silverstein is drawing our attention back to the nature of these ‘textual objects’ and how they function in culture and hence to the rigor with which they should be translated. However, of the three T’s, the importance of transduction and transformation, and hence iconicity and indexicality, still remain central, no matter what the semiotic system is. We can ask why, and the answer probably is because, generally speaking, these aspects of meaning-making have been ignored for so long. Secondly, how we conceptualize something and what we call that concept is very much a matter of the semiotic activity we participate in and the genre we are engaged in at the time. Let us call this the locus of theorization. As Goodwin so sagely points out: An event being seen, a relevant object of knowledge, emerges through the interplay between a domain of scrutiny and a set of discursive practices being deployed in a specific activity … It is not possible to work in some abstract world where the constitution of knowledge through a politics of representation has been magically overcome. (Goodwin, 1994, pp. 606–607) In this respect, before commenting on semiotic systems in general, Silverstein had already returned to the task at hand and focussed our attention on the anthropologist’s initial translational concern, the interlinear gloss: It is clear now, I hope, that translation and its more fluid – as opposed to gelid – extensions, such as transduction and transformation, occur in a kind of nested set of relations that emerge in the process of explicit interlinear glossing. (Silverstein in Rubel & Rosman, 2003, p. 93) Here we witness how theorization and practice coincide and how the use of the concepts and their scope become both visible and circumscribed. Scholars in TS have spent decades pushing back the boundaries (of the notion) of translation, whereas in Silverstein’s debate we witness a narrowing of the term in a certain semiotic sense (translation) and an extension of it to other elements of the semiotics of language (transduction and transformation) in another. But these understandings, based on the three types of signs, still firstly belong within anthropology and more precisely in relation to ethnographic translation and discursive practices. Relatedly, the exponential expansion of the notion of translation in TS can perhaps be then considered a failure to consciously factor in the various loci of theorization and their emergent concepts, an exercise that might prove more flexible than seeking, by a protracted process of expansion and elimination, a one-size-fits-all overarching theory. This, however, is not an argument against semiotics, on the contrary. In the sections further on, the notion of locus of theorization will be examined in more detail in relation to a number of concepts that have emerged from anthropology over the decades and that might prove or already have proved useful for translation scholars. But first, we must now return to Mertz and other developments in semiotic anthropology that have a bearing on their understanding of translation: As anthropologists have worked to build a semiotic paradigm for studying language, culture, and society, they have developed concepts capable of analyzing with greater sophistication the confluence of these great arenas of human life and interaction. (Mertz, 2007, p. 341)

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Developing such concepts has taken a considerable number of years. This has involved a double movement, firstly by building on the apparatus of semiotics and secondly by bringing together diverse cultural and language phenomena [t]hat had been previously analyzed using seemingly obdurate theoretical divisions. If indeed the ethnography and observation performed under diverse models have captured important aspects of multifaceted, complicated human existence, then it seemed important to find ways to integrate the different “parts of the elephant” to the degree that we can. (Mertz, 2007, p. 342) To illustrate integration, Mertz provides the example of how semiotic anthropologists use Goffman’s concept of footing to examine ‘the sifting location of a speaker vis-a-vis layers of social authority’ (Mertz, 2007, p. 343). Goffman’s participation framework has long been used to study various aspects of interpreter interactions including role (Wadensjö, 1995). This, taken together with a growing interest in studying multimodality in interpreting, along with other aspects of sociocultural embeddedness and power relations, might therefore warrant consideration of a similar move toward a semiotic integration of the ‘parts of the elephant’ in Interpreting Studies. Such an exercise might prove more feasible, given the discipline’s main focus on (multimodal) interaction in various contexts. Toward the end of her article, Mertz turns to considerations of how the tools semiotic and linguistic anthropologists have developed might ‘create more effective translations’ (Mertz, 2007, p. 347). She understands translation here both in terms of practice and in traditional anthropological terms of ‘cultural translation.’ This involves drawing on and making use of knowledge gleaned from studies of language socialization and language contact situations. It also involves using such knowledge to inform scholarly practices in attempts ‘to communicate across disciplinary and other divides’ (Mertz, 2007, p. 347). Perhaps translation scholars could extend a hand of greeting to anthropologists thereby showing how they can be of help in relation to translation, as Kate Sturge (2007)10 and others have shown in the past, and hopefully will continue to show in the future (Sturge & Wolf, 2017). For example, in her former work, Sturge cast a critical eye on anthropological translation practices by bringing important insights from TS to the argument. In the final paragraph of her article, Mertz draws the following rather humbling conclusion: In fact, semiotic anthropology is also a powerful source for an impure model of human communication, in which our messages are always strongly connected to their social contexts. In this sense, anthropological attempts to communicate with various publics are no different than any other effort to communicate. (Mertz, 2007, p. 348) Much can be gained, and not only by translation scholars, from teasing out the implications of this statement in terms of positioning within and approaches to scholarship. For example, an awareness of the shortcomings of any given model of translation can only result in further reflection on those shortcomings and resulting theoretical flexibility and openness to other conceptualizations of communication and adjacent translation. The focus remains on ‘impure’ and along with it the realization that this is more or less a permanent state of affairs, no matter how much we refine a model. If TS is becoming an ever-expanding universe,

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semiotics can still offer a touchstone for common theoretical and practical debate. In what follows we will address other forms of anthropology and their relevance for a semiotics of translation.

Social and cultural anthropology and translation Having dedicated quite some attention to semiotic anthropology, largely for its immediate relevance to semiotics of translation, we now (re)turn to other forms of anthropology in an attempt to discover their relevance for the topic at hand. In doing so, we would like to dwell on the notion of the locus of theorization and its importance in and for anthropology and explore its implications in more detail. This will be done by examining a number of concepts that have emerged from fieldwork and participant observation and as such illustrate first the nature of theorization in anthropology, along with a number of related aspects that are relevant to semiotics of translation. Before doing so, it is important to point out a few important stances and points of departure with regard to study and theorization in anthropology in a more general sense. In outlining the discipline, Thomas Hyland Eriksen has the following to say: The discipline is also concerned with accounting for the interrelationships between different aspects of human existence, and usually anthropologists investigate these interrelationships taking as their point of departure a detailed study of local life in a particular society or a delineated social environment. One may therefore say that anthropology asks large questions, while at the same time it draws its most important insights from small places. (Eriksen, 2001, p. 2) This ties in with the point Mertz (2007) makes about the way semiotic anthropology (and also symbolic anthropology) try to bring together micro-level and macro-level analyses of social phenomena. In a related vein, the British anthropologist, Tim Ingold states the following: The aim of anthropology, in short, is to make a conversation of human life itself. This conversation – this life – is not just about the world. In a sense … it is the world. It is the one world we all inhabit. (Ingold, 2018, p. 25) Ingold believes that ethnography, which is such a basic aspect of anthropology, has gone astray and no longer serves the purpose it was formerly intended to fulfill: To repeat, participant observation is a way of studying with people. It is not about writing others’ lives, but about joining with them in a common task of finding ways to live. Herein, I contend lies the difference between ethnography and anthropology. Thus, for the anthropologist, participant observation is absolutely not11 a method of data collection. It is rather a commitment to learning by doing, comparable to that of the apprentice or student. (Ingold, 2018, p. 15) As can be gathered from the above quotes, the net has been cast out quite widely in terms of area of study, but what matters is how the local forms the source for important insights 294

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(Eriksen, 2001) and how studying with people is crucial to this exercise (Ingold, 2018). The insights gained in these places then feed into the general debate in anthropology, which according to Ingold is ‘open-ended, comparative and yet critical’ in its purpose (Ingold, 2017, p. 22). This brings with it a whole set of implicatures, not least that of the environment in and with which the ‘conversation’ is taking place. There is no room to provide an overview of the debate this sharp distinction between ethnography and anthropology has generated. Suffice it to say here that Ingold’s stance is best understood in terms of a move away from the ‘ivory tower’ of academia (ethnography viewed merely as studies of ) toward a more collaborative (participant observation as studies with) stance in relation to the conversation he mentions. This hinges on the degree of embeddedness involved and his challenge to a ‘scientist’ take on doing anthropology (Ingold, 2018, p. 108). In tune with the premises underpinning this volume, his idea of studying with also means engaging with existence in all its forms:12 Once dismissed as the most primitive of religions, animism is now regarded as a poetics of life that betters even science in its comprehension of the fullness of existence. That’s what comes from taking people seriously. (Ingold, 2018, p. 23) This also involves moving beyond the confines of cultural and social anthropology and collaborating with scholars in biological anthropology: ‘Finally, and above all, we are in a position to ground our enquiries within an ethical commitment to, and responsibility for, both our own humanity and the world in which we find ourselves’ (Ingold & Palsson, 2014, p. 21). It is safe to argue that the bulk of concepts and models developed within anthropology have stemmed from a persistent engagement and interaction with particular groups of people and observation of their language and cultural practices. As Ingold might argue, these concepts and models do not emerge from the ethnographic data as such but from the whole learning process. As was argued above, how we conceptualize something and what we call that concept is very much a matter of the semiotic activity we participate in and the genre we are engaged in at the time. I have called this the locus of theorization, to which should be added the period of gestation needed to develop a given set of concepts. This process is akin to those described by Goodwin (1994), can be encapsulated by Bourdieu’s notion of practice13 (Bourdieu, 1984), and more pertinently, coincides with and emerges from thick description (Geertz, 1973). Long-term engagements of this nature have produced concepts and models that have stood the test of time. Not unlike Silverstein’s notions of transduction and transformation, other concepts have been developed from a long-term engagement with translation as such. When Ogden and Richards were writing The Meaning of Meaning14 (1923) they invited Malinowski and Crookshank to write supplementary essays that were included in the book. Malinowski’s contribution, though couched in the language of the day,15 addresses problems of meaning and translation and in doing so produces two concepts that would still serve well in any translational analysis, namely ‘context of situation’ and ‘context of culture.’ Like Silverstein long after him, Malinowski found himself struggling with the interlinear gloss: ‘The ethnographer has to convey the deep yet subtle difference of language and of the mental attitude which lies behind it and is expressed through it’ (Malinowski, [1923]1946, p. 300). He spends a full seven pages discussing a four-line interlinear gloss and concludes by saying: All this shows the wide and complex considerations into which we are led by an attempt to give an adequate analysis of meaning. … we are faced by a long and not altogether 295

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simple process of describing wide fields of custom, of special psychology and of tribal organisation which correspond to one term or another. We see that linguistic analysis inevitably leads us into the study of all subjects covered by Ethnographic fieldwork. (Malinowski, [1923]1946, p. 302) This slow process of teasing out contextualized meaning bore conceptual fruit, as the following quote illustrates: Again, it is equally clear that the meaning of the expression ‘we arrive near the village (of our destination)’ literally, ‘we paddle in place,’ is determined only by taking it in the context of the whole utterance. This latter again, becomes only intelligible when it is placed within its context of situation, if I may be allowed to coin an expression16 which indicates on the one hand that the conception of context has to be broadened and on the other that the situation in which words are uttered can never be passed over as irrelevant to the linguistic expression. (Malinowski, [1923]1946, pp. 305–306) His happening on the term ‘context of situation’ led to another important insight about the tools used for analysis: But the widened conception of context of situation yields more than that. It makes clear the difference in scope and method between the linguistics of dead17 and of living languages. The material on which almost all our linguistic study has been done so far belongs to dead languages. It is present in the form of written documents, naturally isolated, torn out of any context of situation. (Malinowski, [1923]1946, p. 306) Coining the term led Malinowski to consider a further extension of this notion of context, i.e., context of culture, which is not unlike linking up the micro and the macro as mentioned by Mertz (see supra). The concept also stems from considerations in relation to translation. Thus, it is only because we know the world of ideas, the various activities, the economic rules of Trobriand gardening that we can grasp the linguistic side of Trobriand agriculture. It is what we might call their context of culture18which supplies us with the relevant elements whereby we can translate these words. Translation then becomes rather the placing of linguistic symbols against the cultural background of a society, than the rendering of words by their equivalents in another language. (Malinowski, 1935, p. 18) Next to coining these two concepts, Malinowski also points to the importance of forms of speech as the following quote illustrates: But it is the insistent linking up of ethnographic descriptions with linguistic analysis which provides language with its cultural context and culture with its linguistic reinterpretation. Within this latter we have continually striven to link up grammar with the context of situation and with the context of culture. Here the distinctions between pragmatic speech, educational speech, legal and ceremonial utterances, narrative and

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pure gossip appears to me to furnish us with certain concepts and principles which ought to be more fully used in ethnographic work. (Malinowski, 1935, p. 73) These considerations all belong to what Malinowski calls an ethnographic theory of language, in which translation plays a pivotal role in observations and reflections on language and cultural practices. The two concepts could offer some methodological leverage to those involved in studying cultural translation. Context of situation could be used to encompass iconic and indexical elements of situated communication, including translation and interpreting, whereas context of culture could be used to encapsulate other semiotic systems that come into play both as a backdrop to and as integral parts of situated communication. These two concepts later became part of the apparatus of Systemic Functional Linguistics, in which context of situation is related to register and context of culture to genre, but these relations are already present in Malinowski’s writings, as the last quote illustrates. Developments within Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) are not the concern here, but it is worth noting that SFL continues to be an important approach to or point of encounter with TS (Kim et al., 2021). As was argued above in relation to locus of theorization so far, the point of the exercise is to illustrate basic elements of and the engaged contextualized nature of theorization in anthropology, i.e. how theories and their related concepts emerge from their contexts of observation and cooperation. This process remains visible to this day and can be found in countless studies, one of which I would like to mention here as it illustrates the contextual nature of theorization in relation to globalization, something that may seem counterintuitive or not immediately obvious but still very much a matter of present concern. In their multi-sited study, Global Ethnography, the anthropologist Michael Burawoy and his team engaged with and tried to make sense of the complexity of globalization, not from an overarching bird’s eye perspective but by connecting up insights gleaned from numerous sites. Working from various globally connected sites around the world, they identified various patterns within and across these sites, which allowed them to distill a basic set of terms that helped them encapsulate the complexity they encountered: global forces, global connections and global imaginations. These concepts threw up a number of interesting insights that are often passed over in the rhetoric of globalization, one of which is visible in the following quote: Just as global connections are transnational, global imaginations are post-national in that they react against the nation, reinvigorate the local, demand regional autonomy, or clamor for universal identities… Even if it is true, pace Appadurai, that global imaginations have emancipated themselves from the nation state and that the cultural is rapidly disconnecting from the nation state, which should not blind us to the latter’s continuing influence in the realm of forces and connections. (Burawoy et al., 2000, pp. 34–35) Among other things, the studies in Burawoy et al. (2000) show that, despite all the discourse to the contrary, the nation state still exerts considerable influence in various ways, globally speaking. In terms of their relevance for TS, I believe these three concepts (forces, connections and imaginations) could easily be used as a handy framework to study the global circulation of (translated) books and other semiotic artifacts. The concepts though recent in their coinage could be used to explore earlier forms and periods of globalization, for example, the

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growth and expansion of the Spanish empire and the role played in it by translators and book publishers in the city of Antwerp in the sixteenth century. Almost a century has passed since Malinowski coined the two terms discussed above. In the meantime, the ethnographer’s toolbox has been filled with other concepts, some crafted by anthropologists themselves, others borrowed, mainly from adjacent disciplines in the humanities. As a result of the range of conceptual tools that can be drawn to conduct a study, the rate of coinage has perhaps slowed down somewhat. This has worked in favor of the comparative critique of anthropology suggested by Ingold (2017), whereby concepts and models can be held up for scrutiny and be either rejected, refined or reformulated. There was still a lot of coining of concepts to be done in Malinowski’s day, something which young scholars might seem reluctant to do nowadays. I also followed a similar process in my own ethnographic research on literary translation in terms of locus of theorization and the period of gestation required before the formulation/adaption of concepts that emerge from a situated study of translation practices. In studying and collaborating with literary translators in the Netherlands and Flanders, I drew on existing concepts and coined others in part. The purpose of drawing on and coining concepts in my research was to try and encapsulate and bring together their translatorial and translational practices, but it was the ethnography that made this exercise possible in the first place. After considerable engagement with and deliberation on their practices (period of gestation), the following four terms were considered best suited for the job: ethos, perceptions of genre, versions of culture and language ideologies (Flynn, 2005). Like many others, I engaged in the painstaking process of trying to match insights emerging from observation and data with existing concepts and models, which can be a precarious exercise,19 as it may prevent a researcher from seeing less obvious elements of practice at any given site (Blommaert, 2001). In a similar vein, George Marcus points out: The anthropologist really does have to find something out she doesn’t really know, and she has to do it in terms that ethnography permits in its own developed form of empiricism. (Marcus, 1998, p. 18) So, a balance has to be struck between insights emerging from the currently contextually unknown and previous insights gleaned from and resultant concepts developed from nowknown contexts. No exercise of this nature is ever theory free, however. What remains prominent throughout both in terms of study and conceptualization is context and context is vital to Peircean semiotics and unique in comparison to other approaches to understanding signs, including De Saussure’s; in fact, without the inclusion of context, the whole edifice of Peircean semiotics would crumble. In the section that follows we further examine semiotic perspectives on translation in anthropology and elsewhere.

Semiotic perspectives on translation in linguistic anthropology and elsewhere In the preamble to this chapter, I spoke briefly about translation as a practice, an object of study and theorization and as a metaphor for various forms of transfer both in TS and Anthropology. I then turned to discussions of translation practice and theorization in two main branches of anthropology, including the work of, Turner, Malinowski and Silverstein, among others. To discuss a broader spectrum of understandings of translation in 298

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anthropology, I now turn to the writing of Susan Gal who addresses ‘a widening productive conversation about translational practices among studies of science, in medical, legal, and linguistic anthropology, in research on Christianities and in advocacy’ viewed through the lens of linguistic anthropology (Gal, 2015, p. 225). In commencing her article, ‘The Politics of Translation,20” she mentions that ‘“[t]ranslation” has been a very fruitful metaphor in anthropology’ and unlike Silverstein perhaps, considers ‘the label (translation) an apt characterization for an array of communicative practices.’ This brings us back to the brief sent by the editors to the authors of this volume and to their conceptualization of translation as ‘semiosic process’ and also ushers in the final section of this chapter. Rather than pursue traditional avenues of thought couched in terms of ‘faithful replication’ etc., Gal wishes to show ‘the linguistic, social, and ontological productivity of translational modes.’ (Gal, 2015, p. 226). She does in fact use Silverstein’s distinctions but takes them far beyond translational practices in anthropology, and classical understandings of translation as ethnography, using them and other concepts to discuss a whole range of translational practices, most of which have emerged in ethnographic studies that were not specifically focussed on translation as such. Given the scope of her article, the number of examples and areas of study21 she provides and discusses are too numerous to list here but valuable key insights she proposes in relation to various types of translational ‘modes’ (Gal, 2015, p. 233) are definitely worth outlining in more general terms. Starting with translation, which she understands ‘in its broadest sense’ as ‘the expression in one semiotic system of what has been said, written, or done in another. It is a metasemiotic22 activity’ (Gal, 2015, p. 227). It is one of the myriad forms stemming from the ‘potential’ to reframe utterances: Each citation is both imitative and novel. What then guides the recognition of innovation versus replication? The uptake of some similarities, while ignoring possible others, is constrained and inspired by the projects, roles, situations, and language ideologies of participants (Goodman 1972). Language ideologies regiment what counts as a repetition or translation because they shape how participants compare and discern relevant similarities and differences23 (Irvine & Gal 2000). Therefore, discerning how translation works in a social scene or historical moment requires an exploration of linguistic ideologies24, that is, of metasemiotic discourses and practices. (Gal, 2015, p. 227) So, what we call translation, as process and artifact, is shaped by what she calls ‘translation ideologies’25 : a highly interesting take on translation because it places the notion fully back in the realm of the social and not only in that of scholarly debates and definitions, be they in TS or any other discipline. Expressed in simple terms, translation then becomes something to be defined through its contextual use and by the way its users talk about it.26 Perhaps this would allow us to include the notion of emic and etic views (Pike, 1966) on/by translators and others involved and their translations. In the discourse of TS, translation is often considered an activity that bridges linguistic boundaries, which of course she discusses but from another angle, given that her discussion of translation is ‘linked to political struggles about knowledge and forms of expression’ (Gal, 2015, p. 226). Under the heading of circulations, she outlines a number of studies of how translations overstep boundaries or ‘travel’ and in doing so have ‘interdiscursive effects, signaling different political stances, often by virtue of their double voicing as both domestic and foreign, or by indexing opposed factions at various social scales.’ (Gal, 2015, p. 231). She also shows how a story, in moving from country to country, not only changes its content but 299

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‘also the positionality and alliances made possible by each uptake.’ (Gal, 2015, p. 231). Such changes have been documented in TS (see van Doorslaer, Flynn & Leerssen 2016, inter alia) but what’s important here is that people do not merely receive translations, as in translation reception, but actively engage with them and insert them into their own discourses in ways that reflect their stance not only regarding the translation per se but also regarding how it fits into and is adjusted by their own general discursive reality. In contrast, Gal also points to how translation actually creates boundaries and draws on a number of studies to elucidate her assertion: In southern Asia, as well, several scripts and many spoken forms were in general use in the early nineteenth century. A single speaker over the course of a day could use Persian, Marathi, Telugu, Sanskrit, and Tamil, each for a different function. Languages were recognized as distinct, and one learned different languages to do different tasks. Only in the early twentieth century, influenced by colonial contact, did a new ideology of intertranslatability cast these languages as ideally “separate…equal mediums…parallel to each other” that should be ‘complete’, each able to do everything and each being indexical of a national identity. (Mitchell, 2009, p. 161, see also Hastings, 2008, Gumperz & Wilson, 1971 in Gal, 2015, p. 229) She then turns to the notion of register and to how, through translation, registers become subsumed under or transformed into standard language. Gal defines registers as ‘sets of linguistic and multimedia signs that are culturally associated with particular social practices and with the person-types understood to engage in such practices,’ whereby each register ‘indexes a perspective, a social positionality’ (Gal, 2015, p. 230) and shows how registers, though perceived as being ‘internal’ to a language, are often the direct result of interlingual transfer, for example scientific, literary and journalistic registers based on models drawn from Latin, French and English, for example. She then provides the example of missionization and studies that show how new registers were created to deal with Christian concepts and doctrine in Maya and Quechua. Phenomena of this kind have been documented and discussed in detail in TS (Even Zohar, 1990, Cronin, 1996, Delabastita, 2011, to name but three). Though Malinowski coined context of situation ostensibly to cover internal registers and because the term became ostensibly monolingual in its use in SFL, Gal’s insight into translational elements in register and their repurposing in and across ‘languages’ weakens the conceptual undergirding of discreet languages. Gal also broadens our understanding of the term by including multimedia signs in the mix. Under modes of translation, Gal lists three major types: denotation, commensuration and transduction, two of which have been used by Silverstein and discussed above. However, in discussing denotation and correspondences between words, objects and states of affairs and resultant correspondences across languages (two-term comparison or equivalence in common TS parlance), she points out that the correspondence between ‘world and word’ is not given but sociolinguistically apportioned by those who have the authority to do so. Consequently, by extension, “language experts and traditions of translation strive for the authority to do this, often amid heated debate both in institutional and informal settings.” (Gal, 2017, p. 234). Therefore, what something denotates (in translation) is a constant cause for debate and a struggle for authority in and across languages.27 This point is illustrated by drawing on ethnographic studies of the use of medical terms in which she shows that the same term can take on very different (politically charged) meanings depending on the systems of practice 300

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they are used in and that these terms have also to be translated interlingually to become accessible to patients.28 The third mode of translation is commensuration to which we will now turn. Commensuration involves three-term comparisons, the social and ideological process’ of ‘placing items on a grid or scale that gauges them with respect to each other by finding a place for each on the grid’ (Gal, 1917, p. 233). In asking how languages can be commensurate, she shows how dominant languages become standards of comparison for substandard languages which result in some languages being perceived as lacking certain language phenomena found in the dominant language.29 These standards may also be genre-based. To illustrate this, she points to how asylum seekers adapt their stories to match the expectations of the receiving bureaucracy or organization (Gal, 2017, p. 234). According to Gal, transduction, in contrast, has no grid to rely on and works by way of analogy across cultural and linguistic systems, mainly when indexicality and iconicity come into play: ‘Transduction, recognized as an analogical process, opens ways of understanding the productivity that characterizes many phenomena grouped under the rubric of “translation”’ (Gal, 2017, p. 233). Gal takes a step beyond Silverstein’s view and sees transduction as applying more broadly to practices as well: ‘By extending the analytical reach of transduction from linguistic expression to other social practices, we see the role of cultural models in generating value’ (Gal, 2016). This would fall under the remit of transfer in TS (D’hulst, 2012) and can be very easily illustrated by pointing to French hip-hop and its practices, which, on the face of it and in terms of the transfer of electrical charge, did not require ‘denotational’ translation to come into such energetic existence. To conclude, Gal notes that “Translation” embraces a family of semiotic processes. With its same-yet-different logic and its implication of movement, it touches numerous subfields. The word is often used to imply or claim a seamless transfer. In contrast, I have argued that translations and transductions are interdiscursive practices that are generative, producing new objects, practices, person-types, and knowledge. (Gal, 2017, p. 236) Gal has clearly taken views on translation in anthropology (and elsewhere) way beyond its more traditional remit, which hopefully has become visible when contrasted with the work discussed in the various sections of this chapter. Her views are clearly grounded in semiotics but do not belong exclusively within semiotic anthropology per se, which illustrates once again the points made by Glick and Rigney above. Precisely because of its broad palette of applications, semiotics is somehow forced to remain in a sort of meta-disciplinary limbo, despite the fact that scholars make such eager use of its premises and insights across numerous areas of study.

Conclusion The task requested was to discuss anthropological approaches to translation viewed through a semiotic lens. In doing so, I have traced the relations between semiotics and translation in Semiotic Anthropology, Cultural and Social Anthropology, and Linguistic Anthropology. It involved returning to the past and tracing emerging views on translation within anthropology over time. Importantly, an interest in or direct contact (through Ogden) with Peircean semiotics was there very early on (in Malinowski’s work) and has grown and expanded 301

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steadily, as is illustrated in Turner’s, Singer’s, Silverstein’s, Mertz’s, and Gal’s work, among others. It must be admitted that the debate has mainly been about the semiotics of human forms of expression and cultural practice and its relation to translation. I felt this was necessary, as such foundations have to be laid before moving on to human and non-human semiotic processes. In discussing these authors, I have tried to link their work to that of translation scholars, either by involving them directly in the discussion or through footnotes. By doing so, I have attempted to demonstrate the nature of theorization in anthropology and present a number of important concepts that have emerged from the discipline over generations. Hopefully, these concepts, including various ways in which translation is conceptualized (semiotically) will provide some food for thought for translation scholars and students. Hopefully too, it has become clear through the discussion that there is a lot more to translation in anthropology than the metaphor equating it with ethnography, which, in and of itself, still remains quite a challenging project. Throughout the discussion, I have only paid scant attention30 to translation as a ‘semiotic process that takes place in and between all (living) organisms – human and non-human alike.’ A sense of this is present in Ingold’s quote on animism above but more is in store in this respect in current developments in (semiotic) anthropology, which will certainly be of interest to translation scholars with an increasing interest in the ecology or (bio)semiotics of translation. I would like to mention just a few here in closing in relation to their future semiotic and translational implications: environmental anthropology (Orr et al., 2015), ‘ensembles of biosocial relations’ (Palsson in Ingold & Palsson, 2013) and ‘intersectional ecologies’ (Vaughn et al., 2021).

Notes 1 It must be noted that cultural translation itself has generated considerable debate in TS: see the forum on cultural translation in Translation Studies volume 2:2 to 3:3. Ethnography is mentioned in the forum (in Marie Louise Pratt’s & Andrew Chesterman’s response) and its views on translation are critiqued in Maria Tymoczko’s response. 2 In relation to extant tools and models in TS, “the work done to constrain a semiosic process” can be encapsulated in part by Skopos Theory and its various components, and again in part, by typologies of equivalence, culture-specific elements, other more general functionalist wh- questions, the apparatus of DTS, including various levels of analysis ranging from the micro-semiotic to the macro-social, etc. Viewing translation from a semiotic perspective, however, would help bring together many of these seemingly disparate elements. 3 The partial nature of semiosis (no meaning-making is ever total) is a key argument in Mertz’s work. 4 Though genres can be considered as semiotic systems in themselves, no comprehensive (semiotic) study of genre has ever completely pin-pointed how a genre works, short of capturing certain textual (see Crystal & Davy, 1983, for example) or other semiotic features a given genre might comprise or use, which of course are never entirely exclusive to that genre. Scholars still continue to tackle and try to unravel their complexity: http://genreacrossborders.org/ 5 Bold in the original. See also the comment on the focus by translators on exegetical meaning on the previous page. 6 Stecconi (2007) uses a semiotic approach to translation to challenge the very possibility of equivalence. 7 According to Gambier (2010, pp. 412–418) tactics comprise a sequence of locally implemented steps. Strategy is achieved through tactics… In differentiating strategy for a translation event (which includes what is happening before and after the translation per se, such as making a deal with the client, terminology mining, delivering the output in a given format, etc.) and tactics in a translation act (translation in a narrow meaning), we can better highlight the division of labour and responsibilities in translation. 8 See Marais (2019, p. 3) for a long list of cognates of translation including transduction and transformation. Both these terms are also used by other scholars in other ways (see Marais, 2019, p. 3, 78), something that is quite common in Translation Studies. 302

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Bakhtin, M. (2014). The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. (19th Paperback Print ed., University of Texas Press Slavic Series 1). Austin: University of Texas press. Bakhtin, M., & Medvedev, P. N. (1985). The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship: A Critical Introduction to Sociological Poetics (A. J. Wehrle, Trans.). Baltimore, MD and London: John Hopkins University Press. Blommaert, J. (2001). Context Is/as Critique. Critique of Anthropology, 21(1), 13–32. https://doi-org. kuleuven.e-bronnen.be/10.1177%2F0308275X0102100102 Blommaert, J. (2005). Bourdieu the Ethnographer. Translator (Manchester, England), 11(2), 219–236. https://doi-org.kuleuven.e-bronnen.be/10.1080/13556509.2005.10799199 Bourdieu, P. (1984). Le Sens Pratique (Le sens commun). Paris: Editions de Minuit. Burawoy, M., Blum, J. A., George, S., Gille, Z., Gowan, T., Haney, L., Klawiter, M., Lopez, S. H., Riain, O., & Thayer, M. (2000). Global Ethnography: Forces, Connections, and Imaginations in a Postmodern World. Berkeley: University of California Press. Cattrysse, P. (2014). Descriptive Adaptation Studies: Epistemological and Methodological Issues. Antwerp: Garant. Conway, K. (2012). A Conceptual and Empirical Approach to Cultural Translation. Translation Studies, 5(3), 264–279. https://doi-org.kuleuven.e-bronnen.be/10.1080/14781700.2012.701938 Cronin, M. (1996). Translating Ireland: Translation, Languages, Cultures. Cork: Cork university press. Cronin, M. (2002). Babel’s Standing Stones: Language, Translation and the Exosomatic, Crossings. E-Journal of Art and Technology, 2(1), 1–7. http://crossings.tcd.ie/issues/2.1/Cronin/ Cronin, M. (2017). Eco-translation: Translation and Ecology in the Age of the Anthropocene. New Perspectives in Translation and Interpreting Studies. Abingdon: Routledge. Crystal, D., & Davy, D. (1983). Investigating English Style. London: Longman. Delabastita, D. (2011). Literary Translation. In Y. Gambier & L. van Doorslaer (Eds.), Handbook of Translation Studies, 2, 69–78. D’hulst, L. (2008). Cultural Translation: A Problematic Concept? In Homage to G. Toury, P. Anthony, S. Miriam & S. Daniel (Eds.), Beyond Descriptive Translation Studies: Investigations (pp.221–232). Amsterdam, The Netherlands: John Benjamins. D’hulst, L. (2012). (Re)locating Translation History: From Assumed Translation to Assumed Transfer. Translation Studies, 5(2), 139–155. https://doi-org.kuleuven.e-bronnen. be/10.1080/14781700.2012.663597 D’hulst, L., & Gambier, Y. (2018). A History of Modern Translation Knowledge (Volume 142, Benjamins Translation library). Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Duflou, V. (2016). Be(com)ing a Conference Interpreter (Vol 124, Benjamins Translation Library. EST Subseries). Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Eriksen, T. (2001). Small Places, Large Issues: An Introduction to Social and Cultural Anthropology (2nd ed., Anthropology, Culture and Society). London: Pluto Press. Even-Zohar, I. (ed.) (1990). Polysystem Studies. Special Issue, Poetics Today, 11, 1. Flynn, P. (2005). A Linguistic Ethnography of Literary Translation: Irish Poems and Dutch-speaking Translators. Gent: Universiteit Gent. Faculteit letteren en wijsbegeerte. Flynn, P. (2007). Exploring Literary Translation Practice. A Focus on Ethos. Target: International Journal of Translation Studies, 19(1), 21–44. https://doi-org.kuleuven.e-bronnen.be/10.1075/target.19.1.03fly Gal, S. (2015). Politics of Translation. Annual Review of Anthropology, 44(1), 225–240. https://doi-org. kuleuven.e-bronnen.be/10.1146/annurev-anthro-102214-013806 Gal, S. (2016). Processes of Translation and Demarcation in Legal Worlds. In E. Mertz, W. K. Ford & G. M. Matoesian (Eds.), Translating the Social World for Law: Linguistic Tools for a New Legal Realism (Oxford Studies in Language and Law). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Geertz, C. (1973). The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books. Glick, D. (2013). Semiotics. In Oxford Bibliographies. https://doi: 10.1093/OBO/9780199766567-0112 (Accessed 13 September 2021). Goodwin, C. (1994). Professional Vision. American Anthropologist, 96(3), 606–633. American Anthropological Association. https://www.jstor.org/stable/682303 Gorlée, D. L. (1994). Semiotics and the Problem of Translation, with Special Reference to the Semiotics of Charles S. Peirce. Approaches to Translation Studies, 12. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill. doi: https:// doi.org/10.1163/9789004454750 Hanks, W. (1987). Discourse Genres in a Theory of Practice. American Ethnologist, 14(4), 668–692. Hermans, T. (1999). Translation in Systems: Descriptive and Systemic Approaches Explained. Translation theories explained 7. Manchester: St. Jerome. 304

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Ingold, & Palsson, G. (2014). Preface. In Biosocial Becomings: Integrating Social and Biological Anthropology (pp. vii–viii). https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139198394.001 Ingold, T. (2017). Anthropology Contra Ethnography. HAU Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 7(1), 21–26. https://doi-org.kuleuven.e-bronnen.be/10.14318/hau7.1.005 Ingold, T. (2018). Anthropology: Why it Matters. Cambridge, Medford, MA: Polity Press. Ingold, T., & Palsson, G. (Eds.) (2013). Biosocial Becomings: Integrating Social and Biological Anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi:10.1017/CBO9781139198394. Kapferer, B. (2013). How Anthropologists Think: Configurations of the Exotic. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.), 19, 813–836. https://www.jstor.org/stable/42001685 Kim, M., Munday, J., Wang, Z., & Wang, P. (Eds.) (2021). Systemic Functional Linguistics and Translation Studies. London: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. Koller, W. (1976). Äquivalenz in kontrastiver Linguistik und Übersetzungswissenschaft. In L. Grähs, G. Korlén & B. Malmberg (Eds.), Theory and Practice of Translation, Nobel Symposium 39 (pp. 69–92). Bern: Lang. Koller, W. (2004). Semiotic “Equivalences” in Naipaul’s the Enigma of Arrival/The Riddle of Arrival. In J. House, W. Koller & K. Schubert (Eds.), New Perspectives in Translation and Interpreting. Festschrift for Heidrun Gerzymisch –Arbogast (pp. 113–128). Bochum: AKS-Verlag. (= series of foreign languages in teaching and research, 35). Korning Zethsen, K., & Hill-Madsen, A. (2016). Intralingual Translation and Its Place within Translation Studies – A Theoretical Discussion. Meta (Montréal), 61(3), 692–708. https://doi-org.kuleuven.e-bronnen.be/10.7202/1039225ar Marais, K. (2019). A (Bio)Semiotic Theory of Translation: The Emergence of Social-Cultural Reality. Routledge Advances in Translation and Interpreting Studies. New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group. Marcus, G. E. (1998). Ethnography Through Thick & Thin. Princeton, NJ: University of Princeton Press. Mertz, E. (2007). Semiotic Anthropology. Annual Review of Anthropology, 36(1), 337–353. https://doiorg.kuleuven.e-bronnen.be/10.1146/annurev.anthro.36.081406.094417 Mertz, E., & Yovel, J. (2000). Metalinguistic Awareness. In J. Verschueren, J. Östman, J. Blommaert & C. Bulcaen (Eds.), Handbook of Pragmatics 2000. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins Meylaerts, R. (2011). Translation Policy. In Y. Gambier & L. van Doorslaer (Eds.), Handbook of Translation Studies (Volume 2, pp. 163–168). Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Nord, C. (1997). Translating as a Purposeful Activity. Functionalist Approaches Explained. Manchester: St Jerome. Ogden, C. K., & Richards, I. A. (1989[1923]). The Meaning of Meaning. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co Ltd. Orr, Y. Lansing. S. J., & Dove, R. Michael (2015). Environmental Anthropology: Systemic Perspectives. Annual Review of Anthropology, 44(1), 153–168. https://doi: 10.1146/annurev-anthro-102214-014159. Peirce, C. S. (1940). Philosophical Writings of Peirce. New York: Dover Publications. Pike, K. L. (1966). Etic and Emic Standpoints for the Description of Behavior. In A. G. Smith (Ed.), Communication and Culture: Readings in the Codes of Human Interaction (pp. 152–163). New York: Holt, Rinehart, & Winston. Popovič, A. (1976). Aspects of Metatext. Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, 3(3), 225–235. Rigney, A. (2007). Semiotics. In M. Beller, & J. Leerssen (Eds.). Imagology: The Cultural Construction and Literary Representation of National Characters. A Critical Survey. Leiden: Brill. https://doi. org/10.1163/9789004358133_112 Robinson, D. (1997). Western Translation Theory from Herodotus to Nietzsche. Manchester: St. Jerome. Schieffelin B., Woolard K. A., & Kroskrity, P. V. (1998). Language Ideologies, Practice and Theory, Oxford Studies in Anthropological Linguistics. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press. Silverstein, M. (2003). Translation, Transduction, Transformation: Skating “Glossando” on Thin Semiotic Ice. In Paula, G. Rubel & R. Abraham (Eds.) (pp. 75–105).Translating Cultures: Perspectives on Translation and Anthropology. Oxford: Berg. Singer, M. (1985). Comments on Semiotic Anthropology. American Ethnologist, 12(3), 549–553. Singer, M. (2012). Peirce, Malinowski and the Emergence of Semiotic Anthropology. In M. Singer. Semiotics of Cities, Selves, and Cultures: Explorations in Semiotic Anthropology (pp. 260–308). Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton. https://doi-org.kuleuven.e-bronnen.be/10.1515/9783110857757.260 Singer, M. (2012). Semiotics of Cities, Selves, and Cultures: Explorations in Semiotic Anthropology. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton. https://doi-org.kuleuven.e-bronnen.be/10.1515/9783110857757 305

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Snell-Hornby, M. (2006). Turns of Translation Studies (Benjamins Translation Library). Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Spolsky, B. (2009). Language Management. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stecconi, U. (2007). Five Reasons Why Semiotics Is Good for Translation Studies. In Y. Gambier, M. Shlesinger, & R. Stoltze (Eds.), Doubts and Directions in Translation Studies (pp. 15–26). Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company Sturge, K. (2007). Representing Others: Translation, Ethnography and the Museum. Translation theories explored 11. Manchester: St. Jerome. Sturge, K. & Wolf, M. (2017). Looking Back, Looking Forward. Translation Studies, 10(3), 227–228. https://doi-org.kuleuven.e-bronnen.be/10.1080/14781700.2017.1326316 Toury, G. (1995). The Notion of “Assumed Translation”: An Invitation to a New Discussion. In H. Bloemen, E. Hertog & W. Segers (Eds.), Letterlijkheid/Woordelijkheid - Literality/Verbality (pp. 135– 147). Antwerp & Harmelen: Fantom Turner, V. (1967). The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. Ithaca, NY & London: Cornell University Press. Turner, V. (1982). From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play. New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications. Turner, V. (2020, May 8). New World Encyclopaedia. Available at: https://www.newworldencyclopedia. org/p/index.php?title=Victor_Turner&oldid=1036826. Tymoczko, M. (1999). Translation in a Postcolonial Context: Early Irish Literature in English Translation. Manchester: St. Jerome. Van Doorslaer, L., Flynn, P., & Leerssen J. (2016). Interconnecting Translation Studies and Imagology. Benjamins Translation Library (BTL) 119. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Vaughn, S. E. Guarasci, B., & Moore, A. (2021). Intersectional Ecologies: Reimagining Anthropology and Environment. Annual Review of Anthropology, 50(1), 275–290. https://doi-org.kuleuven.e-bronnen.be/10.1146/annurev-anthro-101819-110241 Vološinov, V. N. ([1929] 1986). Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wadensjö, C. (1995). Dialogue Interpreting and the Distribution of Responsibility. Hermes, Journal of Linguistics, 14, 111–129. https://doi.org/10.7146/hjlcb.v8i14.25098 Weissbort, D., & Eysteinsson, A. (2006). Translation - Theory and Practice: A Historical Reader. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Introduction Translation studies (TS) has imported a great deal from other disciplines and fields of research in order to emancipate itself from (comparative) literary studies and (applied) linguistics and become an academic discipline in its own right. This process of emancipation largely took place in the 1980s, during which time TS managed to establish itself as an academic discipline in its own right. This was accompanied by the first appointments of Full Professors and Chairs in TS1. The various underlying core concepts, such as culture, role, norms, habitus, cognition, collaboration, etc., which underpin the academic shifts or turns that have unfolded in TS, such as the cultural turn, the cognitive turn, the sociological turn or the more recent technological turn, are all rooted in other disciplines. The same holds true for the methods which are the concrete tools for gathering data such as surveys and experiments and their underlying methodologies or schools of thought broadly to be divided into positivist and post-positivist applied to TS. TS has frequently been labeled an interdiscipline, or its interdisciplinary roots have been underscored, and with good reason (Snell-Hornby et al., 1994; Wilss, 1999). Interdisciplinarity, just like interculturality and/or intercultural communication, however, would presuppose at least two disciplines and/or fields of research that exist in their own right entering into a dialogue and/or exchange with one another. Interdisciplinarity thus only truly exists when there is a transfer from A to B and vice versa. It needs to be pointed out here that TS has imported massively from other disciplines and fields of research while other disciplines and fields of research have not reciprocated. There seems to be one exception though: the TS’ master concept, namely translation, which has led to the unfolding of numerous ‘translational turns’ (Bachmann-Medick, 2009; 2016) in cultural studies, the humanities, the social sciences and even in the natural sciences. The translation concept is ubiquitous in these disciplinary groupings. This looks at first glance like a success story for TS, but on closer inspection, it becomes clear that the overwhelming majority of the disciplines and fields of research using the translation concept do so without making any references to either TS and its use of the translation concept or all the knowledge, both theoretical/conceptual and empirical, accumulated within it. Thus, the alleged interdisciplinarity of TS is at best a one-sided endeavour. DOI: 10.4324/9781003161448-20

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TS and interlingual translation, and the more recently incorporated intralingual translation (e.g. Korning Zethsen, 2009), is often either completely ignored, such as in the social sciences (e.g. Callon, 1984; Latour, 1993; Czarniawska & Jorges, 1996), or rightly declared outdated on the grounds that as a discipline it allegedly revolves entirely around representations of an all-determining source text and/or origin. The latter criticism is leveled against TS by representatives of cultural studies in particular (e.g. Niranjana, 1992; Buden, 2008). There are, however, also instances of direct references being made to TS and/or its use of the translation concept. One such example comes from sociology, where Joachim Renn (2006) built his whole notion of sociology on translation, explicitly derived from functionalist theories of translation (Reiß & Vermeer, 1984; Snell-Hornby, 1988). Another example would be the representatives of culture transfer studies, which was developed by representatives of intercultural German studies in Paris in the mid-1980s (Espagne & Werner, 1985), who conceptualized interlingual translation or ‘translation proper’ ( Jakobson, 1959) as a prototypical form of transfer (Espagne, 1996a; Lüsebrink & Reichhardt, 1997). The transfers analyzed by culture transfer studies included all sorts of artifacts from both material and immaterial culture. Cultural transfers and the subjects initiating or undertaking these cultural transfers were investigated from a historical perspective. While TS as a discipline was not mentioned at all by representatives of culture transfer studies, it was an important reference point for transfer studies, which focussed exclusively on scientific transfers (Wichter, 2001). Both culture transfer studies and transfer studies clearly focus on lingual translation as transfer, just as Jakobson (1959) did, whom Even-Zohar (1981) regarded as the father of the notion of transfer for TS. Jakobson (1959) clearly had a lingual bias when conceptualizing his three modes of translation. Even when it came to intersemiotic translation, he was clearly lingually oriented. The same lingual bias can also clearly be seen in how the translation concept is used in semiotics (Marais, 2019, p. 47ff.). Examples of intersemiotic translation could include the translation of a song and its lyrics into a dance performance and vice versa (Yeung, 2008). On the other hand, biosemiotics, a field that has emerged within biology, expands the notion of translation and focuses on translation between non-symbolic sign systems (cf. Marais & Kull, 2016). The use of translation in semiotics and biosemiotics is certainly of a very broad nature and there are overlaps with how the translation concept is used in cultural studies or the social sciences, which will be discussed at the end of this contribution. The translation concept is also widely used in medicine as the basis of translational medicine, which primarily refers to the harnessing of knowledge from the basic sciences and the subsequent translation of these results into clinical medicine in the form of patient examination and treatment and/or medical practice (Woolf, 2008). This overview will not just present these various conceptions of translation but will investigate them in terms of the relationship established with TS and its lingual focus on translation and/or the lack of such a relationship. The chapter will finish by establishing a relationship between these various conceptions of translation and inter- or biosemiotic translation, as these notions of translation are certainly broader than the one commonly advocated in TS.

The use of the translation concept in cultural studies and the humanities The notion of ‘cultural translation’ is widespread in cultural studies and the humanities. It is a very broad and essentially all-encompassing concept that can also be seen as a metaphor. This metaphor clearly differs from the translation concept as used in TS in that its focus is on 308

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lingual translation, as also emphasized by the cultural theorist Birgit Wagner (2009) in her juxtaposition: If “translation” commonly refers to the process of recasting a text from one natural language into another, “cultural translation” shifts its focus away from differing languages and primarily denotes the transfer of imaginary content, values, thought patterns, behavioural patterns and practices from one cultural context into another. Cultural translation conceived of in this sense can also be performed through literary and filmic representations and equally through practices of everyday life or politics. (Wagner, 2009, p. 1; my translation) Cultural translation thus means the translation of meaning from one lifeworld into another and within lifeworlds (Bachmann-Medick, 2002). It clearly also shows that it is not an expert technique as conceived of in TS but rather a cultural technique and thus a ‘habitualised form of translation’ (Dizdar, 2015) that anyone can employ, and indeed does employ for meaning-making and meaning-taking. Interlingual translation, according to Wagner (2009, p. 1), is the activity that the discipline of TS should focus on and be responsible for. Migration is frequently used as a case in point by representatives of ‘cultural translation’ (e.g. Buden, 2008; Buden & Nowotny, 2009) since migrants are constantly required to integrate new aspects into their lifeworlds and horizons and make themselves understood, in a manner that goes beyond interlingual translation. Bachmann-Medick (2016) in her monograph Cultural Turns essentially uses (cultural) translation in two ways: On the one hand, (cultural) translation is inextricably linked to the ‘translational turn’ in cultural studies, which has a very prominent role among the turns2 that defined the development of cultural studies. Among these cultural turns, the translational turn is conceptualized as a sort of foundational turn, since it was the turn that helped all the other turns come into being through the translation of theories, concepts, methodologies and methods. Translation, thus, is a sort of meta-category. On the other hand, and linked to its former use, (cultural) translation refers to translation between any disciplines in general (Bachmann-Medick & Buden, 2008, p. 29; Bachmann-Medick, 2016). In this latter sense, translation is also used by the representative of British cultural studies, namely Stuart Hall (1996), when he explains the propagation of British cultural studies all over the world in terms of the translation concept: It is very important that cultural studies can make that translation. It was always a question for many of us, me included, whether cultural studies wasn’t in some way so deeply embedded, even in an unconscious way which we couldn’t understand, in the problematics of western modernity, that it was untranslatable to other cultures; that there couldn’t be an African or Asian cultural studies. (Hall, 1996, p. 400) Hall (1996) also uses translation in his concept of (re-)translation, a process that changes in and with every new context it is translated into. He also argues against the notion of a primary origin: ‘And I use “translation” in quotation marks too: translation as a continuous process of re-articulation and re-contextualization, without any notion of a primary origin’ (Hall, 1996, p. 394). Here, Hall (1996) and other representatives of cultural studies clearly allude and refer to Bhabha’s (1990, 1994) use of the translation concept. 309

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The translation concept in cultural studies and its roots Homi Bhabha (1990, 1994) is certainly a very important reference for cultural theorists that use the translation concept. […] Translation is also a way of imitating, but in a mischievous, displacing sense – imitating an original in such a way that the priority of the original is not reinforced but by the very fact that it can be simulated, copied, transferred, transformed, made into a simulacrum and so on: the ‘original’ is never finished or complete in itself. The ‘originary’ is always open to translation so that it can never be said to have a totalised prior moment of being or meaning – an essence. (Bhabha, 1990, p. 210; emphasis in the original) The concept of ‘cultural translation’ is rooted very much in anthropology and its ethnography. The anthropologist Lienhardt (1954) was one of the first among his ranks to have used the concept of translation for his work as ethnographer: The problem of describing to others how members of a remote tribe think then begins to appear largely as one of translation, of making the coherence primitive thought has in the languages it really lives in, as clear as possible in our own. (Lienhardt, 1954, p. 97) Until the Writing Culture debate of the 1980s in Anthropology, it was believed that ethnography and/or the act of translating cultures could be performed objectively and by an uninvolved anthropologist standing apart from their descriptions. The Writing Culture debate challenged this notion that ethnography is an objectively executed act of translation by an uninvolved anthropologist as fiction and construction (Clifford & Marcus, 1996). This self-reflexive turn subsequently jumped over to other disciplines (Zwischenberger, 2017). The main criticism leveled against TS by representatives of cultural studies is its alleged commitment to the primacy of an original that has to be represented in an objective and mimetic way (Zwischenberger, 2017).

Criticisms of TS TS is actually often represented as a kind of ‘representation studies’: ‘The self-conception of translation studies is deeply imbued with what Derrida has called a “metaphysics of presence.” Its notions of text, author, and meaning are based on an unproblematic, naively representational theory of language’ (Niranjana, 1992, p. 48). This alleged fixation on the original and its inherent sense, however, is also a good selling point and thus asset for TS: ‘Traditional theories of translation appear persuasive because of the role they assign to meaning, which is what good translations are assumed to preserve’ (Niranjana, 1992, p. 55). It is in fact, however, also this alleged fixation on the primacy of the original that, in Niranjana’s view (1992, p. 58), prevents the discipline of TS from advancing: ‘The notion of fidelity to the “original” holds back translation theory from thinking the force of a translation’ (Niranjana, 1992, p. 58; emphasis in the original). The notion of ‘cultural translation’ on the other hand highlights the constructed nature of translation and ‘how translation is always producing rather than merely reflecting or imitating an “original”’ (Niranjana, 1992, p. 81; emphasis in the original). This is clearly seen as an asset of ‘cultural translation’ unlike the translation concept 310

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allegedly propagated by TS, as also underlined by Bachmann-Medick (2008, p. 30; emphasis in the original; my translation): For instance, the insight regarding the reinvention (rather than mere representation) of the original through translation is certainly another important quality of a cultural studies-based understanding of translation: originals are not simply givens or precursors; they, too, are created through translation in the first place. This shatters all notions of origin as well as concepts based on authenticity. Essentially the same criticisms are leveled against TS by other proponents of ‘cultural translation.’ According to Buden (2008, p. 16f.), in traditional translation theory, the decisive factor for every translation is its relation to the original. Furthermore, Buden and Nowotny (2008, p. 7) contend that TS as a discipline has no authority over the concept of translation since the discipline is interdisciplinary in nature, having been nurtured and born out of, for example, linguistics, literature studies, culture theory, etc. As far as these criticisms are concerned, a distinction needs to be made between TS and translation practice (Zwischenberger, 2019). The notion of an all-determining and authoritative origin was abandoned by TS long ago during the 1980s, the period when it was becoming an academic discipline in its own right. In fact, it was this clear abandonment of a strict connection of the translation to a source text and its various theoretical underpinnings that gave the decisive impetus to TS’ becoming a discipline in its own right. The ‘Manipulation School’ held that ‘[…] all translation implies a degree of manipulation of the source text for a certain purpose’ (Hermans, 1985, p. 11). Descriptive translation studies (DTS) regards every text as a translation that is assumed to be created by a certain community at a certain time. A translation also counts as such even if a source text is merely assumed or pretended to exist, as in the case of a pseudo-translation (Toury, 1995, p. 33f.). The representatives of skopos theory (Reiß & Vermeer, 1984, p. 103) see a source text as an offer of information for the translation, which is itself an offer of information. The source text is thus open to interpretation according to the skopos that is postulated for a particular translation. While the source text still has some relevance in these approaches, Holz-Mänttäri (1984) in her theory of translatorial action goes one step further by placing the source text on the same level as all the other material the translator uses as sources of information for producing their target text. The translator, in their function as an expert, decides if they deem the source text to be in any way helpful for producing the target text. Thus, the criticism leveled against TS is not justified as the discipline of TS already has accumulated all the knowledge which would make it an excellent point of reference for other disciplines using the translation concept. While TS abandoned the notion of a determining source text at a very early stage of its history as an academic discipline, the same does not hold true for translation practice. The various metatexts on translation and interpreting produced by professional associations still portray the professional translator or interpreter as someone who is able to convey the sense inherent to the original (Zwischenberger, 2019). They are absolutely loyal to the speaker/ author of the original text and their intended messages. Translation practice holds on to this portrayal of a translator/interpreter because this image is certainly a persuasive one, as maintained by Niranjana (1992). It needs no explanations or justifications and portrays the translator/interpreter as not interfering with the original message in any way, thereby also inspiring trust. Professional practice will cling to this image because it is easy to market, despite its also having a negative impact on the images of professionals whose job is portrayed 311

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in an unrealistic and extremely mundane way (Zwischenberger, 2019). The criticism made against TS by Buden and Nowotny (2008) that TS cannot be taken as an authority when it comes to the use of the translation concept is somewhat surprising given that cultural studies itself has evolved through taking various turns and has thus been nurtured by imports from other disciplines and fields of research (Bachmann-Medick, 2016).

(Cultural) translation in the humanities: some examples Art historian and image culture studies theorist Birgit Mersmann (2004, 2021) bases her work to a large degree on cultural translation, which she sees as particularly useful for her work and the entire unfolding of image culture studies because cultural translation goes far beyond a lingually fixated translation concept and represents an elementary culture technique (Mersmann, 2004, p. 107). In line with cultural studies scholars, Mersmann (2015, p. 61) deconstructs the primacy of an original. Translation and transculturality represent the very pillars of an image culture theory that is no longer national but transnational. Transculturality thereby serves as a meta-concept and -process for translation: An image culture theory only makes sense as a translation theory. As such it is automatically subsumed under transculturality, since every culture is translational. Consequently, any culture is born out of processes of transmission and transformation, of crossings and entanglements of different cultures, with the culture itself setting translation processes in motion in turn. (Mersmann, 2004, p. 108; my translation) In her later work, Mersmann (2021) places her translation concept within a framework that differentiates between transfer, transmission and translation as three translational modes that make up any visual transculturality. Transfer refers to the real or media-based transfer of images, image-artistic works and image-artistic institutions such as museums or biennial arts festivals, the symbolic transmission of image-artistic knowledge, modes of representation and articulations of power, and the intra- and intersystemic translation of image cultures. Translation here seems to function as a sort of meta-concept that encompasses the overall process and not just as a mode in itself. Further emphasis must be placed on the translational actors involved (Mersmann, 2021, p. 32f.). An example which essentially includes all three translational modes defined by Mersmann (2021) is the traveling or touring exhibition Cities on the Move described by Mersmann (2015). The subject of the exhibition was Asian boom cities and their architecture and art, and it toured various cities, starting with Vienna and ending with Helsinki between 1997 and 1999. It involved a media-based transfer of image-artistic works and an exhibition. There was also the symbolic transmission of a written and verbal curatorial concept which served as a kind of meta-text. Every exhibition used this meta-text but developed its very own exhibition concept in cooperation with an architect on-site. This way the various exhibitions were translated intra- as well as intersystemically. The entire exhibition concept, going beyond the verbal curatorial concept per se, continually changed within each exhibition context and in the context of the various new places it was touring to (Mersmann, 2015). Historian Simone Lässig (2012) is among the proponents seeking to disseminate the concept of cultural translation as a fertile concept for history studies. She refers to the concept of cultural transfers, which she postulates to be similar to the concept of cultural translation. The former concept was coined and elaborated on within the context of intercultural 312

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German studies at the Paris-based CNRS (Centre national de la recherche scientifique). The primary focus was very much on French-German cultural transfers (Espagne & Werner, 1985). These cultural transfers revolved around artifacts of both material culture, such as the wine trade, book trade, etc., and of immaterial culture, such as ideas or practices, etc. The concept of ‘cultural transfers’ has also been adopted and propagated by historians (Espagne & Middell, 1993; Middell & Middell, 1994). Lässig (2012, p. 193) considers the concept of ‘cultural translation’ to be an innovative one since it went beyond the approach of cultural comparisons and, in her view, placed the emphasis not on the national framework but instead on cultural entanglements. This was certainly the aspiration of the proponents of culture transfer studies, but in reality, the work of cultural transfer studies scholars never left the national plane, instead focusing, for example, on French-German cultural transfers during a particular epoch (e.g. Lüsebrink & Reichhardt, 1997). This was also criticized by one of the founders of culture transfer studies, namely Michael Werner (1995), leading him to develop his histoire croisée approach (Werner & Zimmermann, 2002). Lässig (2012) in her work ultimately advocates the use of ‘cultural translation,’ as she conceives the concept to be even broader than a transfer. This is a somewhat surprising result since representatives of both cultural transfer studies and TS scholars all see the transfer as a meta-concept of translation (Even-Zohar, 1981; Reiß & Vermeer, 1984; Kortländer, 1995; Lüsebrink, 2012). Cultural transfer studies scholars see interlingual translation as a prototypical form of cultural transfer. This is attested by the various translation bibliographies and translator profiles that it has produced (e.g. Espagne, 1996b; Lüsebrink & Reichhardt, 1997; Roche, 1997). Despite this, there is never any reference to TS. Instead, cultural transfer scholars operate with a very mundane notion of translation whereby interlingual translation is a transmission that is very close to the original and only involves very small changes to accommodate the different cultural horizons of the recipients. At the same time, translation is also a form of reception, but one that represents the lowest and least problematic type of reception (Kortländer, 1995, p. 8; Lüsebrink, 2012, p. 150). This is a complete misconstruing of interlingual translation as a shallow transfer process operating on the textual surface only. The two highest forms of reception are represented by commentary forms and productive reception. While the former type of reception does not involve any interference with the text to be transferred, such as paratexts in the form of a cultural or literary critique, the latter type of productive reception represents an appropriation of the good to be transferred. It is a transformation of discourses, practices and texts (Lüsebrink, 2012, p. 152). This representation overlooks the fact that a translation cannot be equated with reception. The pure existence of a translation does not mean that it has actually been received other than by the translator/s and other agents involved in the production of a translation. Furthermore, any translation always involves an act of productive appropriation, be it by the translator(s) who translate(s) a work or by its audience. Only the act of productive reception and/or productive appropriation ensures that the reception process is actually completed. While cultural transfer studies scholars do not make any references to TS at all, the approach of transfer studies, which exclusively focused on knowledge transfers and aspired to become an academic discipline in its own right, explicitly saw TS as a valuable partner. TS is a discipline that deals with the access to and transfer of knowledge to be understood in its broadest sense. Transfer studies were developed along within linguistics in German-speaking academia 3 (Wichter & Antos, 2001). The creation of meta-knowledge about knowledge and dispositional knowledge which is the knowledge on how to execute things successfully is at the heart of their approach since the transfer of knowledge is conceived of as a major challenge in an increasingly globalized world. TS scholar Susanne Göpferich repeatedly contributed to 313

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a fruitful partnership with transfer studies (Göpferich, 2006, 2007, 2010) and was published in transfer studies’ publication channels. Göpferich (2006) saw obvious parallels between TS and transfer studies. TS is also primarily concerned with the creation of meta-knowledge about knowledge. She considered that TS fulfilled all three principles that Antos (2001, p. 22f.) argued transfer studies should revolve around. These first two principles are the ‘evaluation’ and ‘transformation’ of knowledge, based on the contention that knowledge can only be transferred and represented with a particular addressee and/or purpose in mind. Göpferich (2006) saw these two principles as already fulfilled with addressee-oriented functionalist theories since these theories revolve around the critical evaluation of the source material and a subsequent transformation of this material with a specific skopos or purpose in mind. The third principle, ‘a labelling of knowledge,’ is fulfilled by TS by its terminology-focused branch which constantly categorizes knowledge (Göpferich, 2006, p. 182).

Translation in the social sciences: social translation One of the most prominent examples of the use of the translation concept in the social sciences is actor-network theory (ANT) (Callon, 1981; Callon & Latour, 1981; Latour, 1994). In fact, translation is an integral part of the lexicon and the very functioning of ANT. The theory itself cannot and will not be explained in this overview. Instead, the focus must be on the use of ‘translation’ within this theoretical framework and must restrict itself to the basics here since the use of translation seems omnipresent, and it is not always used consistently. A couple of recurring uses can be identified though. The theory focuses on how actors build their networks, and these actors can be both subjects and objects. Thus, ANT goes beyond the ontological and epistemological dualism of subjects and objects, and therefore also the dualism of sociologism and technologism. There can be no separation between culture and society on the one hand and nature on the other hand. These dualisms are pitfalls and false contentions of modernity according to Latour (1993). Latour (1993) also distinguishes between two different processes in this respect: Purification, a symptom of modernity, creates two entirely distinct ontological zones: that of human beings on the one hand and that of nonhumans on the other, whereas translation creates mixtures between entirely new types of beings, i.e. hybrids. Untranslatability does not exist according to this understanding: ‘How can one claim that worlds are untranslatable, when translation is the very soul of the process of relating?’ (Latour, 1993, p. 113). The hybrid actors ensuing from the process of translation form and essentially are the networks in ANT (Law, 1992; Belliger & Krieger, 2006). Broadly speaking, translation in ANT also means integrating ever more actors into a network. According to ANT, actors always appear and act within a certain program of action and in interrelation with one another with a certain function. Translation is the act of assigning roles to actors in line with a certain program of action (Akrich & Latour, 1992, p. 260f.; Belliger & Krieger, 2006, p. 38). The complex process of translation consists of four moments according to Callon (1999, p. 68ff.). It starts with ‘problematization.’ Building a network starts with the perception of a problem that needs a solution. This perception needs to be shared so that collaboration can start. The translating actor defines a problem in such a way that others identify it as their problem as well. The main actor identifies other actors for their network and persuades them that the solution to a certain problem is possible with their program of action (Belliger & Krieger, 2006, p. 40). The next stage is ‘interessement,’ which consists of assigning specific roles to the various actors in order to solve a certain problem: ‘Interessement achieves enrolment if it is successful’ (Callon, 1999, p. 74). At this stage, the main actor makes sure that 314

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other actors more or less accept the roles assigned to them and are working toward a common goal (Callon, 1999, p. 70ff.; Belliger & Krieger, 2006, p. 40.). ‘Enrolment’ is a decisive stage inasmuch as this is when it is decided whether the various actors will actually take on and act according to the roles assigned to them. They really need to identify with and take on a specific program of action devised by the main actor. They need to translate and retranslate this program for themselves. The last translation stage consists of ‘mobilization.’ The various actors perform their transactions (e.g. signs, texts, roles, interests) via mediators or instances of mediation. Through instances of mediation such as delegates, spokespersons or representatives, actors ‘translate’ their intentions into others (Belliger & Krieger, 2006, p. 41f.). Callon (1999) illustrates this with the example of the protection of scallops in a French region, in which ultimately three researchers ‘in the name of the specialists, speak in the name of the scallops and fisherman’ (Callon, 1999, p. 78). These spokespersons have power and grow in strength in the network: ‘Whenever an actor speaks of “us,” s/he is translating other actors into a single will, of which s/he becomes spirit and spokesman. S/he begins to act for several, no longer for one alone. S/he becomes stronger. S/he grows’ (Callon & Latour, 1981, p. 279). The process of translation is completed with the stage of mobilization. However, the result is a fragile one: Now at the end of the four moments described, a constraining network of relationships, or what I called elsewhere an actor-network (Callon, 1986), has been built. But this consensus and the alliances which it implies can be contested at any moment. Translation becomes treason. (Callon, 1999, p. 79) Actor-Network-Theory, thus, is conceived of as an entire sociology or the socio-logic of translation (Callon, 1981, 1999). There is not a single reference to lingual translation or TS in any of the works.

The roots of the social translation concept as used in ANT and the social sciences more widely The concept used for the sociology of translation in ANT, and also the social sciences more widely, is derived from French philosopher Michel Serres (Latour, 1993, p. 51ff.; Czarniawska & Sevón, 2005, p. 7). Latour in his works makes several direct references to Michel Serres when it comes to the use of ‘translation’: Translation does not mean a shift from one vocabulary to another, from one French word to one English word, for instance, as if the two languages existed independently. Like Michel Serres, I use translation to mean displacement, drift, invention, mediation, the creation of a link that did not exist before and that to some degree modifies two elements or agents. (Latour, 1994, p. 32) Serres (1992) dedicated a whole monograph to his conception of translation. Essentially, Serres (1992) uses the translation concept in two ways. On the one hand, the knowledge of one genre can be translated into another genre, and on the other hand, translation is the conversion of one form of energy into another. Concerning the former use of the translation concept, Serres (1997) describes the academic disciplines as provinces and the way they 315

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ignore each other as provincialism. According to Serres’s own understanding of the term, science is characterized as something entangled that is generated by the crossings of different ideas, practices and genres. Furthermore, Serres (1992) does not see science as the only ground where reason can play out. Mythology can also be an instance of the mediation of reason. This is why Serres’ works are characterized by the entanglements and crossings of philosophy, the natural sciences and Greek mythology (Brown, 2002, p. 10). As far as the second use of the translation concept is concerned, all the production machines in the economy and industry may be conceived of as translation machines in as much as they translate and transform energy (Serres, 1992, p. 123). Thus, objects, rather than just humans, can also translate and become quasi-subjects that are not passive but they have agentive power (Latour, 1993, p. 51ff.). While the fundamentals of how the translation concept is used by Serres are clear (1992, 1997), Serres (1992, 1997) does not really provide an explanation of the concrete transformations and displacements that take place because of translation. However, the basic assumption regarding the use of the translation concept in the social sciences based on Serres (1992, 1997) is that there is a transformation and/or displacement of the translator and the translated. The predecessor of ‘translation’ in the social sciences was the concept of ‘diffusion.’ Diffusion as a concept has its epistemological basis in physics. It was first taken over by anthropology in a metaphorical sense and then spread to the social sciences. Latour (1986) explains the transition from diffusion to translation in the following way: […] A diffusion model of power in which a successful command moves under an impetus given it from a central source is contrasted with a translation model in which such a command, if it is successful, results from the actions of a chain of agents each of whom ‘translates’ it in accordance with his/her own projects. (Latour, 1986, p. 264) While diffusion presupposes passive actors, translation involves active ones. These active actors shape the token in their hands: […] Instead of a passive medium through which the force is exerted, there are active members shaping and changing the token as it is moved. Instead of the transmission of the same token – simply deflected or slowed down by friction – you get, in the second model, the continuous transformation of the token. (Latour, 1986, p. 268)

Social translation beyond ANT: Some examples In organization studies, for example, ‘translation’ started gaining popularity in the 1990s and to a large degree has replaced ‘diffusion’ ever since (Czarniawska & Sevón, 2005, p. 7). In organization studies, ‘translation’ is used in order to explain and account for the change in organizations and institutions. Organizational change may be understood as follows: ‘[…] the crux of organizational life, […] a story of ideas turning into actions in ever new localities’ (Czarniawska & Joerges, 1996, p. 13). Behind this transformation of ideas into actions stands the process of translation and an associated translation model devised by Czarniawska and Joerges (1996). As a first step in the translation model, ideas need to be objectified before they are sent to travel. An idea per se is an abstracted cognition of something bigger: ‘A practice or an 316

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institution cannot travel; they must be simplified and abstracted into an idea’ (Czarniawska & Sevón, 2005, p. 9). The objectifying of ideas may happen in a couple of ways: […] Ideas are images which become known in the form of pictures or sounds (words can be either one or another). They can then be materialized (turned into objects or actions) in many ways: pictures can be painted or written (like in stage-setting), sounds can be recorded or written down (like in a musical score) and so on and so forth. (Czarniawska & Joerges, 1996, p. 20) The two organization studies scholars, however, express a clear predication when it comes to the act of objectifying ideas: ‘the simplest way of objectifying ideas is turning them into linguistic artefacts’ (Czarniawska & Joerges, 1996, p. 32). Despite this contention, there is no reference to (inter-)lingual translation, let alone to TS. Again the inherent quality of transformation and displacement is emphasized in the uses of the translation concept for organizational change: […] albeit usually associated with language, [translation] also means transformation and transference. It attracts attention to the fact that a thing moved from one place to another cannot emerge unchanged: to set something in a new place is to construct it anew. (Czarniawska & Sevón, 2005, p. 8) In this translation model, fashion4 has a particular role, inasmuch as it acts as a driver and decides which ideas within a whole range of ideas are actually translated: ‘The image we are evoking is as follows: guided by fashion, people imitate desires or beliefs that appear as attractive at a given time and place. This leads them to translating ideas, objects, and practices, for their own use’ (Czarniawska & Sevón, 2005, p. 10). Another translation model in organization studies is narrower but also clearer in its conception of what ‘translation’ means (Carlile, 2004). It is about overcoming and managing knowledge across boundaries in organizations where collaboration and innovation are desired. There are three types of boundaries to overcome in Carlile’s (2004) conception. Translation is situated at the intermediate level. When there is a syntactic or information-processing boundary to overcome, a transfer of knowledge is the necessary operation. Information needs to be conveyed among various organizational units but there is a common lexicon and understanding. A translation, however, is needed when there is a semantic boundary to be overcome. When shared meaning is needed, the operation involved is a translation. The third boundary is of a pragmatic and political nature. It is situated at the level of needs and interests, which must be negotiated. The operation involved is a transformation. This is the highest type of operation involved in knowledge management (Carlile, 2004, p. 558). Even if translation here is conceptualized as a semantic operation, there is not a single hint at (inter-)lingual translation or TS. (Inter-)lingual translation certainly also always involves the negotiation of interests and the needs of the various actors involved in the translation. This has been known in TS at least since the ‘cultural turn’ (Bassnett & Lefevere, 1990) that previously shed light on the context of translation and the power relations that frame it, as was also elaborated in the context of the ‘sociological turn’ (Wolf & Fukari, 2007). The pragmatic dimension of translation also becomes obvious and directly observable in community interpreting, where there are often completely asymmetric power relations and the interpreter is directly involved in and expected to partake in the negotiation processes. 317

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This section closes with an example from the social sciences which actually explicitly refers to TS, or rather functionalist theories. It is the example of the sociologist Joachim Renn (1998, 2002, 2006), who built his entire sociology on the notion of translation. This example also connects to the previous example given by Carlile (2004), as translation is similarly conceived of as an operation for overcoming boundaries (Renn, 1998). According to Renn (1998), however, translation is the performative act of overcoming a pragmatic boundary. Translation is a process not of observing another lifeform but rather an act of moving directly into this other lifeform (Renn, 1998, p. 151). Thus, the translator cannot stay outside the process but rather experiences a transformation as well. Renn’s sociology (2002, 2006) starts with the contention that imagining society and/or culture as a unitary entity is misleading. On the contrary, modern cultures are characterized by fragmentation and differentiation. This is why the various social and/or cultural units are dependent upon constant translation for their communication (Renn, 1998, p. 165). Renn explicitly takes interlingual translation as an example and makes an excursus into functionalist translation theories (e.g. Holz-Mänttäri, 1984; Reiß & Vermeer, 1984; Snell-Hornby, 1998) since in his model, communication via translation is seen as performative action (Renn, 2006, pp. 171–177). He makes this explicit reference to interlingual translation and TS because representatives of the latter have mostly abandoned strict notions of equivalence between a source and its target (Renn, 2006, p. 175). Renn’s (2006) understanding of TS here clearly diverges from the one largely upheld in cultural studies as shown in this chapter, and it must have been derived from his obvious engagement with modern TS. Still, according to Renn, it is always actions that are translated. These translations are not linear in nature – instead, one action needs to have the potential to imply various actions. Consequently, a political action means one thing for the political system and quite another for the economic or the legal ones. As an example, Renn (2006) refers to the meaning of a political decision in terms of its influence on the stock market on the one hand and its implications for the legal system on the other (Renn, 2006, p. 150). In these translations, it is not a question of maintaining the meaning of an action, but they do still need to refer to one and the same action (Renn, 2006, p. 176). While Renn (2006) makes use of the knowledge accumulated around translation as the master concept of TS and he uses the translation concept in a systematic way to mean the translation of concrete actions between integration units or systems, he does not provide any example of what the transformations of the entities and actors involved that ensue from the translation process look like in practical terms. Furthermore, while in sociological TS the actors involved in the translation process are clearly identified, Renn (2006) does not provide any information regarding who translates what in his sociology of translation, as also aptly pointed out by Schwinn (2008, p. 363).

Translation in medicine and the natural sciences The concepts of ‘translational research’ (Woolf, 2008) or also ‘translational medicine’ (Cohrs et al., 2015) are widespread in the medical and natural sciences. In essence, ‘translational research’ (Woolf 2008) has two meanings, labeled as T1 and T2. T1 is about harnessing knowledge from the basic sciences, the natural sciences and medicine to produce new treatments, drugs and devices for treatment and prevention. This type of translation is situated at the interface of basic science and clinical research. It requires ‘appropriately trained clinical scientists working in strong laboratories and with cutting-edge technology’ (Woolf, 2008, p. 211). The other meaning of ‘translational research’ or T2 is the immediate translation of new scientific knowledge and treatment to the patients and communities for whom they 318

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are intended (Woolf, 2008, p. 211). While T1 is more abstract and about doing science, T2 is more concrete and hands-on. It is about bringing research to and/or translating it for the people who need it and making sure it is correctly implemented. Woolf (2008, p. 212) highlights that most people when referring to translational research actually mean T1, which can also attract more funding than T2. The same is also attested to by the use of translation in neuroscience when it comes to translating preclinical research to clinical studies (Pavlov & Tracey, 2017). There is even a European Society for Translational Medicine that is based in Vienna. In its position paper, the Society argues in favor of bringing T1 and T2, which it instead calls ‘benchside’ and ‘bedside,’ concepts of translational medicine together into one translation concept and extending it with a focus on the community as represented by health populations, patients and medical practitioners, all of whom actively feed or translate back into translational medicine.

Going beyond lingual translation and toward intersemiotic translation or semiotranslation? All of the interdisciplinary approaches presented above share a common denominator: they all go beyond a lingual conception of the translation concept as it is advocated by TS, be that in the form of interlingual translation and/or ‘translation proper’ ( Jakobson, 1959) or TS’ more recent and gradually increasing engagement with intralingual translation ( Jakobson, 1959; Korning Zethsen, 2009). While TS has so far devoted nearly all of its research to intralingual and above all interlingual translation, which it regards as its master concept (Dizdar, 2009), intersemiotic translation – which is the only kind of translation that also includes nonverbal sign systems – has been pretty much sidelined so far. The intersemiotic translation type as described by Jakobson (1959, p. 233), however, does not leave the lingual plane as ‘intersemiotic translation or transmutation is an interpretation of verbal signs by means of signs of nonverbal sign systems’ ( Jakobson, 1959, p. 233). It, thus, does not envisage a translation between nonverbal sign systems exclusively, nor does it seem to include a translation that goes the other way around, namely from a nonverbal sign system to a verbal sign system. Jakobson’s conception of intersemiotic translation is, thus, a rather narrow one that also has a very distinct lingual focus. This distinct lingual focus or orientation is also part and parcel of how semiotics defines translation or rather intersemiotic translation. In fact, Marais (2019, p. 47f ) sees the lingual focus of intersemiotic translation in semiotics as one of its major weaknesses, along with conceptualizations of translation that revolve around notions of equivalence or source and target texts. Marais (2019, p. 49f.) attributes this lingual focus in theories of meaning to a Saussurean understanding, within which all semiotic processes were modeled on language as the ultimate semiotic phenomenon. The full scope of (intersemiotic) translation according to Marais (2019), however, should include examples of both lingual and non-lingual translation done by humans and non-humans alike, or between them: The full scope of translation should include examples of non-lingual translation, such as the intraspecific communication between acacia trees, which communicate chemically with surrounding trees when they are being browsed by kudu, or the communication between members of a pack of wolves. It could also include the communication between a lion tamer in a circus and the lions, i.e. interspecific communication. It should also include the translation of a piece of music into a painting, or the translation of religious views into agricultural practices. (Marais, 2019, p. 50) 319

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This broad conception of translation is linked to a Peircean understanding of translation as not limited to verbal sign systems. Signs are also always in the process of being translated into other signs. The process of meaning-making and meaning-taking, thus, is never finalized (Marais, 2019). A field that considers all sorts of meaning-making in living organisms, irrespective of the sign systems involved, and at all levels of life – even at the level of cells and their communication and translations – is biosemiotics: ‘Biosemiotics is defined as prelinguistic semiotics, i.e. the study of non-symbolic sign processes’ (Marais & Kull, 2016, p. 171). Marais and Kull (2016, p. 175) coin the term ‘semiotranslation’ to cover this concept, which is composed of two broad translation types: […] Semiotranslation – can be distinguished into two major types – biotranslation (for non-linguistic sign processes) and eutranslation (in which language is involved). Thus, biotranslation challenges Translation studies to take note of the argument that translation cannot be limited to eutranslation (or even interlingual eutranslation). By providing biological and semiotic arguments, biosemioticians require of TS scholars to think about the claim that interlingual translation (or translation proper), is only a small part of all the translation activities, including in humans. (Marais & Kull, 2016, p. 175f.; emphasis in the original) The various translation concepts certainly have a contribution to make when it comes to a broad conception of intersemiotic translation or semiotranslation. The translation concept of ‘cultural translation’ goes far beyond a lingual conception of translation inasmuch as it is understood as a culture and not as an expert technique. The latter technique is reserved for TS and the translator’s professional training in interlingual translation, or more recently also in intralingual training, such as with translation into plain language, speech-to-text-interpreting, etc. There is a clear focus on translation between verbal sign systems. When translation, however, is conceptualized as a ‘culture technique’ as in ‘cultural translation,’ translation becomes a process of everyday life used in order to integrate foreign and unknown experiences, practices, ideas, etc. into one’s own horizon. The focus here clearly goes far beyond translating between verbal sign systems, instead including all kinds of sign systems. The focus, however, remains on human translation here. The same applies to the second notion of ‘cultural translation,’ which is used for a translation between various disciplines and fields of research. It is in this vein that contemporary cultural studies have been evolving up until now according to Bachmann-Medick (2016), and this type of ‘cultural translation’ seems to occur between all kinds of sign systems, or at least it is not specified by Bachmann-Medick (2016) how this translation takes place between disciplines. The actors behind these translations are also not specified, but it may be assumed that they are human. This notion of ‘cultural translation’ also echoes the use of translation by representatives of ‘translational research’ or ‘translational medicine’ and the translation of basic science based on a confluence of various disciplines and fields of research from medicine and the natural sciences into clinical research. The second notion of ‘cultural translation’ certainly also echoes the use of translation by Serres (1992), with translation meaning that one form or genre of knowledge can be translated and thus transformed into another one. Like Bachmann-Medick (2016), Serres (1992) remains ambiguous when it comes to these translation processes and the actors involved. Representatives of actor-network theory on the other hand are very specific when it comes to which actors are involved in building a network. They can be both subjects and objects, human and non-human (Callon, 1981; Latour, 1993). Organization studies (Czarniawska & 320

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Joerges, 1996) also adopts the idea that subjects’ ideas can be translated into objects, including via non-lingual objectification processes (e.g. into pictures), so that they can be sent to travel within an organization. With translation as it is used in ANT, there may not be any living organisms involved. The involvement of these actors clearly puts ANT beyond biotranslation, which must at least involve living organisms, even if only on the cellular level. All of these conceptions of translation outside TS can clearly feed into intersemiotic and also biosemiotic translation as all of them go beyond the lingual plane and also involve non-human actors. The concept of semiotranslation being composed of biotranslation and eutranslation could even be expanded to also involve non-living organisms as actors or translators, as suggested by ANT. In general terms, there is much to be gained by semiotranslation becoming the transcultural playground because it is the confluence site of the various perspectives on and contributions to the concept of translation. TS should take the lead in this transdisciplinary and/or transcultural project if it wants to remain relevant in the future and finally be taken seriously and be noticed by other disciplines and fields of research. As a first step, it should open itself up to intersemiotic translation and biotranslation and all other interdisciplinary uses of its master concept. While TS may not have the last word on translation, it surely has the most expertise with ‘translation’ and is thus in a unique position to stretch out its hands to others and also to expand its notion of translation.

Notes 1 This claim at least holds for the appointment of the first Full Professors in Translation Studies in Austria and in German-speaking countries, where the first Full Professors and Chairs in Translation Studies were installed in the late 1980s. The first person to hold a Full Professorship and Chair in Translation Studies in Austria was Erich Prunč at the University of Graz in 1988, with Mary Snell-Hornby at the University of Vienna and Annemarie Schmid at the University of Innsbruck following him shortly thereafter (cf. Budin, 2021; personal correspondence). 2 Bachmann-Medick (2016) lists a total of eight turns that have defined cultural studies: the linguistic turn, the interpretive turn, the reflexive/literary turn, the postcolonial turn, the translational turn, the spatial turn and the iconic turn. A chapter of its own is dedicated to every turn, with the exception of the linguistic turn, which is depicted as a turn from which all the other turns take a critical distance. 3 Transfer studies seems to have reached a dead end since its former proponents are no longer active in promoting it. 4 Fashion is quite a widely used explanatory concept in organization studies and management literature. Zwischenberger (2022) has recently used the concept in order to account for the various turns of translation studies.

References Akrich, M., & Latour, B. (1992). A Summary of Convenient Vocabulary for the Semiotics of Human and Nonhuman Assemblies. In W. Bijker & J. Law (Eds.), Shaping Technology. Building Society. Studies in Sociotechnical Change (pp. 259–264). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Antos, G. (2001). Transferwissenschaften. Chancen und Barrieren des Zugangs zu Wissen in Zeiten der Informationsflut und der Wissensexplosion. In S. Wichter & G. Antos (Eds.), Wissenstransfer zwischen Experten und Laien. Umrisse einer Transferwissenschaft (pp. 3–34). Frankfurt, Germany: Peter Lang. Bachmann-Medick, D. (2002). Übersetzung im Spannungsfeld von Dialog und Erschütterung. Ein Modell der Auseinandersetzung zwischen Kulturen und Disziplinen. In J. Renn, J. Straub & S. Shimada (Eds.), Übersetzung als Medium des Kulturverstehens und sozialer Integration (pp. 275–291). Frankfurt, Germany: Campus. 321

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Espagne, M. (1996b). Übersetzer in Paris und Leipzig: Michael Huber (1727–1804). In M. Espagne & W. Greiling (Eds.), Frankreichfreunde: Mittler des Französisch-Deutschen Kulturtransfers (1750–1850) (pp. 85–106). Leipzig, Germany: Leipziger Universitätsverlag. Espagne, M., & Middell, M. (Eds.) (1993). Transferts Culturels et Région. L’exemple de la Saxe. Region und Interkultureller Transfer am Beispiel Sachsens. Textes et études rassemblés par M. Espagne et M. Middell en collaboration avec J. Grandjonc. Aix en Provence, France: Presses Universitaires de Provence. Espagne, M., & Werner, M. (1985). Deutsch-französischer Kulturtransfer im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert. Zu einem neuen interdisziplinären Forschungsprojekt des C.N.R.S. Francia, 13, 502–510. Even-Zohar, I. (1981). Translation Theory Today: A Call for Transfer Theory. Poetics Today, 2(4), 1–7. Göpferich, S. (2006). Transferwissenschaft: Eine Subdisziplin der Translationswissenschaft? In S. Wichter & A. Busch (Eds.), Wissenstransfer: Erfolgskontrolle und Rückmeldung aus der Praxis (pp. 167–187). Frankfurt, Germany: Lang. Göpferich, S. (2007). Translation Studies and Transfer Studies: A Plea for Widening the Scope of Translation Studies. In Y. Gambier, M. Shlesinger & R. Stolze (Eds.), Doubts and Directions in Translation Studies: Selected Contributions from the EST Congress, Lisbon 2004 (pp. 27–39). Amsterdam, Netherlands: John Benjamins. Göpferich, S. (2010). Transfer and Transfer Studies. In Y. Gambier & L. van Doorslaer (Eds.), Handbook of Translation Studies. Volume 1 (pp. 374–377). Amsterdam, Netherlands: John Benjamins. Hall, S. (1996). Cultural Studies and the Politics of Internationalization: An Interview with Stuart Hall by Kuan-Hsing Chen. In D. Morley & K.-H. Chen (Eds.), Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies (pp. 392–408). London: Routledge. Hermans, T. (Ed.) (1985). The Manipulation of Literature: Studies in Literary Translation. London: Croom Helm. Holz-Mänttäri, J. (1984). Translatorisches Handeln. Theorie und Methode. Helsinki, Finnland: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia. Jakobson, R. (1959). On the Linguistic Aspects of Translation. In R. A. Brower (Ed.), On Translation (pp. 232–239). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Korning Zethsen, K. (2009). Intralingual Translation: An Attempt at Description. Meta, 54(4), 795–812. https://doi: 10.7202/038904ar Kortländer, B. (1995). Begrenzung – Entgrenzung. Kultur- und Wissenstransfer in Europa. In L. Jordan & B. Kortländer (Eds.), Nationale Grenzen und internationaler Austausch. Studien zum Kulturund Wissenstransfer in Europa (pp. 1–19). Tübingen, Germany: Niemeyer. Latour, B. (1986). The Powers of Association. In J. Law (Ed.), Power, Action and Belief. A New Sociology of Knowledge? Sociological Review Monograph 32 (pp. 264–280). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Latour, B. (1993). We Have Never Been Modern. Hemel Hempstead: Harveser Wheatsheaf. Latour, B. (1994). On Technical Mediation. Common Knowledge, 3(2), 29–62. Law, J. (1992). Notes on the Theory of the Actor-Network: Ordering, Strategy and Heterogeneity. System Practice, 5, 379–393. Lässig, S. (2012). Übersetzungen in der Geschichte: Geschichte als Übersetzung?. Geschichte und ­Gesellschaft, 38(2), 189–216. https://doi: 10.13109/gege.2012.38.2.189 Lienhardt, G. (1954). Modes of Thought. In E. E. Evans Pritchard (Ed.), The Institutions of Primitive Society: A Series of Broadcast Talks (pp. 95–107). Oxford: Blackwell. Lüsebrink, H-J. (2012). Interkulturelle Kommunikation: Interaktion, Fremdwahrnehmung, Kulturtransfer (3rd ed.). Stuttgart, Germany: Metzler. Lüsebrink, H-J., & Reichhardt, R. (Eds.) (1997). Kulturtransfer im Epochenumbruch. Frankreich/Deutschland 1770–1815. Leipzig, Germany: Leipziger Universitätsverlag. Marais, K. (2019). A (Bio)Semiotic Theory of Translation. The Emergence of Social-Cultural Reality. New York: Routledge. Marais, K., & Kull, K. (2016). Biosemiotics and Translation Studies: Challenging ‘Translation’. In Y. Gambier & L. van Doorslaer (Eds.), Border Crossings: Translation Studies and Other Disciplines (pp. 169–188). Amsterdam, Netherlands: John Benjamins. Mersmann, B. (2004). Bildkulturwissenschaft als Kulturbildwissenschaft?. Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, 49(1), 91–109. Mersmann, B. (2015). Relokalisierung und ausstellungskulturelle Übersetzung. Zur Ortsmigration der Ausstellung Cities on the Move. Kritische Berichte. Zeitschrift für Kunst- und Kulturwissenschaften, 3(43), 50–64.

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Yeung, J. (2008). The Song of the Earth. An Analysis of Two Interlingual and Intersemiotic Translations. The Translator, 14(2), 273–294. https://doi: 10.1080/13556509.2008.10799259 Zwischenberger, C. (2017). Translation as a Metaphoric Traveller across Disciplines. Wanted: ­Translaboration!. Translation and Translanguaging in Multilingual Contexts, 3(3), 388–406. https://doi: 10.1075/ttmc.3.3.07zwi Zwischenberger, C. (2019). From Inward to Outward: The Need for Translation Studies to Become Outward-going. The Translator, 25(3), 256–268. https://doi: 10.1080/13556509.2019.1654060 Zwischenberger, C. (2022). On Turns and Fashions in Translation Studies and Beyond. Translation Studies, online first.

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17 Approaches from computational sciences ­ Lynne Bowker

Introduction Biomimetics or biomimicry refers to the practice of emulating elements of nature or naturally occurring phenomena to solve complex human problems (Vincent et al., 2006). As pointed out by Giammarresi and Lapalme (2016), when computers were invented, computer scientists were initially inspired by notions of human language and of translation between natural languages, which they sought to imitate to some degree when developing programming languages and applications such as computer-assisted translation (CAT) and machine translation (MT) tools. However, computers are not human, and so it proved unfeasible to adopt and apply these concepts wholesale. Instead, it was necessary to adapt them to a computational framework. As a result, although the way that translation is viewed within computing has some relation to the way that it is viewed in the language professions, it has some differences too. In keeping with the handbook’s goal of providing information about conceptual approaches that can be used when studying translation in the broadest sense, this chapter explores the translational dimension of computing and considers how approaches to translation that are applied in computing go beyond translation as it is understood within the language professions. In addition, this chapter goes on to consider how the approaches that are used in computing could in turn be applied to study other types of intersemiotic translation and in this way can help to move us toward a more comprehensive conceptualization of translation, such as that which Marais and Kull (2016) refer to as semiotranslation. In particular, this chapter focuses on translation as a process, rather than as a product, and examines the involvement of elements that go beyond interlingual transfer and binaries (e.g. source-target). This chapter is divided into two main sections. The first explores the notions of language and translation as they occur within computer programming, while the second focuses on approaches to CAT and MT. Within each of these sections, we zero in on the intersemiotic aspects of translation in computing and then illustrate how the conceptual approaches used in the computer could be used to investigate other types of intersemiotic translation.

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Language and translation in computer programming At its most basic, a computer is a machine that accepts input (e.g. from a keyboard, mouse, touchscreen, microphone, the internet), processes this input according to some instructions and sends the results back through an output device (e.g. screen, speakers and printer). So essentially, a computer receives instructions, carries them out and presents the results. Broadly speaking, we could say that in computing, translation refers to the process by which instructions are converted into results. However, humans and computers do not communicate in the same way. Humans communicate primarily through so-called natural languages (e.g. English and French), while computers communicate using electrical signals. In order for humans and computers to interact – that is, in order for humans to be able to issue instructions that a computer can execute – an intersemiotic process is required. As part of this intersemiotic process, several types of language are used. Moreover, the process for getting a message from human language into machine language is not one of direct translation but instead resembles the process of relay translation. As described by Ringmar (2012, p. 141), relay translation (in the field of Translation Studies) consists of A chain of (at least) three texts, ending with a translation made from another translation: (original) ST [source text] > intermediate text (IT) > (end) TT [target text]. Let us consider the process needed to convert a human instruction into a tangible result produced by a computer. A user can only interact with a computer via a computer program, which is a collection of instructions that can be executed by a computer to perform a specific task. A computer program is usually developed by a specialist known as a computer programmer. A computer programmer is a person who can take their thoughts (in English, French or whatever natural language they use) and express them in written form in a high-level programming language. High-level programming languages, also known as human-readable programming languages, are formal languages that have been artificially constructed and carefully designed to be unambiguous. Instructions written in a high-level programming language are referred to as source code. There are many different high-level programming languages, and readers will undoubtedly have heard of some of these (e.g. C++, Java and Python). Most high-level programming languages are text-based, although some use visual programming (e.g. Scratch and Visual Logic), which allows users to describe processes using illustration. While a text-based programming language largely requires the programmer to think in a way that resembles a computer’s way of operating, a visual programming language lets the programmer describe the process in a way that may be easier for a person to grasp intuitively. For instance, with a visual programming language, a user can create programs by manipulating program elements graphically, such as by using boxes and arrows, where boxes are treated as entities and arrows represent relations. Visual programming language has been easy to apply to some types of programming, but in other cases, visual programming logic has proved less powerful than text-based languages. Some hybrid programming languages have also emerged. For instance, in contrast to the ‘no code’ approach espoused by visual programming languages, ‘low code’ programming languages allow uses to create some aspects of the program visually and to supplement these with text-based source code where it makes sense to do so. For more on the comparison between visual and text-based programming languages, see Saito, Washizaki, and Fukazawa (2017). 327

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High-level programming languages are readable by humans, but they are not readable by computers. Machine language is the only language that a computer can work with directly. In machine language, the instructions and data must all take the form of binary numbers (i.e., 0 or 1). Inside the physical computer, we find the central processing unit, which is a microchip that is sometimes described as the ‘brain’ of the computer. Transistors, which are semiconductor devices used to switch electronic signals and electrical power, are the main building blocks of microchips. In a transistor, a zero (0) corresponds to no flow of electricity (‘off’), while a one (1) means that electricity is being allowed to flow (‘on’). In this way, the binary numbers are represented physically inside a computer, which makes it possible to do calculations. However, high-level programming languages have few, if any, language elements that correspond directly to machine language. Therefore, before a program’s instructions can be carried out by a computer, the message must first pass through an assembly language. An assembly language is a low-level programming language in which the instructions correspond more closely to the machine language (binary code) instructions. To perform this relay translation, where a message is converted from a high-level programming language to a low-level or assembly language, then from this assembly language into machine language, and then finally from machine language into an electrical signal, the computer uses translators. The term translator is a technical term in the field of computing, where it refers to a processor that converts code from one computer language to another, and more specifically from one level of computer language to another (Thornton, 2017). As explained below and illustrated in Figure 17.1, there are three different types of translators: 1

2

3

Compiler: a translator used to convert a high-level programming language to a lowlevel programming language. A compiler takes time to work because it converts the whole program in one session and reports any errors that it detects after the conversion process is finished. Interpreter: a translator used to convert a high-level programming language to a lowlevel programming language. In contrast to a compiler, an interpreter converts the program one line of code at a time and reports errors as they are detected. An interpreter is faster than a compiler because it immediately executes the code as it is read. Assembler: a translator used to translate a low-level programming language into machine language.

level programming language • High-level Compiler

•GO TO 20

level (assembly) language • Low-level Assembler

•JMP TWN

• Machine language Instruc on execu on

•10000000 •11110001

• Processor

Figure 17.1

328

Three types of translators involved in the translation of computer code (adapted from Thornton [2017]).

Approaches from c­ omputational sciences

This section has explored some of the main ways in which language and translation are viewed in the context of computer programming. For a detailed overview of computer programming concepts, see Brookshear and Brylow (2019). For a deeper exploration of how programming language concepts compare to views of language and translation in the language professions, see Giammarresi and Lapalme (2016).

Intersemiotic aspects of translation within computer programming Now that we have explored how the notion of translation is approached in computer programming, let us consider some intersemiotic aspects of this approach which could potentially be used to investigate intersemiotic translation elsewhere. The main takeaways relating to intersemiotic translation that can be gleaned from computer programming approaches include: • • • • • • •

Initial input can be in various modes or forms. High-level programming languages can be in written or graphical form. Machine code generates electrical signals. Translation does not take place between languages but between levels of languages. Translation is a process whereby instructions are converted into results. Translation is a multistep process that resembles relay translation. The end result of the translation process is not limited to text.

The first thing that we might observe about the way that computers approach translation is that neither the initial input nor the final output needs to be a text in the conventional sense. Users can input information in a variety of forms through devices such as keyboards, mice, microphones or touchscreens. The high-level programming languages (also known as humanreadable programming languages) can be in written or graphical form, and as the message moves through the various steps of the relay translation process, the output at each level becomes less and less language-like (see Figure17.1). Moreover, at the level where the instructions are executed, the 1s and 0s of the binary code trigger electrical signals. Since humans and computers do not share a common language or even a common mode of communication, intersemiotic translation is the only way to effect meaningful communication between them. An additional key observation about the way that translation is conceived in computer programming is that it is chiefly a process rather than a product. What is more, it is never a simple or direct process whereby the starting input is transformed directly into the end output in a single step. Rather, it is always a multistep process where the output of one step becomes the input of the next. In this way, and as noted above, it is similar to relay translation (Ringmar, 2012) or relay interpretation (Shlesinger, 2010). However, in the case of translation or interpreting studies, the relay approach is considered to be the exception, rather than the norm, and it is frequently presented as being less desirable (e.g. because of the potential for errors to be introduced at each stage of the process) (Ringmar, 2012).1 In contrast, in computer programming, it is at the translation stage where any syntax errors (e.g. typographic errors, missing punctuation) that may exist in the source code will be identified; therefore, rather than being a process where errors are introduced, translation is a process where errors can be caught.2 Moreover, at the end of the process, we are left with a result, rather than a product per se. It is possible for the result to be expressed as a text (e.g. an on-screen message), but it is equally possible for the result to take another form, such as an audio message, an image, a sum, or even the absence of something (e.g. the deletion of a file). 329

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Another distinguishing feature of translation in computer programming is that t ranslation does not occur between languages but rather between levels of languages. For instance, there are many different high-level programming languages (e.g. C++, Java and Python), but translation is not an activity that takes place between these languages at the same level. Instead, as illustrated in Figure 17.1, translation takes place between different levels of languages. As we have seen, these levels go from languages that are readable by humans through languages that are only semi-comprehensible to most people, down to the binary code of machine language. What is more, different ‘players’ are involved at each level. Finally, although it is not a translation-related feature per se, it is worth adding a note about the nature of high-level programming languages. As mentioned previously, a computer program essentially contains a detailed set of instructions. Therefore, two very common techniques used in computer programming are iteration and recursion, both of which execute a set of instructions repeatedly in order to achieve an outcome. Although they work in slightly different ways, both iteration and recursion are methods of breaking a complex task down into a series of smaller or simpler tasks, and of repeating these smaller tasks numerous times. The results of the smaller steps cumulate to produce the overall result. This feature of programming languages reinforces the observation that human-computer communication is an inherently multistep process and one that does not necessarily proceed in a direct line from beginning to end. Based on these observations about the approach to language and translation that is adopted in computer programming, we surmise that this view could provide a useful frame for examining translation in contexts where: • • • • •

Translation is inherently intersemiotic. Translation is viewed primarily as a process, rather than a product. Translation is a multistep process involving multiple players. Translation may be a non-linear process (e.g. iterative or recursive). Translation agents mediate between different levels of specialization.

An illustration: Applying conceptual approaches from computer programming to translational medicine and knowledge translation To demonstrate the potential of applying the conceptual approaches used in computer programming to the study of other kinds of intersemiotic translation, let us consider the emerging field of translational medicine. Since the 1990s, the notion of translation has been increasingly adopted in biomedical science, where it has been variously referred to as translational medicine, translational science, and translational research (Curry, 2008; Strand, 2020). Popularly described as taking health research ‘from bench to bedside’ (Curry, 2008), this concept of translation within biomedical science has been more formally explained by the United States public agency known as the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) as follows: The process of turning observations in the laboratory, clinic and community into interventions that improve the health of individuals and the public – from diagnostics and therapeutics to medical procedures and behavioural changes. (Austin, 2018, p. 455) In commenting on this definition, Austin (2018) takes pains to point out what he sees as differences between the way the term translation is used in linguistics and the way it is used 330

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in medicine. In doing so, he emphasizes several points that are in line with the view of translation adopted by computer programming. First, Austin (2018, p. 455) stresses that the notion of process is very important, stating that this notion reflects the fact that ‘unlike linguistic translation, biomedical translation is not a one-step event, but multistep and recursive.’ This view is echoed by Strand (2020, p. 2), who also picks up on the relay aspect by noting that, at the very least, translational medicine will flow ‘from basic research to clinical practice and then to public health.’ However, Strand goes on to caution that translational pathways in biomedical science are often more complex than this and instead involve interactions and relations among a network of actors and organizations. As we have learned, the approach to translation in computer programming does indeed involve multiple actors (e.g. computer programmers, compilers, assemblers), although the process is more linear; however, the notion of recursion is a feature of programming languages. Therefore, to apply the computer programming concepts to translational medicine, we need to expand the notion of recursion from being a feature of a programming language to being a potential feature of the overall translation process. In this way, the two approaches to translation are not identical but are connected by a series of overlapping similarities in a relationship likened by Wittgenstein (1953) to family resemblance. In line with the idea that translation is a process, translational medicine is about starting with information (e.g. observations, research findings) and converting this information into results (e.g. improved health). Therefore, as is the case in computer programming, the input to and the output from the translation process are not necessarily texts in the conventional sense. Austin (2018, p. 455) again takes care to distance the notion of translation in translational medicine from that which is commonly understood in linguistics when he emphasizes its intersemiotic nature, noting that Translation is modality-agnostic; the translational process is conceptually similar whether its intended result is a small-molecule drug, a biologic (such as an antibody, oligonucleotide or aptamer), a device, a medical or surgical procedure, or a behavioural change (such as diet, exercise or smoking cessation). Thus ‘translation’ refers to an overarching conceptual and practical multistep process. Moreover, in the observations made by both Austin (2018) and Strand (2020), we can see that translational medicine involves transferring information and instructions between groups who have different types or levels of specialization, such as medical researchers, clinical practitioners, and patients. In this way, the computer programming notion of translation as an activity that operates between levels applies in translational medicine also. While researchers in the biomedical sciences are exploring the application of translation to medicine, this general idea has also been taken up by research funding bodies and policy makers, although these latter groups have coined a different term. According to Rushmer et al. (2019), the term knowledge translation first appeared in the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) Act (2000). The CIHR is an independent agency and research funding body accountable to Canada’s Parliament, and it is one of three agencies that make up the Tri-Council (along with the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council). On their website, the CIHR (2016) confirms that knowledge translation is a fundamental part of their mandate: ‘The objective of CIHR is to excel, according to internationally accepted standards of scientific excellence, in the creation of new knowledge and its translation into improved health for Canadians…’ [emphasis in the original]. 331

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The CIHR (2016) website goes on to offer the following detailed definition of this concept: Knowledge Translation is defined as a dynamic and iterative process that includes synthesis, dissemination, exchange and ethically-sound application of knowledge to improve the health of Canadians, provide more effective health services and products and strengthen the health care system. If the term knowledge translation originated in Canada, Sudsawad (2007) and Rushmer et al. (2019) observe that it has since been adopted more widely, including by the World Health Organization. A common thread running through the original CIHR definition and subsequently adapted definitions is that knowledge translation is viewed as a process that seeks to close the knowledge-to-action gap. In other words, the translation element resides in taking knowledge (e.g. research findings) and then converting this into results (e.g. improved health). What is more, as was the case in the definition of translational medicine presented by Austin (2018), the definition of knowledge translation incorporates the notion that translation is understood to be an intersemiotic process that involves multiple players with different levels of knowledge, and has multiple steps that may be non-linear. All of these characteristics relate back to the view of translation that is present in computer programming. Overall, these related examples from biomedical science demonstrate how the conceptual approach to translation stemming from computer programming can be used to study intersemiotic translation in other fields. For instance, this could include the interrelated notions of knowledge mobilization, knowledge transfer, knowledge integration and knowledge ­brokering –­ sometimes collectively referred to as K* – which are emerging in relation to funding policies concerning research in the social sciences and humanities, among others (Phipps, 2012; SSHRC, 2021). Finally, another area that could be interesting to explore through this frame in the future is the burgeoning field of science communication (e.g. Burns et al., 2003; Hall Jamieson et al., 2017), along with the related notions of science literacy, public understanding of science and popularization of science.

Computer-assisted translation and machine translation As we have learned in the previous section, computers cannot understand human languages; they can only follow precisely formulated instructions that are translated in a relay fashion from human-readable programming languages down to machine-readable binary code. However, even though computers are not able to understand natural languages, researchers have nonetheless tried to program computers to carry out (or facilitate) interlingual translation between natural languages. This section will examine some of the main approaches that have been used to develop computer-assisted translation (CAT) and machine translation (MT) tools. Chronologically, research into MT preceded research into CAT tools, and the earliest efforts to program computers to carry out translation date back to the period just after the World War II. As explained by Hutchins and Somers (1992), in these initial attempts, researchers once again engaged in biomimetics and tried to get computers to reproduce the steps that they thought human translators followed. These early approaches are referred to as rule-based machine translation (RBMT) because they essentially consisted of providing the computer with large bilingual dictionaries and a detailed set of grammar rules. However, these RBMT systems did not perform particularly well because natural language is inherently ambiguous (owing 332

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to synonymy, polysemy, homography, etc.), and people use much more than a knowledge of vocabulary and grammar when translating. In particular, human translators regularly employ real-world knowledge to correctly disambiguate phrases that, strictly speaking, could have more than one possible meaning. Since computers do not have access to real-world knowledge, they are not good at processing language in the way that people do. Rule-based machine translation remained the dominant MT research paradigm for about 40 years, but in the face of its limited success and a lack of progress in being able to equip computers with the type of knowledge used by human translators, researchers eventually decided to approach things differently, which included focusing on CAT tools and looking for alternate approaches to MT. By the 1990s, computing technology had progressed significantly; computers were much faster and had a lot of storage capacity. In addition, more and more people were producing text in electronic form, meaning that there were lots of examples of machine-readable texts that had already been translated by professional translators. These three factors – improved processing power, increased storage capacity, and the availability of data – led developers to try to approach both CAT and MT in a way that would harness the strengths of computers. Two key strengths of computers are pattern matching and number crunching, and these became the mainstay of data-driven or corpus-based approaches to CAT and MT, which essentially carry out translation without using linguistic knowledge. CAT tools assist translators with certain aspects of translation rather than attempting to complete a translation from beginning to end in an automatic fashion. One of the main CAT tools to emerge during the 1990s, and which remains popular today, is the translation memory (TM). A TM system operates on the principle of translation by analogy.3 The TM tool has access to a database that contains a large collection of previously translated target texts aligned at the sentence level with their source texts. As described in detail by Bowker and Fisher (2010), when a translator has a new text to translate, the TM system begins by breaking down the new source text into sentences and then comparing each sentence of the new source text against the sentences contained in all of the source texts stored in the database. If the TM system finds a match, which could be an exact match or a partial (fuzzy) match, then it shows the translator how that particular sentence was translated previously. The translator is then free to decide whether any elements of the previous translation solution can be usefully integrated into the new target text. This basic principle of pattern matching was also applied to fully automatic MT in an approach known as example-based machine translation (EBMT) (Carl & Way, 2003). In EBMT, the computer matches chunks (e.g. phrases) of the source text against the source language material stored in the system’s aligned parallel corpus, and then the corresponding chunks of target language text are recombined to form a translation of the original sentence. Finally, the new target language sentence is then verified by comparing each target language sentence against a language model (e.g. a monolingual target language corpus) to determine whether it constitutes an acceptable sentence in the target language. The next major advance to come about in data-driven MT was statistical machine translation (SMT), which is based on the idea that every source language segment has any number of possible translations, and the translation that is the most appropriate is the one that is assigned the highest probability score by the MT system (Koehn, 2010). Once again, the process starts with an aligned bilingual corpus. The statistical translation model breaks the sentences in the bilingual corpus into smaller chunks and then calculates the probabilities of each target language phrase being a translation of its parallel source language phrase. SMT systems also make use of language models, which are monolingual models of the target language. So while the bilingual corpus can tell users that “the car” is a likely translation of 333

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‘la voiture,’ the SMT system also needs to determine whether ‘the car’ is a likely sequence in English in the first place. Language models can be trained on very large monolingual corpora of texts written in the target language. As it turned out, MT systems based on these pattern-matching and number-crunching techniques produced translations that, while not perfect, were of a much higher quality than the translations that were produced using the earlier rule-based approaches. Progress based on data-driven techniques continued with the emergence of neural machine translation (NMT) in late 2016. NMT employs an artificial neural network, which is an information processing system that is inspired by the way that biological nervous systems, such as the brain, process information. An artificial neural network is composed of a large number of highly interconnected processing elements that work together to solve specific problems. Once again, in this data-driven approach, the MT system learns by example. As described by Koehn (2020), an artificial neural network is configured for a specific application, such as pattern recognition, through a learning process. Artificial neural networks are organized in layers, and these layers are made up of a number of interconnected nodes that contain an activation function. Patterns are presented to the network via the input layer, which communicates to one or more hidden layers where the actual processing is done via a system of weighted connections. The hidden layers then link to an output layer where the answer is shown. Artificial neural networks contain some form of learning rule that modifies the weights of the connections according to the input patterns with which it is presented. In this way, artificial neural networks learn by example. The more examples that an NMT system has available for reference, the better the quality of its output; therefore, ideally, the training corpora are very large (i.e., hundreds of millions of words of parallel text). A core difference between NMT and SMT is that when researchers present training material (i.e. corpora) to the learning algorithms in an artificial neural network, they do not necessarily tell the algorithms what to look for. Instead, the NMT system discovers patterns itself. Forcada (2017) likens the process to predictive text completion: for each word from the source text, the most likely output word is predicted while the target text is being constructed. The preceding descriptions of the data-driven TM, EBMT, SMT and NMT systems have all been greatly simplified, and more detailed information can be obtained from sources such as van der Meer (2020) and Way (2020), among others. In addition, while it is convenient to describe these as independent approaches, in reality, many translation technologies are hybrid tools that incorporate elements of different approaches. However, it is not necessary to understand all the finer details of data-driven CAT and MT systems to see that the essential techniques that are employed do not make use of linguistic information per se, and they do not approach the task of translation in the same way that humans do. Rather, these datadriven techniques include: • • •

the identification of patterns (i.e., through superficial matching of character strings) the calculation of frequencies (i.e., how many times these character strings appear), and the calculation of probabilities (i.e., how likely it is that these character strings will occur again).

However, it is also important to recognize that none of the data-driven approaches claim to offer problem-free translations, and it is usually recommended that the MT output be verified, and if necessary revised, by a human. This process is often referred to as post-editing (Nunes Vieira, 2020). 334

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Intersemiotic aspects of data-driven approaches to CAT and MT Now that we have explored some of the main techniques used to facilitate the semi-automatic or automatic translation of texts by computers, let us consider some intersemiotic aspects of these data-driven approaches which could potentially be used to study intersemiotic translation elsewhere. The main takeaways relating to intersemiotic translation that can be gleaned from data-driven approaches to CAT and MT include: • • • •

Input is not recognized as a text per se, but rather as a stream of data that can be processed. Translation is primarily a process (although it does result in a product). Translation is a multistep process involving both computer and human agents. Many steps of the process do not require any knowledge of the language and involve identifying patterns and performing calculations.

The first observation to make is that while the input to the translation process may be something that is recognized as a text by humans, it is not actually recognized as a text by the computer. Rather, to the computer, it is simply a collection of data that can be processed. This processing takes place without any knowledge of the language, and instead, it takes the form of superficial pattern matching and numerical calculations. Finally, the output that is produced by the computer is typically quality-checked by a person, who is capable of confirming the accuracy of the content and the appropriateness of the form for a given purpose, and of making any necessary adjustments in order to bring the output up to the desired quality level. The process is intersemiotic because, in addition to the need for translation between human and computer languages as described in section 2, the computer’s pattern matching and number crunching techniques do not process ‘texts’ per se but instead involve transforming raw data into information with meaning potential. In addition, as seen earlier in the section on programming languages, there is a sort of relay element to the process whereby the computer takes the raw input and produces a draft output, and then the human takes the draft output and produces a final product. In moving through this process, the combined effort of a computer and a person can translate the input from raw data into processed information, and then from information to application-ready knowledge. Based on these observations about the data-driven approach to translation that is adopted in CAT and MT, we surmise that this view could provide a useful frame for examining translation in contexts where: • • • •

Translation is inherently intersemiotic. Translation is viewed primarily as a process, rather than a product. Translation is a multistep process. Translation involves multiple players that do not communicate in the same way.

An illustration: applying conceptual approaches from data-driven CAT and MT to data processing To demonstrate the potential of applying the conceptual approaches used in data-driven CAT and MT to the study of other kinds of intersemiotic translation, let us consider the field of data processing more generally and see whether we can view data processing of any sort as a type of intersemiotic translation. 335

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American organizational theorist Russell Ackoff (1989) is generally credited as being the first person to articulate the hierarchical relationship between data, information and knowledge, and this has since been referred to as the knowledge hierarchy, the information hierarchy or the knowledge pyramid (Frické, 2019), as illustrated in Figure 17.2.4 Rowley and Hartley (2008) synthesize definitions of these three concepts as found in numerous textbooks, and key elements from this synthesis include the following: •

•

•

Data are characterized as being discrete, objective facts or observations that are unorganized and unprocessed and therefore have little meaning or value because of the lack of context or interpretation. Information is described as organized or structured data, which has been processed in such a way that the information now has relevance for a specific purpose or context, and is therefore meaningful, valuable, useful, and relevant. Knowledge is generally recognized as being an elusive notion that is difficult to define, and which is typically described in relation to the information; however, an essential feature of knowledge is that it involves understanding. In other words, to convert information into knowledge, information must be combined with understanding.

Nowadays, data processing is almost always carried out with the help of computers, and it has become integrated into many aspects of our lives. Some commonly recognized computer applications that have been developed to support different types of data processing include spreadsheets, databases, and personal finance software. Although we might not instinctively view the processing of numerical or financial data as a type of translation, it nonetheless lends itself to this view when we consider it through the lens of data-driven approaches to CAT and MT. Like CAT and MT, spreadsheets or financial software are concerned with taking data as input and then processing it by identifying patterns, performing calculations and even projecting trends. There is no need for the software to ‘understand’ the data. Regardless of the type of data at hand, the goal of data processing is to convert the data into information, and this is achieved by organizing or structuring the data, such as by identifying patterns according to which data can be sorted, or performing calculations that bring together discrete elements of data. Just as the output of CAT or MT is then passed on to a human agent for the next step, so too is the output of a spreadsheet or finance software. A human takes this output, examines

Knowledge

Informa on

Data

Figure 17.2 The knowledge pyramid. 336

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it, and if necessary, adjusts it in order to make it useful to the goal at hand. In data processing, this step is referred to as data cleaning or data cleansing, but it resembles the notion of post-editing in that it is concerned with detecting inaccurate information and then replacing, modifying or deleting the so-called dirty data. The data cleaning may be carried out with the help of additional software tools, and in this way, it has a parallel in the form of automatic post-editing, which is emerging as an intermediary step between the generation of MT output and the application of human post-editing with the goal of reducing the number of errors that human translators need to correct (Shterionov et al., 2020). In both CAT/MT and in other forms of data processing, it is at the stage of human input, that the information is transformed into knowledge. In fact, this stage where the human analyzes and makes sense of the machine output is sometimes referred to as (data) interpretation because the person is deriving meaning from the information. Overall, the process is intersemiotic because the two players involved – first the computer which does the data processing to create information, and second the human who analyzes and potentially corrects the information to produce knowledge – do not need to use a common form of communication. The computer does not ‘understand’ the data that it processes or the information that it produces, and the human user does not necessarily understand the raw data or details of the techniques used by the computer to process the data. Yet translation has taken place because what was unusable to a human at stage one (i.e., raw data), has been transformed into something that can be meaningfully analyzed (i.e., information) and then understood and applied (i.e., knowledge). We have given the example of spreadsheets and financial data as something that most readers will be able to relate to; however, this view can be extended to encompass data processing more broadly as a form of intersemiotic translation, regardless of whether the data is language data, financial data, health-related data, weather-related data, and so on.

Concluding remarks The earliest attempts both to develop computer programming languages and then to design specific computer programs that could automatically translate between two natural languages, were inspired by human language and human translation. However, in both cases, it proved challenging to apply a purely biomimetic approach because people and computers do not communicate in the same way. It therefore became necessary to conceive of translation somewhat differently and to introduce an intersemiotic approach. As a result, both programming languages and CAT/MT tools have evolved in ways that depart from the specific translation techniques used in the language professions. In human translation, we often prize creativity, linguistic information, and cultural and other real-world knowledge. However, none of these are easily accessible to computers. Instead, the conceptual approaches to translation used in computing privilege the features and strengths of computers, such as the ability to follow instructions precisely, the capacity to identify patterns in enormous volumes of unstructured data, and the ability to perform complex calculations rapidly. Consequently, the conceptual approaches to translation that are used in computing can in turn offer a frame to facilitate the study of yet other forms of intersemiotic translation, allowing us to conceive of translation in even broader terms. In this way, our understanding of the notion of translation can continue to expand beyond a simple binary notion where something is considered to be translation (or not) based on how closely the products or overall process resemble those commonly associated with interlinguistic translation. Instead, drawing on conceptual approaches that have been developed in other fields, such as computing, 337

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can allow us to build up a family portrait of translation that is in keeping with the notion of family resemblance. As postulated by Wittgenstein (1953), instead of being connected by a single essential common feature, it is possible to be connected by a series of overlapping similarities, where no single feature is common to all. In this spirit, we hope that this snapshot of translation in computing can make a meaningful contribution to the growing family album of intersemiotic translation.

Notes 1 While prevailing attitudes in Translation Studies may frown upon the use of relay translation except as a last resort, it is nonetheless gaining momentum as an area of study (e.g. Pieta, 2017). In some cases, it is referred to as indirect translation, although as noted by (Ringmar, 2012, p. 141): “‘indirect translation’ tends to focus on the end product, whereas ‘relay translation’ highlights the process.” 2 Other types of errors, such as the program not doing what the programmer wants it to do, are not a result of the translation between a programming language and the machine language; rather, this type of problem arises from the difficulty of expressing the right algorithms in any programming language (Giammarresi & Lapalme, 2016). 3 According to Fraser (2020, p. 13), human translation is not immune to this approach, which he refers to as the ‘the copy effect in translation.’ 4 Some presentations of the hierarchy include a fourth level – wisdom – which is then described as the data-information-knowledge-wisdom (DIKW) hierarchy or pyramid (Frické, 2019).

References Ackoff, R. (1989). From Data to Wisdom. Journal of Applied Systems Analysis, 16, 3–9. Austin, C. P. (2018). Translating Translation. Nature Reviews Drug Discovery, 17(7), 455–456. https:// doi:10.1038/nrd.2018.27 Bowker, L., & Fisher, D. (2010). Computer-Aided Translation. In Y. Gambier & L. van Doorslaer (Eds.), Handbook of Translation Studies, Vol. 1 (pp. 60–65). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Brookshear, G., & Brylow, D. (2019). Computer Science: An Overview, 13th edition. New York: Pearson. Burns, T. W., O’Connor, D. J., & Stocklmayer, S. M. (2003). Science Communication: A Contemporary Definition. Public Understanding of Science, 12(2), 183–202. Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) (2000). Canadian Institutes of Health Research Act. Available at: https://laws.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/c-18.1/page-1.html Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) (2016). About us >> Knowledge Translation. Available at: https://cihr-irsc.gc.ca/e/29418.html Carl, M., & Way, A. (Eds.) (2003). Recent Advances in Example-Based Machine Translation. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Curry, S. H. (2008). Translational Science: Past, Present, and Future. BioTechniques, 44(2), ii–viii. Forcada, M. L. (2017). Making Sense of Neural Machine Translation. Translation Spaces, 6(2), 291–309. Fraser, R. (2020). The Copy Effect in Translation: On Formal Similarity and the Book Historic ­Perspective. TTR: Traduction, Terminologie, Rédaction, 33(2), 13–40. Frické, M. (2019). The knowledge Pyramid: The DIKW Hierarchy. Knowledge Organization, 49(1), 33–46. Giammarresi, S., & Lapalme, G. (2016). Computer Science and Translation: Natural Languages and Machine Translation. In Y. Gambier & L. van Doorslaer (Eds.), Border Crossings: Translation Studies and Other Disciplines (pp. 205–224). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Hall Jamieson, K., Kahan, D. M., & Scheufe, D. A. (Eds.) (2017). The Oxford Handbook of the Science of Science Communication. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hutchins, W. J., & Somers, H. L. (1992). An Introduction to Machine Translation. London: Academic Press. Koehn, P. (2010). Statistical Machine Translation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Koehn, P. (2020). Neural Machine Translation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marais, K., & Kull, K. (2016). Biosemiotics and Translation Studies: Challenging ‘Translation’. In Y. Gambier & L. van Doorslaer (Eds.), Border Crossings: Translation Studies and Other Disciplines (pp. 169–188). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 338

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Nunes Vieira, L. (2020). Post-Editing of Machine Translation. In M. O’Hagan (Ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Translation Technology (pp. 319–335). London: Routledge. Phipps, D. (2012, March 9). What Is Knowledge Mobilization and Why Does It Matter to Universities? The Guardian blog. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/ blog/2012/mar/09/introduction-to-knowledge-mobilisation Pieta, H. (2017). Theoretical, Methodological and Terminological Issues Researching Indirect Translation: A Critical Annotated Bibliography. Translation Studies, 10(2), 198–216. Ringmar, M. (2012). Relay Translation. In In Y. Gambier & L. van Doorslaer (Eds.), Handbook of Translation Studies, Vol. 3 (pp. 141–144). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Rowley, J. & Hartley, R. (2008). Organizing Knowledge: An Introduction to Managing Access to Information, 4th edition. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Ltd. Rushmer, R., Ward, V., Nguyen, T., & Kuchenmüller, T. (2019). Knowledge Translation: Key Concepts, Terms and Activities. In M. Verschuuren & H. van Oers (Eds.), Population Health Monitoring (pp. 127–150). Cham: Springer. Saito, D., Washizaki, H., & Fukazawa, Y. (2017). Comparison of Text-Based and Visual-Based Programming Input Methods for First-Time Learners. Journal of Information Technology Education Research, 16, 209–226. Shlesinger, M. (2010). Relay Interpreting. In Y. Gambier & L. van Doorslaer (Eds.), Handbook of Translation Studies, Vol. 1 (pp. 276–278). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Shterionov, D., do Carmo, F., Moorkens, J., Hossari, M., Wagner, J., Paquin, E., Schmidtke, D., Groves, D., & Way, A. (2020). A Roadmap to Neural Automatic Post-editing: An Empirical ­Approach. Machine Translation, 34(2–3), 67–96. Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) (2021). Definitions of Terms. Website of the SSHRC, Government of Canada. Available at: https://www.sshrc-crsh.gc.ca/funding-financement/programs-programmes/definitions-eng.aspx#km-mc Strand, D. L. (2020). Everyday Characterizations of Translation Research: Researchers’ Own Use of Terminology and Models in Medical Research and Practice. Palgrave Communications, 6, article 110. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-020-0489-1 Sudsawad, P. (2007). Knowledge Translation: Introduction to Models, Strategies, and Measures. Austin, TX: Southwest Educational Development Laboratory, National Center for the Dissemination of Disability Research. Available at: https://ktdrr.org/ktlibrary/articles_pubs/ktmodels/ Thornton, S. (2017, February 17). What Are Compilers, Translators, Interpreters, and Assemblers? Microcontroller Tips. Available at: https://www.microcontrollertips.com/compilers-translatorsinterpreters-assemblers-faq/ van der Meer, J. (2020). Translation Technology – Past, Present and Future. In E. Angelone, M. Ehrensberger-Dow & G. Massey (Eds.), The Bloomsbury Companion to Language Industry Studies (pp. 285–309). London: Bloomsbury. Vincent, J. F. V., Bogatyreva, O. A., Bogatyreva, N. R., Bowyer, A., & Pahl, A.-K. (2006). Biometrics: Its Practice and Theory. Journal of the Royal Society Interface, 3(9), 471–482. Way, A. (2020). Machine Translation: Where are We at Today? In E. Angelone, M. Ehrensberger-Dow & G. Massey (Eds.), The Bloomsbury Companion to Language Industry Studies (pp. 311–332). London: Bloomsbury. Wittgenstein, L. (1953). Philosophical Investigations (G. E. M. Anscombe, Trans.). New York: Macmillan.

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18 Intersemiotic approaches Susan Petrilli and Margherita Zanoletti

Part I: Intersemiotic translation across semiotics and translation studies: definitions, taxonomies, perspectives Margherita Zanoletti As Susan Petrilli (2015c, p. 97) observes, ‘semiotics and translation theory are different disciplines, but between them there exists a relation of translation understood as the possibility of explanation and development as they respond to and interpret each other.’ In fact, definitions, taxonomies and perspectives on translation-related issues coming from semiotics and translation theory have often engaged in dialogue, providing complementary assessments of a multidisciplinary phenomenon. The first part of this chapter aims to provide a guided overview of some crucial contributions to the conceptualization of intersemiotic translation, coming from the distinct yet interrelated fields of semiotics and translation studies. Key concepts such as text, translation and intersemiotic translation are synthetically outlined in their diverse declinations, sketching future developments of a fast-evolving field of research.

Verbocentric traces The concept of text – as simple as it may seem – can serve as a starting point for a discussion on intersemiotic translation. This term derives from the Latin textus, which is the past participle of the verb texere, ‘woven.’ Therefore, ‘text’ is metaphorical evoking the image of a network of interwoven threads. Texts are like fabrics, with a multiplicity of lines. While in everyday language the word ‘text’ mostly implies verbal communication, semioticians and media communication specialists tend to apply it to any kind of message. According to Peeter Torop (2008, p. 255; 2014), any channel of expression in any act of communication carries meaning. For this reason, even exclusively nonverbal communication deserves the label ‘text.’ In Henrik Gottlieb’s conceptualization (2005, p. 35), ‘text’ is ‘any combination of sensory signs carrying communicative intention.’ Moreover, as stressed by Paul Thibault (2000, p. 312): the meaning of the text is the result of the various ways in which elements from different classes of phenomena – words, actions, objects, visual images, sounds and so on – are 340

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related to each other as parts in some larger whole. Meaning-making is the process, the activity of making and construing such patterned relations among different classes of such elements. Torop and Gottlieb employ the word ‘text’ to refer to different types of human cultural artifacts. Thibault describes the text as a mixture or network of verbal and nonverbal elements. More recently, Kobus Marais (2019, p. 69; also Petrilli, 2015b, 2016b; infra, p. 352, 358, 361, 364) proposes the expression ‘semiotic system’ rather than ‘text.’ According to Marais, the metaphoric use of the term ‘text’ tends to reduce culture to verbal language. To cite one example, W. J. T. Mitchell’s (1994) seminal concept of ‘imagetext’ is an oxymoron intending to describe a level of meaning, which is not medium-specific. It suggests the multimedial mixture inherent in any work, message or form of expression (‘the term “imagetext” designates composite, synthetic works [or concepts] that combine image and text,’ ibid.; also Zanoletti, 2012a, pp. 10, 20–22; 2013). Within the compound noun ‘imagetext,’ as opposed to ‘image,’ ‘text’ indicates words. On the contrary, Marais’ choice of the term ‘system’ avoids implicit reference to the verbal-linguistic, broadening the concept of culture to embrace all types of signs and of translations including what is currently defined as ‘intersemiotic translation,’ namely, translation from one semiotic system to another. Indeed, eschewing the word ‘text’ in favor of ‘semiotic system,’ ‘semiosystem,’ and ‘sign system’ is a powerful terminological strategy, allowing to expand the notion of translation beyond the interlingual paradigm.

Beyond verbocentrism The centrality of the word ‘text’ in discourses around translation is one of the most evident traces of the verbocentric and anthropocentric perspectives that pervade reflection on translation to this day. Since becoming a discipline, translation studies in the Western world has been conceptualized almost exclusively in terms of language, literature, and culture, basing itself mainly on Roman Jakobson’s tripartition featuring intralingual, interlingual (‘translation proper’), and intersemiotic translation (1959[2004]). Although Jakobson did consider translation processes between nonverbal and verbal sign systems, he focused on Charles Peirce’s broad notion of semiotics as a general sign theory on verbal language (Marais, 2019; also Zanoletti, 2021). The term ‘translation’ is usually understood as a verbal-only and human-only practice, and thus matches Jakobson’s notion of interlingual translation. Traditionally, translation is intended as the (professional) practice of turning a piece of writing or speech (a source text) into another written or oral piece (a target text). Moreover, as testified, for instance, by João Queiroz and Pedro Ata (2019, p. 303), whether in translation studies or intermedial studies, the relation between source and target is mostly treated as a dyadic relation, where the former is regarded as something static, having stable, formalized meaning. On this account, visual signs, unlike verbal ones, do not constitute an obstacle to interlingual and intercultural communication, thanks to their supposedly alleged universal, immediate nature (Torresi, 2008, p. 65). Although special attention is devoted to the decision process guiding translation practice, and especially the rules of selection, that is ‘the capacity of any discourse to choose which events and objects actually to state and which only to imply’ (Chatman, 1978, p. 28), typically only verbal elements are considered, while nonverbal signs tend to be overlooked. The widespread use of the word ‘text’ is not the only trace of a verbocentric perspective on translation. The common understanding of translation as a verbal phenomenon is also 341

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mirrored by the kind of training typically provided by translation schools, which tends to focus on the verbal elements, treating as incidental, if at all, any nonverbal components that may nonetheless contribute to the construction of meaning (Torresi, 2008, p. 64). While traditional conceptions of translation have only included intrasemiotic translation, and almost exclusively its subcategory interlingual translation, a primary aim of translation semiotics (Gottlieb, 2017, p. 46) is to establish a supposedly all-embracing taxonomy and expand the notion of translation to accommodate the nonverbal channels present in much modern communication and deal with the myriad types of multimedial practices and products so typical of contemporary society. From this perspective, translation across languages is seen as a specific case of translation across what Petrilli (2015b, p. 99) calls ‘semiosystems,’ namely, sign systems. According to Petrilli (2003, p. 41; also infra, p. 352), ‘interlingual translation only concerns the point of departure and arrival, while all the intermediary interpretive work is of a semiotic order,’ consequently, an adequate understanding of translation calls for interdisciplinarity. From the interdisciplinary angle, translation is studied as a shift, not between two languages, but between two cultures, two encyclopedias (Eco, 2001, p. 17) – two semiosystems. The final translation encompasses much more than the rephrasing of the original message. For instance, even discussing literary translation, Clive Scott (2010) argues for translation not only as a phenomenon entailing several media and stimulating different sensory and cognitive reactions but also as an orchestral proliferation, which develops a ‘prosthetics’ of language – that is, a process of replacement and of addition – through the multiplication of intermedial associations. Clearly, his main focus is not turning one (stable) instance of meaning into another (stable) instance of meaning, but rather the process of change and recreation that triggers meaning-making and meaning-taking. In translation studies, this perspective can be linked to translation as interpretation ( Jakobson, 1963; Gorlée, 1994; Petrilli, 2003, 2012a, 2019a, b; Campos, 2007; Queiroz & Ata, 2019), where ‘translation [is] conceived not as the reproduction of an unchanging textual essence but as an act of interpreting a text that is variable in form and content’ (Venuti, 2011, p. 128), and ‘no translation is fundamentally a unique text but one of many possibilities to render the original text’ (Torop, 2008, p. 255). This approach largely derives from Peirce’s theoretical model (see infra, p. 354-355). ‘Semiosis’ is an open-ended process of deferral among signs and ‘translation’ refers to semiosic/semiotic process in which meaning is generated in all its guises through ongoing interaction with new interpretants. From a Peircean perspective semiosis, which is an interpreter and context- dependent activity, is characterized by triadism involving dynamical interaction among signs, each conceived as an open set of relations between representamen, object and interpretant interacting dialogically with other open sets of sign relations (see Queiroz & Ata, 2019, p. 303). As posited by Thomas A. Sebeok (2001), such dynamics not only pervades language and conscious beings, but the whole living universe (infra, p. 352). In such a framework where translation entails any movement or change in space-time to existing relationships, or creation of new relationships, inclusive of the context in which the translative process takes place, such expressions as ‘source text’ and ‘target text’ are well replaced with ‘incipient sign system’ and ‘subsequent sign system.’ These expressions emphasize the time-based, intersemiotic and intersystemic nature of all translative processes.

Definitions and taxonomies of intersemiotic translation The original definition of intersemiotic translation was formulated by Jakobson (1959[2004], p. 114; see also Petrilli, 2003, p. 18; Marais, 2019, pp. 14–16; and infra, p. 359): ‘intersemiotic 342

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translation or transmutation is an interpretation of verbal signs by means of signs of nonverbal sign systems.’ To emphasize the idea of transformation, Jakobson chose the synonym ‘transmutation.’ In fact, intersemiotic translation can provisionally be said to take place when there is a re-presentation, in one or more semiotic systems with a different purport and substances of expression, of a form of the content intersubjectively recognized as being linked, at one or more levels of pertinence, to the form of the content of a source (Dusi, 2015, p. 184). As Nicola Dusi recounts (ibid.), Jakobson’s concept of ‘transmutation’ has impacted film semiotics most strongly, giving rise to various conceptualizations. The phenomenon has been variously investigated and expressed, ranging from the so-called ‘semiological interferences between the arts’ (Metz, 1971) to the notion of a full-blown transposition. Louis Hjelmslev (1961[1943]) adopts the term transduction, while Algirdas Greimas (1966, p. 14) speaks of transposition to indicate intertextual transformations oriented by natural language toward other sensorial orders. According to Gérard Genette (1982, p. 8), what is involved is hypertextuality, as transposition relates to a second-degree text, a text deriving from another, preexisting one. All these cases are but different faces of the same all – intersemiosis (see infra, p. 353). According to Gideon Toury, intersemiotic translation does not necessarily imply a transformation from verbal to nonverbal signs, but rather entails ‘the two codes being two different sign systems, whether one of them is verbal or not.’ This way, Toury’s definition clearly overcomes Jakobson’s literary bias by assuming that both systems in the translation process can be nonverbal (Marais, 2019, p. 55). Umberto Eco also reconsiders Jakobson’s three-part division, proposing a system-based classification. Eco adopts the syntagm ‘intersystemic interpretation’ to define ‘important variations in the substance of the expression’ (2001, p. 106). This category includes interlingual translation and ‘adaptation or transmutation,’ occurring when transposition involves a relationship between semiotic systems with a different purport and substance of expression. ‘Adaptation,’ or ‘transmutation,’ is the term employed by Eco to refer to Jakobson’s notion of intersemiotic translation. This type of translation transforms the source often radically, explicating the unsaid. Moreover, according to Eco, this process can be defined as successful or faithful if it maintains a relation of coherence with the enunciative choices of the source, a relation that operates across various levels of the subsequent sign system. A general strategy arises from the interpretation of source intention (Dusi, 2015, p. 184). Torop is another forerunner in conceptualizing intersemiotic translation. Following Jurij Lotman, Torop shows how culture emerges out of translational activities. His notion of ‘total translation’ is intended to expand translation to include all aspects of culture (Torop, 1995; Osimo, 2012). On this account, translation is relational, connected with thought and culture which results from manifold translation processes. He underlines how even monomedial texts entail more semiotic dimensions (e.g. font types, colors, etc.) than just the verbal. While Eco’s and Torop’s reflections on intersemiotic translation tend to focus on human communication only, drawing on Sebeok’s global semiotics (2001), Petrilli (2015a; see infra, p. 350, 354, 362) underlines the need to overcome anthropocentric and logocentric temptations: ‘verbal signs constitute only a tiny sector of the signs on our planet.’ She claims that signs are always in translation, unstable, and in the process of being further translated into other signs. In her translation typology which she develops in a global semiotic framework, Petrilli (2003, p. 19; see also pp. 352-355 and p. 364 below) distinguishes between intersemiosic translation (across two or more sign systems), endosemiosic translation (internal to a given sign system) and intersemiotic translation (which occurs in properly human semiosis and as such involves language, including verbal language). Such distinction accounts for all signs, including nonhuman signs. 343

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Alongside Petrilli, Queiroz also adopts a biosemiotic perspective, and reading Peirce describes translation as a triadic process involving representamen, object, and interpretant, irreducible to a binary connection between source and target. With Queiroz too, the themes of evolution and nonhuman communication are added to the agenda. Furthermore, according to Queiroz and Ata (2019, p. 298), intersemiotic translation is a notion close to ‘adaptation,’ a creative process highlighting sign transformation. The authors explore the relationship between intersemiotic translation and creativity, arguing that many experimental artists who have creatively transformed their fields dedicated themselves to the intersemiotic translation of methods and aesthetic procedures from one sign system into another, and that many periods of artistic creativity depend crucially on the translation of artifacts (materials, procedures, methods…) between different systems. By adopting a new approach in the domain of intermediality and interart studies based on premises from Peircean semiotics, they suggest that several creative artists rely on explicit cross-influence between different semiotic systems, in cases variously described as adaptation, ekphrasis, transmediation, or intersemiotic transposition (Queiroz & Ata, 2019, p. 299). The domain explored by Queiroz and Ata appears to be intimately related to Kristeva’s seminal notion of intertextuality (1980), as well as Petrilli’s proposition: There is no doubt that a translation must resemble the original. But the idea of resemblance to the original should not end up serving as an obstacle to the capacity for inventiveness, creativity and autonomy of the translation. (Petrilli, 2015b, p. 108) In a similar vein, Gottlieb (2005, pp. 25–27; 2017, p. 48) proposes a thorough theorization of intersemiotic translation which distinguishes among varied types. In all cases, source and translation are semiotically non-equivalent, though the latter is linked to the former. This link embodies similarity rather than equivalence, echoing Petrilli’s stance ‘a translation must be at once similar and dissimilar, the “same other.” This is the paradox of translation, the paradox of multiplicity’ (2015, p. 109; infra, p. 350, 360). Gottlieb distinguishes among diasemiotic translation (when the subsequent sign system, referred to as the ‘target text,’ features semiotic channels of expression, that is, signifying codes, different from the original: for instance, music based on a photo), ultrasemiotic translation (when the final translation features more channels of expression than the source: for instance, an animation film based on music), and infrasemiotic translation (when the final translation features fewer channels of expression than the source: for instance, a painting based on a drama). Furthermore, intersemiotic translation can be adaptational (less constrained and less predictable) or conventional (relying on norms and conventions): however, ‘these two counterparts are not poles at each end of a line, but two halves of a cline ranging from zero degrees of freedom to almost total freedom’ (Gottlieb, 2017, p. 48). Finally, Marais suggests that the distinction between intersystemic and intrasystemic translation is relative. From a higher level of analysis than Jakobson’s, all forms of translation are intersemiotic insofar as they occur among semiotic systems in addition to within the same semiotic system (Marais, 2019, p. 57; a conception which characterizes Petrilli’s stance described below, p. 350). In line with this view, the categories of translation proposed by Marais are categories of process, not categories of types of things. Rather than Jakobson’s tripartite distinction between intralingual, interlingual and intersemiotic translation, Marais proposes the categories of intrasystemic, intersystemic and extra-systemic translation, irrespective of what those systems are. Moreover, a second categorization, it too drawn from 344

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Peircean semiotics, distinguishes among translation processes initiated by a change in the representamen, those initiated by a change in the object, and those initiated by a change in the interpretant. As the process unfolds, neither of the three elements remains unaffected (ibid., pp. 142–157). The theoretical trajectory in reflection on intersemiotic translation from Jakobson through Toury, Eco, Torop, Petrilli, Queiroz and Ata, and Gottlieb through to Marais testifies to a progressive unfolding from a glottocentric conceptualization of translation to an allpervasive, semiotic notion thereof. Such pervasiveness is addressed in the following section, where a variety of types and examples are schematically categorized.

Types and examples of intersemiotic translation Drawing together the definitions and taxonomies illustrated so far, and based on the presupposition that all forms of translation are intersystemic, that is, they occur between semiotic systems, this section schematically outlines four types of intersemiotic translation as variously conceptualized and exemplified by translation studies, semiotics and intermedial studies scholars. The subdivision accounts for changes to the material nature of the signs involved and includes: verbal to verbal; verbal to nonverbal; nonverbal to verbal; and nonverbal to nonverbal. In all cases, intersemiosis can be said to occur whenever a subsequent sign system responds to the preceding sign system interpreting it relatedly to its object (cf. II.2, II.3, pp. 352-353). Each typology is exemplified by a selection of practical samples. Categories and genres contaminate each other and existing forms of intersemiotic translation are developed and refined accordingly. As these examples show, and as Petrilli remarks in part two (pp. 350), semiotic materiality can be translated into different channels of expressions, linguistic or nonlinguistic, verbal or nonverbal, depending on such factors as material conditions, communicative contexts, and interpretive orientations (see Petrilli, 2010b, pp. 137–158).

Verbal to verbal The first type of intersemiotic translation entails verbal language: it involves processes in which a verbal sign system is transformed into another verbal sign system. These translative processes can be endolingual or interlingual. Endolingual translation includes processes such as literary transcriptions from speech to writing (i.e. diamesic translation, Petrilli, 2003, p. 19), transliterations, or subtitling used as an accessibility aid for a target audience which is deaf or hard-of-hearing (Taylor, 2020, pp. 95–96). Subtitling involves transcribing oral discourse as well as supra-segmental traits formed by intonation, timber, inflexion, tone, and other features of vocal execution, extra-linguistic sound effects or any kind of audible cues crucial to the pragmatic communication of the scene. Virtual recreation can also be endolingual. Hypermedia is today the main vehicle for formal innovation and cultural exploration in contemporary writing, allowing an unprecedented interweaving and intermingling of genres, media, and concepts. Rita Wilson (2014) has recently discussed some of the implications of moving narrative text from print to a webbased environment, suggesting that the formal possibilities of hypermedia provide a unique way of exploring the cultural construction of both place and subjectivity. Interlingual translation processes include literary translation from a natural language to another (Jakobson’s ‘translation proper,’ 2004[1959], p. 114; see infra, p. 351), filmic adaptation of books that requires interlingual translation of the original verbal material, film dubbing (the 345

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replacement of a soundtrack in one natural language by one in another language), subtitling used as a didactic aid for those who are not familiar with the language spoken in the audiovisual text, and ‘covering,’ namely, the musical practice of artists’ appropriating other people’s songs.

Verbal to nonverbal The second type of intersemiotic translation entails processes in which a verbal sign system is transferred into a nonverbal sign system. Pragmatic examples include conventional translations of verbal messages such as pictograms, road signs and nonverbal logos; mute film adaptations (for instance, films taken from a novel, in which vocal language is lost, while images and movements convey a message, Gottlieb, 2017, p. 54), and translation by illustration. The latter is a useful option if the word which lacks an equivalent in the target language refers to a physical entity which can be illustrated, particularly if there are restrictions on space and if the text has to remain short, concise and to the point. In such cases, an illustration can be employed instead of a paraphrase (Baker, 2011, p. 43). Another significant case of verbal to nonverbal translation, also entailing (endolingual or interlingual) verbal-to-verbal translative processes, is filmic adaptation (Kress & van Leeuwen, 1996; Baldry, 2000; Thibault, 2000; Gambier, 2003; Kress, 2003). In Experiences in Translation, Eco discusses how a film from a book necessarily entails a display of the implied, that is, rendering explicit something that the literary work may just allude to by way of implication or partial reticence (see infra, p. 363). According to Eco, in the shift from the literary to its filmic representation the interpretation is mediated by the adapter and is not left at the mercy of the addressee (Eco, 2001, p. 125).

Nonverbal to verbal The third type of intersemiotic translation entails processes in which a nonverbal sign system is turned into a verbal sign system. Practical declinations of this category include ekphrasis, audio description (AD), tactile tours for blind people, voice-over, and human-nonhuman animal communication. Ekphrasis can be defined as ‘the verbal representation of visual representation’ (Venuti 2010, p. 132) – a phenomenon of intercultural communication that communicates one interpretation among different possibilities (ibid., p. 137). According to Venuti, The intersemiotic character of ekphrasis is implied by the process of resemiotization of a set of meanings from one semiosystem to another. Because of the multidimensionality of the verbal medium, the interpretation inscribed by an ekphrastic text can reaffirm or complicate a reader’s visual experience by reinforcing or revising the meanings, values, and functions that invest an image. (ibid., p. 139) Usually classified as an audiovisual translation sub-genre, AD is ‘the visual made verbal’ (Snyder, 2008, p. 191), the acoustic verbal description of the visual elements of any cultural product. This translative practice exists since the Seventies to cater to the needs of people with hearing loss (Taylor, 2020, p. 83; 95). In the case of foreign films, AD texts may also then be translated interlingually, where an original version exists, including the use of subtitles to cover the dialogue, thereby further extending the range of intersemiotic transfer. 346

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When AD is extended to other areas such as the description of museum exhibitions or architecture, the role of intersemiosis is even more complex. The sense of touch and even the sense of smell and taste are brought into play, in an attempt to extend accessibility to the sensorially impaired (Taylor, 2020, p. 84). Tactile tours of museums are nowadays offered by many institutions: the person with sight loss receives a transfer of meaning from the visual to the verbal and the haptic (ibid., p. 95). Voice-over is used to revoice fictional TV programs, as well as children’s films and series, and it is also used to revoice nonfictional programs in most countries all over the world. Nonverbal to verbal translation (in Petrilli’s typology an example of intersemiotic translation insofar as it involves ‘language,’ while at once presupposing intersemiosic translation, 2003, p. 19) is also at play in meaningful communication between animals and humans, for instance between a dog and a man, or when using animal behavior as inspiration for managerial principles (Marais & Kull, 2016, p. 178).

Nonverbal to nonverbal The fourth type of intersemiotic translation entails processes in which a nonverbal sign system is transformed into another nonverbal sign system. In these cases, modes and resources such as sound, gesture, color and so on can express the same types of meaning as the verbal medium, that is, experiential, interpersonal and textual meaning (Halliday, 1978), all within the broader concept of social semiotics. Examples of nonverbal to nonverbal translation include choreography represented on paper, new musical arrangements of an existing work, for instance, a jazz standard, or conventional music transcriptions/transpositions (Gottlieb, 2017, p. 57), and intentional communication between nonhuman organisms (zoosemiotics, Sebeok, 1976, p. 164, see infra, p. 364; semiotranslation, Marais & Kull, 2016, p. 175). Additional examples reported by Queiroz and Ata (2019, p. 300) are the translation of one-point visual perspective to classical ballet and the translation of random procedures from Cage’s music to Cunningham’s dance (Marais, 2019, p. 76).

Intersemiotic translation and multimodality thinking The four categories of intersemiotic translation outlined above (verbal to verbal; verbal to nonverbal; nonverbal to verbal; nonverbal to nonverbal) often combine and hybridize. As the examples suggest, even in verbal-to-verbal translation, where semiotic systems such as written texts are apparently monomedial, communication functions through multiple semiosystems simultaneously, and all modes of production work together to create meaning (Marais, 2019, p. 63). As stressed by Petrilli (cf. infra, pp. 356-357), human beings communicate through a multisign, multilinguistic, multiverbal and multidiscursive universe. No text, no verbal semiosystem, is made entirely of verbal signs: even verbal signs demand some sort of physical support. Among the most prominent polysemiotic system types is the audiovisual, but also the ‘artifact plus wall-panel explanation’ paratext found in museums, often expanded by an audio or an augmented-reality description, is an apt example (Torop, 2008, p. 255). Furthermore, with digital technology and the ability to construct meaning in multiple forms, the simultaneous release of movies, websites, videogames, apps, gadgets, tools, etc. has become ever more a common culture experience. Services (and not just products) are also semioticized in a multi-channel framework. In a word, modern communication has become increasingly multimedial. 347

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Multimodality is now a major research focus across a wide variety of disciplines – from linguistics to film studies, art history to media studies, and semiotics to IT – whose common denominator is the notion of translation as the semiotic process that connects multiple modes of a particular instance (Marais, 2019, pp. 76–77). It is a modus operandi for conducting research on human communication, both mediated and face-to-face (Seizov & Wildfeuer, 2017, p. 3). The principal aim of multimodality studies is to make sense of the combination of semiotic resources, or modes, that comprise a multimodal text. From this perspective, a fundamental presupposition is a realization that all communicative acts are ‘composite,’ all media are mixed media, combining different codes, discursive conventions, channels, and sensory and cognitive modes (Mitchell, 1994, pp. 94–95). The translation of multimodal semiosystems, namely, sign systems where several codes, verbal and nonverbal, linguistic and nonlinguistic, coexist and interact, entails the reformulation of a network of heterogeneous signs belonging to a particular instance. This realization is evident in Baker and Saldahna (2009, p. 8) who recall Calzada Perez’s (2005) argument that ‘images need translating as much as words and cyberspace is nothing if not a huge meeting point which provides information that is constantly translated back and forth.’ They also recall Baldry’s (2000) common sense warning that no text is strictly monomedial where phenomena as widespread as print advertisements and radio commercials are taken into consideration, and that elements such as inscriptions and typographical choices contribute to the construction of verbal meaning. A related example is advertising, one of the multimodal genres most suitable for analyzing the interplay of verbal and visual elements. A relevant issue is a question of whether the elements of such a visual code are translatable from one culture or semio-linguistic community to another, and if so, how this may concern translators (Torresi, 2008, pp. 66–67). The intersemiotic translation of advertising material is not only possible theoretically, but a reality (ibid., p. 69) required to account for the visual mode. Like verbal language, nonverbal elements also convey cultural values and stereotypes; for example, colors may assume political, social or even commercial indexical values relevant in one community, but not in another. Moreover, the norms of visual composition may differ substantially across cultures. Yet, although the translation of audiovisual products began in the early twentieth century, first with subtitling and later with dubbing, it was long regarded unworthy of theoretical discussion, only to come to the fore on its own account in the latter part of the century (Taylor, 2020, p. 85). Likewise, electing the role of the visual in the translation of print advertisements and other printed texts as the main focus, Torresi as late as 2008 explores the reasons why the incorporation of such systems into translation practices – and theories – still encountered strong resistance. Even though multimodality has progressively become the norm (rather than the exception), translation studies have largely ignored the phenomenon until recently, perhaps except for subtitling. Nowadays, definitions of translation restricted to verbal language appear more limited than ever and inadequate for a rapidly evolving scene in expression and communication. The urgency of reconsideration is manifest for all the world to see. In today’s multimedial scenario, a verbal-linguistic-only conceptualization of translation studies is overly narrow, and ‘pure’ interlingual translation is set to decline. Besides, as mentioned earlier and as emphasized by Petrilli (see infra, p. 352), ‘anthroposemiosis is reconducted to its correct dimensions in planetary semiosis.’ For an adequate understanding of communication in the human world, an exclusive focus on human language is not sufficient: it is time to rethink our relation to nonhuman life-forms and thus account for a whole range of biosemiosic interactions as the context for specifically human communication through language, verbal and nonverbal. 348

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Translation cannot be limited to an interlingual phenomenon but calls for conceptualization in semiotic terms (Gorlée, 1994, p. 10). As argued by two founding fathers of multimodal studies, Gunter Kress and Theo Van Leeuwen, ‘this incessant process of “translation,” or “transcoding” – transduction – between a range of semiotic modes represents, we suggest, a better, a more adequate understanding of representation and communication (2006, p. 39).’ A Peircean approach (see infra, pp. 355-356) helps explain the translatability of all ‘meta,’ ‘inter’ and ‘trans’ phenomena, wherewith expanding the hermeneutic power of translation studies.

Future perspectives As synthetized by Baker and Saldahna among others, a multimodal approach to translation contributes to overcoming verbocentric trends, prioritizing three areas: training translators to analyze relationships among the different semiotic elements of the text; working on the text as a whole, compensating for an unavoidable loss of meaning; and moving beyond the written word to incorporate the multimodal. First and foremost, as Baker and Saldahna suggest, translator training still needs a greater focus on the link connecting different semiotic elements in the source (e.g. Laviosa, 2007; Torresi, 2008). In particular, developing full semiotic awareness is vital for grasping the global meaning of source texts, for creating target texts that function well in their formal, social and cultural contexts, and for smoothing out the translation process, which otherwise risks being hindered by the lack of communication and mutual understanding among the professionals involved. (Torresi, 2008, p. 71)) Increasing semiotic skills and confidence could be the first step toward what might become political action – persuading clients that translators are not mere ‘word-traders,’ but text- and meaning-makers. Second, it is paramount to work on the text as a whole, compensating for an unavoidable loss of meaning, on the one hand, and allowing for signifying enhancement on the other hand. From this perspective, as the authors and theories recounted in this chapter repeatedly suggest, no text can be said to be exclusively verbal: even words printed on paper or viewed on a computer screen have a visual (the layout) and tactile dimension (the paper, or pressure of the fingers on the keyboard). Translation studies still need to account for such semiotic complexity. Third, the time is ripe for translation studies to move beyond the written word to incorporate multimodality in their research. The interdependency of the different forms of expression in multimodal genres has already been highlighted in translation studies and related disciplines (Torresi, 2008, p. 63). Multimodality, whether or not a sign of our times, is doubtlessly an inherent trait of human communication. The worldwide digital revolution has given us Internet and website technology, which have taken multimodality studies several steps further on the road to understanding how meaning is conveyed and interpreted. The dimension of intersemiosis favors thinking about translation not as a speech-act, but rather as a condition subtending communication in its overall variation and complexity. In a human world dominated by multimediality, a strictly anthropocentric and glottocentric approach to translation studies will result in being increasingly inadequate. Communication is ubiquitous in living organisms, in human 349

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and nonhuman semiosis, which the human presupposes. A semiotic theory of translation contributes to conceptualizing the translational dimension of culture, society and living organisms globally (Marais, 2019).

Part II: Global semiotics and translation Susan Petrilli Translation, a global enterprise The question of translation investigated in the context of global semiotics has led to a new understanding of what is implied in the translation process itself and in the sciences that study the latter beyond anthropocentric, glottocentric and phonocentric limitations (Sebeok, 2001; Petrilli, 2016a: 45-68; see supra, pp. 341-342). Translation in the human world is not an independent cultural phenomenon, but rather presupposes biosemiosis as its condition of possibility. As such an adequate understanding of translation in its various dimensions calls for a vision that is just as global and interdisciplinary. Such an approach was proposed at the end of the twentieth and beginning twenty-first century with the ‘Athanor trilogy’ (directed by Augusto Ponzio), three collective volumes on translation (edited by me) with contributions in English, Italian and French: La traduzione (Translation), Tra segni (Among/between signs, Petrilli) and Lo stesso altro (The same other) (Petrilli, 1999b, 2000, 2001). This was followed by Translation Translation (Petrilli, 2003) which gathers the English contributions from the Athanor project with a few extra pieces. The four volumes offer studies not only by major translation experts but also by researchers from different fields including, in addition to semiotics, linguistics and philosophy, such disciplines as literary criticism, cultural studies, gender studies, mathematics, biology and the medical sciences. All are focused on translation and its central role in the development of signs, language and meaning whether in the anthroposphere (pervaded by anthroposemiosis) or the larger biosphere (biosemiosis), the inevitable context and condition of possibility for all translational processes that sustain life in the great variety of its different expressive forms and special interests. For what concerns the human cultural world, our immediate focus in this chapter, expression, communication and translation are particularly complex phenomena evolving at varying degrees of otherness and dialogical distancing among different sign systems and levels of semiosis. These range from immediate sign action, the semiosical level, to ever more complex levels of metasemiosis or semiotics (where ‘semiotics’ is a synonym for both metasemiosis and for the general science of signs), the semiotical level (Petrilli & Ponzio, 2005, pp. 3–6). These complex sign phenomena are multilayered, multisystemic and multimodal, in becoming through intersemiotic translational processes, where ‘intersemiotic’ is broadly understood as presupposing human primary modeling (or language), without necessarily involving the direct manifestation of verbal signs.

Translation and modeling in semiosis and metasemiosis The specifically human capacity for metasemiosis has led to describing the human being as a ‘semiotic animal,’ where ‘semiotic’ reads therefore as ‘metasemiosic’ (Petrilli, 1998, p. 8, 146; Deely et al., 2005). ‘Metasemiosis’ refers to the human species-specific capacity to suspend immediate semiosis, to reflect and thus deliberate. All this always through signs. As such, 350

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metasemiosis presupposes language, where, attention (!), ‘language’ is understood as human modeling, that is, primary modeling. The distinctive feature of language as modeling is ‘syntactics,’ that is, a combinatorial and re-combinatorial capacity (Sebeok, 1986, pp. 10–16). This can be traced in all human action, above all the verbal. The latter, in fact, formed of a limited number of phonemes that vary from one language to another allows for the composition of an infinite number of terms, words or utterances. Therefore, if Charles Morris identifies the combinatorial capacity as a characteristic of verbal language (on this account he speaks of ‘syntactics’), one that distinguishes verbal language from nonhuman animal communication – ‘signs in a language must constitute a system of interconnected signs combinable in some ways and not in others in order to form a variety of complex sign processes’ (Morris 1971[1946], p. 113), this is because the human being’s primary modeling, as his student Thomas A. Sebeok avers, is ‘language.’ The concept of ‘modeling’ is a major focus in Sebeok’s global semiotics, one that he extends to all life-forms (Sebeok, 1994, pp. 117–127; Kull, 2010). He chooses the term ‘language’ for the human species-specific modeling device, which he contrasts to ‘speech’ (verbal language), because unlike modeling devices in other life-forms, human modeling is characterized, precisely, by syntactics, thus by the capacity to order single elements on the basis of operational rules (Sebeok, 1986, pp. 10–16). But while for the linguists these are the elements of historical-natural languages (words, phrases, utterances, etc.), Sebeok’s reference is to mute syntax. Thanks to ‘syntax,’ following Morris better denominated ‘syntactics,’ language, not historical-natural languages, but modeling (which the former presuppose), is capable of generating an indefinite number of possible worlds in open-ended intersemiotic chains of deferral, verbal and nonverbal. The most complex forms of communication in the biosphere are traceable in anthroposemiosis thanks to syntactics (Vernadsky, 1926; Petrilli & Ponzio, 2013). The conception of language as modeling at last explains the origin of nonverbal languages, employed by homo since its first appearance. It also explains the origin of verbal language. Consequently, the notion of language as modeling contributes to explaining the evolution, through adaptation, of homo loquens to homo sapiens and, ultimately, homo sapiens sapiens. At a certain point, verbal language is no longer used only for communication with other human beings. Rather, through the processes of ‘exaptation,’ verbal language is also employed to reflect, imagine, think and even lie, thereby enormously enhancing the human language capacity as modeling. All this throws light on what we are capable of doing as homo sapiens sapiens. Language as modeling, primary modeling, its syntactical nature and, consequently, the human capacity for construction and deconstruction, allows for the invention of multiple meanings and senses, for the creation of manifold expressive means, thus for multiform worlds. It also explains the possibility of there existing multiple historical-natural languages. On this basis, we are at last able to answer questions still at the heart of debate today, particularly in linguistics and translation studies: “why so many (historical-natural) languages?,” “why external and internal plurilingualism with respect to any given (historical-natural) language?” and “how to explain the human capacity for translation across different sign systems, verbal and nonverbal,” “Why is interlingual translation more or less always possible?”. Moreover, interlingual translation proves to be possible in spite of the Sapir-Whorf “theory of linguistic relativity” and corresponding belief that translatability is limited, in this case clearly a belief oriented by ideology. In fact, specific reference happens to be to American Indian languages and the subtending ideology which justifies ‘Indian reserves’ (thoroughly critiqued by Rossi-Landi 1973). We now understand why translation is always possible: translation in anthroposemiosis is a specific capacity that derives from primary modeling as it characterizes human beings. 351

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Intersemiosic and intersemiotic translation In such a conceptual framework, translation in the specifically human world, whether ‘interlingual,’ ‘intralingual’ or ‘intersemiotic’ (according to Roman Jakobson’s triad, 1959[2004]), will always imply language (primary modeling), apart from whether it occurs through verbal or nonverbal sign systems. Therefore, by ‘intersemiotic translation’ we here understand translation that only ever occurs in the human world, in anthroposemiosis, thus distinguishing it from ‘intersemiosic translation’ which, instead, is the broader concept embracing translational processes traceable across sign systems in the general biosphere (Petrilli, 2003, p. 19; 2019, pp. 29–36; Petrilli & Ponzio, 2015). The general framework of our argument is part of a broad view of semiotics, Sebeok’s ‘global semiotics’ (2001; supra, pp. 342), whose basic assumption is that life and semiosis converge. Signifying processes in the anthroposphere, thus translation, expression, communication in human semiosis, develop and are explained relatedly to the great biosphere where sign processes are necessarily translational processes and are ongoing as the very condition for life and its persistence. Not only: communication in the human world evolves from the condition of intersemiosis, thus from translational interconnectedness between the anthroposphere in its socio-cultural dimension and vital semiosis constitutive of biosemiosis globally (Petrilli, 2014a, pp. 189–219). So, thanks to global semiotics, translation in human semiosis, whether interlingual, intralingual or intersemiotic, is put into perspective, showing human signs for what they really are: parts in the total sign network converging with life over the planet. Anthroposemiosis is thus reconducted to its correct dimensions in planetary semiosis. That biosemiosis provides the context for cultural semiosis implies that intersemiosis is the a priori condition for interpretation/signification, expression, communication, hence for translation through the anthroposphere. Such a broad vision of translation/communication in human semiosis no doubt includes, but is not reducible to functional message and information exchange. À propos anthroposemiosis, we know that a common distinction is that between verbal and nonverbal signs. By virtue of metasemiosis, the verbal is acknowledged with the capacity to translate from the nonverbal into the verbal (supra, p. 346). But this is not to undersign glottocentrism or phonocentrism (Petrilli, 2016a, pp. 45–68; supra, pp. 340-342). A musical composition, a pictorial image, a religious ritual, or a gesture is not wholly replaced by words. Words do not supplant nonverbal signs but accompany and support them as in the case of singing and its musical accompaniment (Vološinov, 1973[1929], p. 15). Even more, as much as verbal signs are species-specific to humans, it is not the verbal sign, the word, but language as modeling that specifies the human as human (consider nonverbal communication in deaf mutes and infants, or in the aphasic) (Petrilli, 2012, pp. 113–116, 150–152). Transitioning among verbal and nonverbal signs and sign systems in the anthroposphere occurs through intersemiotic translation. Of these two types of signs, traditionally the verbal has been considered as fundamental compared to the nonverbal. But while the meaning of nonverbal sign material may be enhanced through verbalizing interpretation thanks to the translative capacity of the verbal over nonverbal human languages, which in this sense depend on the verbal, nonetheless, verbal signs are just as dependent upon nonverbal signs as the other way around. An implication is that social-cultural nonverbal signs in human semiosis are also capable of metasemiosis. A police officer can give verbal notice of a violation – whether orally or in writing –, but must be dressed and recognizable as a police officer. 352

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Keeping account of the fact that global semiotics presupposes biosemiotics favors a better understanding of the intersemiotic and intercultural nature of meaning in human semiosis as expressed through verbal language (Kourdis & Petrilli, 2020). Intersemiosis among different orders, types and systems of signs in the biosphere is an a priori for meanings and languages, including verbal languages, in specifically human cultural semiosis. A characteristic of the latter is the capacity for high degrees of otherness and dialogism (Bakhtin, 1981; Petrilli, 2012c; Ponzio, 2015b). This implies the possibility of expression and sense well beyond the limits of binary equal exchange logic and strictly functional semiosis (Petrilli, 2014b[1998], pp. 95–136). Meaning flourishes in interpretive-translative processes regulated by the relation between identity and alterity in polylogic and plurilinguistic contexts, internally and externally to a single language. In the framework of ‘global semiotics’ and ‘interpretation semiotics’ (by contrast to ‘decodification semiotics’ transcended by ‘signification semiotics’) (Bonfantini, 1981; Petrilli, 2014a, pp. 4–5), communication is confirmed as a primary function of human verbal language, but with the important specification that it is not reducible to the mere exchange of messages.

Dialogism, otherness and life In cultural communication, ideas and words are based on the work of translation, obviously, but here ‘translational work’ is specified as ‘linguistic work’ (where ‘linguistic’ derives from both language-modeling and language-communication). Linguistic work is so customary, so familiar to the human being that it can even occur while we are asleep. Freud, in fact, described dreaming in terms of ‘dream-work,’ and rightly so. In this respect, Rossi-Landi pointed out that in terms of the genealogy of ideas, his notion of ‘linguistic work’ unites Freud to Marx (Rossi-Landi, 1968; Ponzio, 2015a). Whatever the type of translation process characterizing a given instance of semiosis, it always implies encounter with the other, with something else, something different, foreign, a surplus (Petrilli, 2021b; Ponzio, 2022a). Consequently, to speak of dialogism in general, including in biosemiotics, is not exactly just a metaphor. The notion of ‘dialogism’ is a life condition, human and nonhuman (see Maturana & Varela). ‘Dialogism’ is another word to say, though more forcefully, that which is expressed with the terms ‘interconnectivity,’ ‘interrelation,’ ‘encounter,’ ‘intercorporeity.’ It says clearly that any semiosis presupposes otherness. Therefore, in every part of the living, where there is modeling and communication, of whatever type, there is dialogism (Petrilli, 2012a, pp. 150–156). Bakhtin had had occasion to say as much in his writings of 1961, while working at the new (1963) edition of his (1929) Dostoevsky book: ‘Life by its very nature is dialogic. To live means to participate in a dialogue’ (Bakhtin, 1984, p. 293; also Zanoletti, 2012b, p. 188). That which Bakhtin describes as dialogics of nature, as dialogics of life, can now be translated as ‘semiotics of life,’ as ‘biosemiotics.’ This explains Bakhtin’s interest in studies of his day in biology. He even authored the essay “Contemporary Vitalism’ (available in Russian and Italian translation in Bachtin e il suo Circolo, 2014[1926], pp. 215–270), signed by the biologist Ivan Kanaev though the latter declared that authorship was Bakhtin’s. The ‘dialogics of life’ is also expressed in terms of Umwelt and ‘functional-cycle’ by Jakob von Uexküll (1973[1928], (1992[1934]) and ‘autopoiesis’ by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela (1972). Maturana and Varela employ such terms as ‘dialogue’ and ‘dialogism’ to describe what in our terminology are semiosical or intersemiosical processes in the natural world. The human Umwelt is based on primary modeling or language and is thus characterized by the syntactical capacity, as described above. Syntactics, in turn, explains the human capacity 353

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for interrogation and critique, for detotalization with respect to the limitations of monolithic and monologic reality, and as such is also associated with the capacity for creativity (2014, pp. 300–321). Humans can construct, deconstruct and reconstruct an indeterminate number of worlds from a finite number of elements. In this sense, the human modeling device is a translational device. Translation is structural to modeling, the very condition for creativity, innovation and simulation, ultimately for what Peirce described as the ‘play of musement’ (CP 6.460–465, 486; Sebeok, 1981; Petrilli, 2014a, pp. 312–319). Consequently, unlike nonhuman animals, humans are not condemned to the empirical inevitability of the world, to a single species-specific Umwelt, but are free to invent an infinite number of new possible worlds.

Signifying processes in their general intersemiotic framework Introducing a neologism, ‘significs,’ for her theory of meaning, what she described as a philosophy of significance, interpretation and translation, Victoria Lady Welby, at the end of the nineteenth century, broke new ground as she conducted the sense of translation into the territory of reflection on sign, language and meaning, expanding the concept well beyond strictly verbal-linguistic boundaries (Welby, 1983[1903], pp. 120–129, 148–153). Welby’s special focus was on translation as a cognitive-interpretive method that involved all signifying processes, verbal and nonverbal, and not only the relationship between historical-natural languages. Translation thus emerges as a method for expanding the interpretive capacity and enhancing understanding (Welby, ‘Significs and Translation – [i.e., Definition] [1905–1911],’ in Petrilli, 2009, pp. 560–571). Welby’s broad multiplex and multidisciplinary conception of translation was elaborated in dialogue with the natural sciences, the hard sciences and the human sciences, thereby prefiguring developments in semiotics and translation studies as they were to emerge from the second half of the twentieth century onwards through to current (bio)semiotic approaches to translation theory (Marais, 2019; also supra, pp. 344-345). A dynamical theory of meaning, sign and language inevitably involves reflection on the role therein of translation (Petrilli, 2009, pp. 517–559; 2016b; also Zanoletti, 2022, pp. 255-256). In accordance with the tradition in semiotic studies delineated by Charles Peirce, Charles Morris and Thomas Sebeok, the meaning of a sign is given in relation to another sign that interprets it, where ‘interpretation’ concerns semiosis generally and not just the human brain. The sign, thus interpretation and understanding occur in translation. Morris (1964) cites the ‘dance’ of bees to exemplify behavior, the object, that elicits a chain of interpretations by other bees in semiosic processes leading to the localization of food. Sebeok gives numerous examples revealing how interpretation, therefore translation, not only is not limited to the human mind, but is not even limited to large living organisms. Examples famously cited by Sebeok include interspecific communication between aphids and ants; the endosemiotic function of AMP cycles that trigger intracellular communication; interpretive processes of the immunitary system. But we also speak of translation à propos the circulation of energy-information at the physical-quantistic level (Sebeok, 1979, pp. 3–27, 35–60). Giorgio Prodi (1977) thematized ‘protosemiosis’ which he did not limit internally to the living sphere. John Deely introduced the notion of ‘physiosemiosis’ tracking sign relationships that unite the organic and the inorganic (Deely et al., 2005, pp. 208–209; 2011, p. 9, pp. 86–100; Petrilli, 2014a, p. 20). Interpretive-translative processes hold together the gigantic ecosystem, a biogeochemical system called Gaia. 354

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So, at this point, the claim is that as much as our focus here is on interpretation/translation in the human world, this is not to neglect the relation of interdependency, as anticipated, on the larger intersemiosic context (Petrilli & Ponzio, 2011; Petrilli 2016b).

Interpretants in translation in the open sign network The interpretant’s role is pivotal in semiosis, as underlined by Augusto Ponzio (1990a[1985], pp. 15–47; also Petrilli, 1998, pp. 3-14). But what exactly is an interpretant? The interpretant is a response where ‘to respond’ is not understood reductively in terms of the mechanistic stimulus-reaction paradigm, theorized by certain trends in behaviorism. To respond is a dialogical operation. If this sounds like a metaphor, let us repeat nonetheless that interpretant signs and interpreted signs effectively act like rejoinders in a dialogue. Differently to what is generally intended by ‘dialogical relation,’ here instead dialogue is understood as something that occurs among bodies and not among disembodied ideas. Nor does dialogue necessarily involve verbal signs (Ponzio, 1993, 2006; Petrilli & Ponzio, 2005, 2007). With respect to the previous sign, the interpretant is a response and inaugurates a new signifying trajectory. In the dynamics of ongoing live semiosis the interpretant transforms into an interpreted for another sign which it somehow determines and which acts, in turn, as an interpretant in dialogical relations that open to new semioses (Petrilli & Ponzio, 2005, pp. 8–10; Petrilli, 2013a, pp. 274–275). That the meaning of an interpreted sign is in another sign’s response, the interpretant sign which, transformed into an interpreted sign, calls for another response, another interpretant, confirms how the sign’s nature is dialogical (Ponzio, 2006). The sign is a dialogue between the interpreted sign and interpretant sign in potentially open-ended semiosical chains of deferral/transferral/translation among signs. Theoretically, deferral processes among interpretant signs are not limited to a single type of sign or sign system (Petrilli, 2012a, pp. 247–250). The signs’ meaning is not in the sign, but in deferral among signs, in translation, where the first is an interpreted sign and the next an interpretant sign which responds to the preceding sign interpreting it relatedly to its ‘object,’ ‘referent,’ or ‘designatum’ (Petrilli, 2019, pp. 81–116). On the one hand, the interpretant sign transforms the preceding interpreted sign into an interpretant of a preceding interpreted sign and, on the other hand, that interpretant is open to further interpretation/ translation thus becoming an interpreted sign for another interpretant sign, ad infinitum. Elicited by the interpretant, an interpreted sign (read interpreted object) initiates an ‘interpretive trajectory’ consisting in an open-ended chain of deferrals among signs that coincides with a sign’s ‘meaning.’ The same referent, object, that is, the same interpreted sign has the potential to inaugurate multifarious interpretive/translative trajectories. An interpreted sign in a given interpretive/translative trajectory becomes an interpreted sign or interpretant sign in other trajectories; any given sign is a node in the great sign network formed of intersecting interpretive/translative trajectories (Petrilli, 2007; 2014b[1998], pp. 13–24). Another distinction is that between the ‘identification interpretant’ and the ‘responsive understanding interpretant.’ The ‘identification interpretant’ concerns meaning insofar as it is predetermined by codes, in signality, where the degree of signifying otherness is low. In this case, the relation to the interpreted sign tends toward univocality. Instead, the interpretant specific to the sign, which interprets its ‘actual sense’ is the ‘responsive understanding interpretant.’ Rather than simply identifying the interpreted sign, the interpretant of responsive understanding installs a relationship of dialogical (which is not necessarily verbal) involvement with it, of participation: the interpretant of responsive understanding responds to the interpreted sign and takes a stand in relation to it. Interpretive potential is not exhausted in a 355

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single meaning. In other words, the signifier and the signified do not relate to each other on a one-to-one basis. The work of the interpretant sign is not limited to the very basic operations of identification, mechanical substitution, or mere recognition of the interpreted sign. Signifying trajectories are traced out like routes in a roadmap, sometimes without alternatives. But new connections can be invented and the possibility of alternative routes can be explored. From the perspective of intersemiotic translation, anything can be an interpreted sign, an object that receives meaning, just as anything can play the part of an interpretant sign, the object that confers meaning. The interpretant of a sign is another sign, which the previous sign creates in the interpreter. This is ‘an equivalent sign, or perhaps a more developed sign’ (CP 2.228). Therefore, the interpretant sign cannot be identical to the object of interpretation, the interpreted sign – it cannot be a repetition – precisely because it is mediated, interpretive, and as such always new. Nor can the interpreted-interpretant relationship be isolated from the sign network. When anything has meaning, thus becomes meaningful, this can only occur in semiosis as it unfolds along the interpretive trajectories constitutive of meaning. Interpreted and interpretant signs form the nodes in the sign network where interpretive trajectories intersect, and like all intersections they stop existing if the trajectories uniting them are eliminated. This network converges with the species-specific Umwelt. Every lifeform has an Umwelt relatively to its species; human semiosis also includes a legacy of the historical-social order.

Meaning in live communication and unlimitedness of interpretability/translatability ‘To have’ in ‘to have meaning’ implies ‘to have a relationship’: ‘to have’ not in the sense of possession, property, intrinsic characteristic, internal modality, but ‘to have’ as relationship, connection. Meaning is neither in the sign nor vehicled by signs as though it were packaged outside the communicative-translative process. In live communication, the sign’s meaning is in becoming as an interpretation of a second something, the object (referent, designatum), subsisting in a third something, the interpretant through which the sign is interpreted. The sign is properly this relationship – the interpreted-object-interpretant relationship – where the sign signifies insofar as it becomes, in turn, an interpretant sign of another interpretedobject-sign relationship. the interpretant that interprets the meaning of a sign is another sign, which is then interpreted by another interpretant, ad infinitum. Consequently, meaning in live communication is not fixed once for all and is not reducible to the status of a set substance. The nature of meaning in the human world is semiotic, indeed intersemiotic, in translation. Therefore meaning, which in human semiosis is always historically accentuated and re-accentuated, is dynamical, indeed recalcitrant to ontological cages. Flourishing at the intersection of different interpretive trajectories, signs are ambiguous. Verbal signs in particular are plurivocal, characterized by a capacity for ‘semantic ductility’ (Bakhtin, 1986), plasticity. ‘Plasticity’ is a term adapted by Welby from the biological sciences to describe the expressive vitality of thought and language. We know that the life sciences played a central role in the formulation of her theory of meaning such that she prefigured developments in biosemiotics and global semiotics as they emerge today (Petrilli, 1999; Petrilli & Ponzio, 2005, pp. 87–88, 123–134). Like living organisms, linguistic expressions are alive and dynamic, capable of adapting to the environment and to new expressive needs, forever creating new connections in a growing sign network. Ultimately, the translative capacity thus described is a necessary condition for continuity and communication in the historical-cultural world as much as in the organic world (Welby, 1983[1903], p. 60). 356

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The word is both one’s own word and the word of the other, evolving from encounter among languages, verbal and nonverbal, within the same historical-natural language or among different historical-natural languages. Meaning is never fixed unless a question of codes where signality prevails and is characterized by low degrees of otherness in the interpreted-interpretant relation. But, generally, communication is possible thanks to this essential condition of ambiguity, healthy and creative ambiguity (as distinct from ambiguity cause of confusion), where the otherness dimension of semiosis is central. Ambiguity thus understood also explains the human capacity for uniqueness and inventiveness in relation to the world. Traits that distinguish human communication include interlingual and endolingual plurilingualism, plurivocality, ambiguity, polysemy and dialogism. From a global semiotic perspective, any sign relationship is dialogic, which means to say that all semiosic processes are relational at different degrees of dialogism, the highest degrees characteristically reached in human sign activity. Iconicity, dialogism and otherness structure the human capacity for the unspoken, the unsaid (Levinas, 1974; Bakhtin, 1986). As paradoxical as it may seem, such signifying phenomena as vagueness, ambiguity, inscrutability, concealment, reticence, allusion, illusion, implication, simulation, imitation, semantic pliancy, polysemy, polylogism and plurilingualism together determine the capacity for successful communicative and translative practice (Petrilli, 2014a, pp. 139–157; 2016a, pp. 279–305; see supra, pp. 345-347). Concrete live speech occurs through continuous translative processes in both production and interpretation, in the transition from one sign system (class, linguistic register, idiolect, genre, etc.) to another, one language to another, one communicative context to another involving verbal and nonverbal signs in deferral processes among interpretants which overlap and replace each other without ever totally converging. Given that the relationship among interlocutors is oriented by otherness, dialogism and ambiguity, verbal language continuously adapts to a transforming world, to changing circumstances, so that communication is possible in ever-new and different situational contexts. In formalized, artificial, exact languages such characteristics are considered as limits, and in fact, mathematical information theory applied to languages (langues) does not account for such distinctive traits of human language. But ambiguity, vagueness, allusion, implied meaning, plurivocality are essential to the creative function of language and characterize it in its specificity. Creativity, responsibility and values are not associated with the monologism of univocality, but with plurivocality and otherness. Such is the context from which communication emerges, communication that may indeed tend toward semantic convergence, univocality and identity, but such positions are provisional, relative and open to interrogation and translation (Petrilli, 2019, pp. 37–50; 2019b). The specificity of ‘semiotic materiality’ in human semiosis implies otherness, dialogism, plurivocality and the capacity for detotalization. A global and detotalizing approach in semiotics demands availability toward the other, to extreme degrees, a disposition to respond, to listen to others in their alterity, a capacity for opening to the other, where ‘opening’ is measured in both quantitative (omni-comprehensive) and qualitative terms. All semiotic interpretations especially at a metasemiotic level involve a dialogic relationship with the other. Dialogism is a fundamental condition for an approach to semiotics which is oriented globally and at once privileges opening to the particular and the local, rather than englobing and enclosing. This is the tendency to privilege detotalization over totalization (Petrilli, 2012c, pp. 29-42). 357

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With reference to the magic of word power, consider George Steiner when he observes that The words we speak bring with them far more knowledge, a far denser charge of feeling than we consciously possess; they multiply echo. Meaning is a function of socialhistorical antecedent and shared response. Or in Sir Thomas Browne’s magnificent phrase, the speech of a community is for its members “a hieroglyphical and shadowed lesson of the whole world.” (Steiner, 1975, p. 489) Meaning as developed in a given verbal or nonverbal language cannot be fully replaced by another verbal or nonverbal language. But what to understand by ‘replaceability’? What does it mean that full replacement of a nonverbal sign system by another nonverbal sign system, or by another historical-natural language is not possible, or of one spoken language by another? That the same meaning may be expressed indifferently in one sign system or another is an incorrect assumption and cause of loss in terms of expression, communication and experience (Petrilli, 2019, pp. 121–138). The same is true if we proceed in the opposite direction as well and translate verbal language into the language of images, painting, music and gesture, or in the relationship between two historical-natural languages, or, again, between standard language and internal idiolects, sociolects, dialects and specialized languages (see examples supra, p. ). Road signs can be expressed verbally, but not totally replaced by words without losing in communicative force and information transmission. Nor is it correct to claim that a nonverbal sign system cannot be replaced to any extent at all by verbal language, or a historical-natural language by another. An implication thereof would be that nonverbal sign systems and historical-natural languages are self-sufficient, closed systems, unable to communicate with other sign systems. This would mean to undersign the notion of incommunicability, untranslatability, the idea that translation among languages, verbal languages, is not always possible. On the contrary, some degree of overlap, of interpretation/re-interpretation/translation is always possible, sign systems are open, and not least of all verbal sign systems. Ferruccio Rossi-Landi (1961) demonstrated this stance effectively, for example, with his ‘common speech hypothesis’ and, subsequently, with his concepts of ‘linguistic work’ (1968), and of ‘common semiosis’ (1972, 1978) relatively to human semiosis; and again with the concept of ‘homological similarity’ among different orders and systems of signs, human and nonhuman (Petrilli, 1987, 2014, pp. 206–208, 282–289; Rossi-Landi, 1992). On the question of translatability/untranslatability, we have already signaled Rossi-Landi’s outstanding critique of the conception of language elaborated by Edward Sapir (1949) and Benjamins Whorf (1956), their theory of linguistic relativity. With specific reference to the relation between Western historical-natural languages and the Amerindian, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis posits that interlingual translation is not always possible. Worth repeating here is that Rossi-Landi critiques the notion of ‘linguistic relativity,’ evidencing how it was the ideological result of racial discrimination toward American Indians (accompanied in the real world by the hard reality of Indian reserves) (Rossi-Landi, 1973). Verbal signs depend on nonverbal interpretants, but this dimension of intersemiosis often remains unacknowledged as a consequence of failing to sufficiently understand the sign dimension of nonverbal reality. The world appears as nonverbal material tout court, instead of as nonverbal sign material in socio-semiotic processes of deferral among signs. If I say ‘pen’ and illustrate its meaning with a drawing, this is obviously a nonverbal interpretant. Instead, 358

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if I show the pen, the impression is that we are before a material object and not a nonverbal sign. In reality, the pen here counts as an interpretant sign and not as referent, unlike what occurs on uttering the expression ‘this is the pen I meant.’ Translation from one historical language to another, however distant in cultural terms, is always possible thanks to the metasemiosic capacity of human language (supra, pp. 345-346). With respect to a given historical language, another historical language provides new interpretants, thereby enhancing signifying processes (Rossi-Landi, 1972, pp. 154–156). Likewise, though the verbal cannot totally replace the nonverbal and carry out exactly the same functions, still it can describe the nonverbal metalinguistically and metasemiosically. All forms of semiosis, all communicative spheres, whether verbal or nonverbal, can somehow be translated and re-interpreted through the interpretants of another linguistic-verbal sign system. Translation/interpretation/re-interpretation is the condition of possibility for both ‘general semiotics’ and the ‘special semiotics’ (Eco, 1984) turned to the different spheres of human communication.

Translation and iconicity We have explored two central concepts for translation, dialogism and otherness, which we now repropose in relation to a third, iconicity. To consider human language, whether verbal or nonverbal, as a manifestation of life and communication, contextualized in global semiosis, contributes to evidencing the centrality of translation in signifying/interpretive processes. Particularly important is how iconicity operates in verbal language (Petrilli & Ponzio, 2012; Petrilli, 2014a, pp. 226–247). According to Welby, language is a ‘symbolic system,’ while its method is mainly pictorial (1983[1903], p. 38). In light of Peirce’s triad and distinction between symbolicity, indexicality and iconicity (CP 2.247-2.249), Welby’s statement can be reworded as verbal language is a ‘conventional system’ while its method is ‘iconic.’ In other words, language proceeds by association, attraction and resemblance. While her focus is on verbal language, Welby recognizes the centrality of iconicity and hypothetical similarity in human expression, communication and signification generally, verbal and nonverbal. Not being possible to express ourselves ‘literally,’ we use metaphors that are regulated by iconicity (Petrilli, 2009, 2015). Wittgenstein in his Tractatus (1922) recognizes the importance of iconicity in the proposition. He distinguishes between ‘propositions’ and ‘names’: in the relation between names, ‘simple signs,’ and their objects, meaning is conventional, that is, arbitrary. Instead, when a question of propositions or ‘propositional signs’ the relation corresponds to the order of things, based on similarity, so that iconicity prevails. Like Welby’s ‘pictorial symbol’ and ‘representative action,’ Wittgenstein’s ‘proposition’ is characterized by high degrees of signifying otherness (Petrilli, 2014a, 189-194). As particularly Jakobson (1965) has contributed to demonstrating, iconicity and indexicality concur in the verbal, beyond just the symbolical-conventional. Indeed, as Peirce had already averred, ‘the most perfect of signs are those in which the iconic, indicative, and symbolic characters are blended as equally as possible (CP 4.448; Petrilli, 2014a, 114-116; L. Ponzio 2015). Verbal language is not only characterized by convention or symbolicity in Peirce’s terminology. That conventionality, indexicality and iconicity are normally all at play together in verbal language results, for example, in the case of indexicality, from the fact that the correct formula is ‘My mentor and I’ and not ‘I and my mentor.’ Much like Peirce’s ‘existential graphs’ (Hardwick, 1977, pp. 119–131), the relation between proposition and object is proportional/structural. In the English language the sentence sequence is usually 359

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subject, verb, object, ‘Brutus killed Caesar,’ and cannot be the contrary. Another example where term order forming the proposition corresponds to the real is ‘President, minister and secretary left the meeting,’ which respects a certain hierarchical social order and cannot be said differently. As to the iconic aspect: in a diagram featuring two unequal rectangles the first, longer than the second, represents a larger quantity; the second, shorter than the first, represents a smaller quantity – greater or lesser evidence, a greater or lesser number of voters, and so forth. Analogously, iconicity is also present in verbal languages: generally, the adjective and its superlative present a quantitative increase, the word is lengthened, that is, the superlative is longer than the adjective in the positive (great, greatest). The same occurs in English when the word is lengthened in the transition from the singular to the plural (book, books). Iconicity also acts in translation. The translating utterance must install a relation of similarity with the translated utterance. However, this is not a question of simple or surface similarity: the two utterances belonging to two different historical languages do not at all resemble each other, nor do they say ‘almost the same thing,’ as Eco (2001, 2003) maintains, given that there do not exist ‘things’ a priori that subsequently are said differently in different languages. Instead, the relation between historical-natural languages is one of iconic similarity, based on alterity and dialogism. With respect to the original, the translated text is the same other. This expression, the ‘same other,’ corresponds to the title of the third volume in the Athanor translation trilogy mentioned earlier, ‘stesso altro’ (Petrilli, 2001). The paradox of interlingual translation is that the text must remain the same while becoming other, even simply because it has been reorganized into the expressive modalities of another sign complex. The translation is at once identical and different from the original. In fact, the same sign is always the same other, for in order to be itself and continue being itself, it must become other in intersign or transign interpretation/translation processes (Petrilli, 2001; Ponzio, 2003). The translation of utterances across languages occurs at high degrees of iconicity and though the conventional-symbolic relation is present, the iconic mode is dominant, as in Peirce’s ‘diagrams.’ Analogously, for Bakhtin (1986) as well, encounter and similarity always occur in the interpretation/translation process given that the interpreted-interpretant relation is dialogical at varying degrees of alterity. Important to underline is that iconicity in human language is associated with the capacity for creativity, innovation and critique, thus with responsibility (Petrilli, 1998, pp. 169, 172–179; 2010b). Where iconicity, that is, similarity by affinity and attraction prevails and regulates sign relations, interpretive-translative processes give rise to logico-cognitive procedure at high degrees of dialogism and alterity (Petrilli, 2010a; 2010b, pp. 237–301). This is a distinctive feature of the communicative capacity in language and languages, the very condition for the acquisition of knowledge, experience and critical awareness. Moreover, translational processes presuppose the listening capacity. Listening to the other is a necessary condition for health even simply of everyday human communication, that is, for participative and dialogic communication. This is a question of listening to the signs of the other, to the verbal and nonverbal utterances of the other. On this account, listening is not a concession made to the other by a subject. Far more essentially, listening is structural to the word, indeed to life generally (Petrilli, 2013b; 2019, pp. 25–29, 139–176). If this is the case in normal everyday communication simply because communication is interpretation, therefore translation, listening is all the more essential for translation in the strict sense since it too involves interpretation, but above all in the sense of rendering, or yielding the word of the other. 360

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Studies between the nineteenth and twentieth century by Welby, Peirce, Wittgenstein, Bakhtin (Deely, 2001; Petrilli & Ponzio, 2005) help understand the more complex levels of signification, expression and communication by demonstrating how they cannot be reduced to a simple exchange relation between signifiers and signifieds. As a result, each of these scholars contributes in different ways to emphasizing the centrality of iconicity and alterity in the intersemiotic processes of translation in human semiosis (Petrilli, 2014, pp. 28–34; see supra, p. 342).

Translation and the ideological component of languages Otherness, dialogism and iconicity operate at all levels of translation, interlingual, intralingual and intersemiotic. Interlingual translation always involves the other two. In the transition from one language to another, verbal and nonverbal, the chain of interpretants does not end where the semantic-ideological field of a given language ends (Petrilli, 2014, pp. 211–220). Deferral continues beyond boundaries to enter new semantic-ideological domains, other languages, cultures and ideological horizons. Such encounter favors the development of dialogized plurilingualism and dialogized pluridiscursivity, whether internally to the same verbal language, in relation to different verbal languages, or among verbal and nonverbal sign systems. From this point of view, translation is the condition not only of human semiosis but also of humanizing semiosis, that is, semiosis oriented in the sense of true humanism forever open to the other, thus to renewal. Signs and languages in human semiosis are perfused with ‘ideology,’ where ‘ideology’ as such, in general, is understood as ‘social planning’ (Rossi-Landi, 1978; also Petrilli, 2012a, pp. 345–348; 2012b; 2014a, pp. 189–225), rather than as ‘false consciousness,’ ‘worldview,’ or ‘representation of reality.’ No doubt, worldview can be assumed passively in the form of alienation and thus be connoted as ‘false consciousness.’ On our part and with Rossi-Landi, we prefer to speak of ideology in terms of ‘social planning’ considering that ideology is always a historical-social connotation and is more or less always an orientation in praxis. ‘Planning’ indicates the ultimate end that orients a given ‘program’ with the ‘programming’ it belongs to and expresses. To speak of ideology as planning, rather than as worldview, as representation of reality, etc. is far more precise insofar as the concept of ‘social planning’ accounts for the necessary socio-historical connotation that characterizes ideology. Ideology as ‘false consciousness’ refers to ideology that distorts and mystifies reality for the self-interest of a given group. But the notion of ‘ideology’ is polysemic and is also associated with general social organization through the processes of intersemiotic translation, of which it is an expression. According to Adam Schaff (1977), ideology is a complex of opinions concerning social reality connected to given values: it is generated by the interests of a given social group (genetic definition) and defends the interests of that group (functional definition). We will also add that, obviously, ideology is always interpreted ideology. In other words, ideology is always in a sign, an interpretant for an interpreter (Ponzio, 1993). From this perspective, the relation is not between ideology and sign, but between one ideological sign and another, where ideological signs and their interpretants can be verbal or nonverbal. Interverbal and intersemiotic translations occur from verbal to nonverbal and vice versa, as exemplified by Bakhtin (1963, in Bachtin e il suo Circolo, 2014; 1984[1965]) with his studies on the transition from the nonverbal signs of ‘carnival’ ideology to the verbal signs of ­‘carnivalized literature.’ 361

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Given that ideology is associated with social organization and intersemiotic translation, with a system of opinions and social planning, the relation between ideological signs and their interpretants is open to interrogation and discussion. Ideology thus described foresees the logical procedure of abduction and puts iconic signs into play. Consequently, the relation between ideological interpreted signs and interpretants is characterized neither by necessity, where indexicality prevails, proper to deduction, nor by conventionality or symbolicity, as in induction. Instead, in ideology, as we are describing it, iconicity prevails over indexicality and symbolicity so that the interpretant relates to the interpreted sign on the basis of similarity (synonyms include resemblance and likeness), that is, iconic similarity which is similarity by affinity or attraction. In this case, similarity and attraction regulate deferral processes among signs, leaving free play at varying degrees to the subject’s imagination, capacity for invention and innovation. This approach contributes to distinguishing between ‘ideology,’ where iconicity predominates, and behavioral ‘norms’ and ‘stereotypes’ (Schaff, 1980) where, instead, symbolicity and indexicality predominate. Furthermore, the distinction between ‘ideology,’ ‘norms’ and ‘stereotypes’ can also be read in light of Charles Morris’s (1964) tripartite distinction between ‘conceived value,’ ‘operative value’ and ‘object value’ (Ponzio, 1990b). Ideology thus described subsists in the dialogical relationship among interpretants at varying degrees of otherness and can be imagined or guessed from these interpretants, as foreseen by abductive logical procedure. The relation of similarity is always uncertain, vague and even problematic. For example, as Rossi-Landi (1985, pp. 167–192) observes, it is difficult to establish where author awareness begins and where it ends in an ideological expression that communicates a certain degree of detachment (‘ideological excess’) with respect to ‘expressed ideology’ (Petrilli & Ponzio, 2021, pp. 29–105). This is the case of irony, self-criticism, intolerance and derision manifest in such discursive figures as imitation, stylization, parody, caricature, satire, etc. Situations can change suddenly and reveal internal contradictions, calling for interrogation, thereby questioning representation, whether in terms of intralingual, interlingual or intersemiotic translation (Petrilli, 2004). The nature of language is complex. In the framework of his philosophy of language, Voloshinov establishes an immediate connection between his investigations into language and the question of ideology. As verbal language, language involves the physical (sound), physiological (phonation involving the processes of sound production and reception), and psychological (speaker and listener experience, inner signs) spheres of reality. But no one of these spheres, taken in isolation, disconnected from the others, can adequately describe verbal language. Transformation of this complex into the phenomenon of language calls for socio-historical contextualization, social relations of production, social atmosphere and community. On Voloshinov’s account, the condition for transformation of the physico-psychophysiological complex into the phenomenon of language is ‘unity of the social milieu’ and ‘unity of the immediate social event of communication.’ Social milieu and communicative context involve hosts of multifaceted and multifarious connections, not all of which are equally important to understand verbal language, nor are they necessarily constituents of verbal expression (1973[1929], pp. 46–47). In contrast to glottocentric and phonocentric tendencies, verbal-linguistic signs are described as emerging interrelatedly with nonverbal signs, dependent on the nonverbal, on the one hand, and as perfused with ideology, on the other hand. Insofar as signs reflect and refract another reality, they are ideological products that convey ideology understood in a broad sense. Everything ideological possesses meaning. In other words, ideology is in signs 362

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and in the relation among signs, such that while there are signs that are not ideological, there is no ideology without signs: A physical body equals itself, so to speak; it does not signify anything but wholly coincides with its particular, given nature. In this case there is no question of ideology. However, any physical body may be perceived as an image; for instance, the image of natural inertia and necessity embodied in that particular thing. Any such artisticsymbolic image to which a particular physical object gives rise is already an ideological product. The physical object is converted into a sign. Without ceasing to be a part of material reality, such an object, to some degree, reflects and refracts another reality. (Voloshinov, 1973[1929], p. 9) All types of signs can be characterized in terms of specificity. The implication, therefore, is that a sign cannot be fully replaced by another sign. This applies to relations between nonverbal signs and a historical-natural language, to endoverbal semiosis generally, and to relations among historical-natural languages. Every language has specific characteristics at the semantic, syntactic and pragmatic levels, with a particular mode of interpreting, classifying and relating to linguistic reality, as much as to the nonlinguistic. As a critic of phonocentrism, Emilio Garroni (1972) underlined how relations between nonverbal and verbal are influenced by the historical-natural language they occur in. The effability/translatability of nonverbal reality (signs and nonsigns) is relative to the specific language in use (Rossi-Landi, 1992).

Intersemiotic translation and semioethics As translation from verbal to nonverbal, and vice versa, and among nonverbal sign systems without necessarily surfacing in the verbal, intersemiotic translation pervades properly human semiosis overall as its condition of possibility (supra, p. 345). As pointed out earlier, sign activity in the socio-cultural sphere, signifying and interpretation are generated by language understood as modeling, so that expression and communication will always be ‘linguistic,’ whether verbal or nonverbal. We know that the distinctive trait of language as modeling, thus of specifically human semiosis is syntactics; language is a syntactical modeling device. Intersemiosic translation becomes intersemiotic insofar as semiosis is implanted in syntactical modeling, in language, the condition of the human capacity for metasemiosis which ongoing intersemiotic translation enhances. The interpretant of a sign may belong to the same sign system. Nonetheless, in the infinite deferral among interpretants (deferral converges with the interpretive/translative trajectory constitutive of meaning) across languages in human semiosis (which presupposes both nonlinguistic and nonverbal semiosis) encounter (whether implicit or explicit) with extra-systemic interpretants with respect to any given system is inevitable. Based on research in biosemiotics (Kull, 2003; Petrilli, 2012, pp. 71–126), it is worth repeating that linguistic communication, verbal and nonverbal, like language as modeling, is species-specific. In other words, ‘linguistic communication’ can only occur in anthroposemiosis and is tagged ‘linguistic’, whether verbal or nonverbal because it is inscribed in human primary modeling, Sebeok’s ‘language.’ On this account, nonhuman animals obviously neither communicate through verbal signs nor through nonverbal linguistic signs, which are species-specific to humans. Consequently, it is not correct to speak of the ‘language’ of animals (except in Walt Disney’s cartoons or in fables and fairytales). Human beings alone are capable of language, and language, as stated, is verbal and nonverbal. Unlike humans, modeling 363

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systems in nonhuman life-forms are not endowed with syntactics, though nonhuman animal life-forms do communicate both intraspecies-specifically and interspecies-specifically (think of communication with our pets) through other, nonlinguistic sign systems (supra, pp. 346347). This has contributed to distinguishing between intersemiosic and intersemiotic translation as imaged in our typology of translation, described below, reported in English for the first time in Translation Translation (Petrilli, 2003, p. 19, but originally proposed in Italian in Teoria dei segni e del linguaggio, Petrilli, 1998, now in Petrilli, 2014b, p. 103). Working through the typology of translation as we have proposed it, before differentiating between intersemiosic and intersemiotic translation, a distinction is drawn between intersemiosic and endosemiosic translation, where the first refers to translational processes across two or more sign systems and the second is internal to any one sign system. Both types of translation occur in the living world generally, and not only in the human cultural world (supra, p. …). Where a language (Fr. langage) occurs, whether verbal or nonverbal, intersemiosic translation is specified as intersemiotic translation. When translation occurs uniquely across languages (Fr. langage), including from nonverbal signs to verbal signs and vice versa, or across nonverbal sign systems, we have interlinguistic translation, where the adjective ‘linguistic’ derives from language-in-general (Fr. langage) and not from historical-natural language (Fr. langue). When a question of translative processes within a single language (langage), we have endolinguistic translation. When specifically a question of linguistic translation in the sphere of verbal sign systems, we have endoverbal translation. The latter is specified as: (a) interlingual when signs transit from one historical-natural language to another; and (b) endolingual when transiting across languages within the same historical-natural language. Endolingual translation is characterized as: (bi) diamesic endolingual translation (from diamesia, linguistic variation relatively to the expressive medium: translation from oral to written verbal signs and vice versa; (bii) diaphasic endolingual translation (from diaphasia, linguistic variation relatively to different registers: colloquial, formal, professional, etc.); (biii) diglossic endolingual translation (from diglossia, socially connoted bilingualism, with high and low language, e.g., standard language and dialects). Insofar as it is characterized by syntactics, ‘language’ or ‘primary modeling’ is exclusive to humans and thus is not present in general communication or rather general semiosis. We have claimed that syntactics endows human semiosis with a capacity for ‘metasemiosis,’ hence for dialogism, alterity and creativity. Sebeok places his reflections on specifically human semiosis, or rather semiotics, in his overall vision of semiotics which he described as ‘global semiotics.’ Such a vision concerning semiotics as a capacity specific to the human being allows for the possibility of recognizing the uniqueness of every single individual as a species-specific manifestation of humankind, uniqueness that signifies together freedom and responsibility (Petrilli & Ponzio, 2001, 2002, 2003). Thematizing metasemiosis, global semiotics allows for recognition of human responsibility in the capacity for semiosic consciousness, thus consciousness of semiosis in its diversity and variation, for consciousness therefore of the relations of intercorporeal interdependency that interconnect all living beings to each other (Petrilli, 2014a, pp. 322–341). Considering the human capacity for metasemiosis, precisely, and the related capacity for intersemiotic translation beyond the intersemiosic, and thus recognizing human responsibility for life in all its manifestations leads to the perspective, in the context of the sign sciences, of global semiotics, denominated semioethics (Petrilli, 2015c; Petrilli & Ponzio, 2003, 2021; Ponzio 2022a, b). To conclude then: transposition, translation, transfer, intersemiosis, intertextuality, dialogism, dialectics, interverbal, interlingual, interlinguistic and intersemiotic: all these expressions 364

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tell us that the sign can only subsist in the relation among signs and that the modality of this relation is translation. Sign theory and translation theory come together in what can be designated, in translation theory, as the ‘semiotic turn.’ At the same time, in the light of developments in semiotics centered on the relation of signs to values and the problem of responsibility, this ‘semiotic turn’ is also what we propose to designate as the ‘semioethic turn.’

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Petrilli, S. (2019a). Signs, Language and Listening. Ottawa: Legas. Petrilli, S. (2019b). Significare, interpretare e intendere. Tra segni, lingue, linguaggi e valori. Lecce: Pensa MultiMedia. Petrilli, S. (2021a). Translation, Ideology, and Social Practice. In M. Ji & S. Laviosa (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Translation and Social Practices (pp. 23–44). New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. Petrilli, S. (2021b). Senza Ripari. Milan: Mimesis. Petrilli, S., & Ponzio, A. (2001). Thomas Sebeok and the Signs of Life. London: Icon Books. Petrilli S., & Ponzio, A. (2002). I segni e la vita. La semiotica globale di Thomas A. Sebeok. Milan: Spirali. Petrilli, S., & Ponzio, A. (2003). Semioetica. Rome: Meltemi; now. In S. Petrilli (Ed.), Semioetica e ­Comunicazione Globale (pp. 127–151). Athanor, XXIV, 17. Milan: Mimesis, 2014. Petrilli, S., & Ponzio, A. (2005). Semiotics Unbounded. Toronto: Toronto University Press. Petrilli, S., & Ponzio, A. (2007). Semiotics Today. From Global Semiotics to Semioethics, a Dialogic Response. Signs—International Journal of Semiotics, 1, 29–127. Petrilli, S., & Ponzio, A. (2011). A Tribute to Thomas A. Sebeok. In J. Deely et al. (Eds.), Semiotics Continues to Astonish (pp. 307–330). Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter. Petrilli, S., & Ponzio, A. (2012). Iconicity, Otherness and Translation. Chinese Semiotic Studies, 7(1), 11–26. Petrilli, S., & Ponzio, A. (2013). Modelling, Dialogism and the Functional Cycle. Sign Systems Studies, 41(1/2), 93–115. Petrilli, S., & Ponzio, A. (2015). Language as Primary Modeling and Natural Languages: A Biosemiotic Perspective. In E. Velmezova, K. Kull & Stephen J. Cowley (Eds.), Biosemiotic Perspectives on L anguage and Linguistics (pp. 47–76). London: Springer. Petrilli, S., & Ponzio, A. (2017). In Name of the Other. In S. Petrilli (Ed.), Challenges to Living Together (pp. 197–231). Milan: Mimesis. Petrilli, S., & Ponzio, A. (2021). Maestri di segni e costruttori di pace. Milan: Mimesis. Petrilli, S., & Ponzio, A. (2022). Precarity and Insecuritas, between Fear of the Other and Apprehension for the Other. From Semiotics to Semioethics. The American Journal of Semiotics, online first: 15 March. Ponzio, A. (1990a). Man as a Sign. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Ponzio, A. (1990b). Peirce’s and Morris’s Categories in a Theory of Ideology. In M. A. Bonfantini & C. J. W. Kloesel (Eds.), Peirceana Two. Versus 55/56, 121-132. Ponzio, A. (1993). Signs, Dialogue and Ideology. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Ponzio, A. (2003). The Same Other. The Text and Its Translations, in S. Petrilli (Ed.), Translation Translation (pp. 55-68). Amsterdam, Atlanta, GA: Rodopi. Ponzio, A. (2006). The Dialogic Nature of Sign. New York: Legas. Ponzio, A. (2015a). Il linguaggio e le lingue. Milan: Mimesis. Ponzio, A. (2015b). Tra semiotica e letteratura. Milan: Bompiani. Ponzio, A. (2018). Linguistica generale, scrittura letteraria e traduzione. Perugia: Guerra. Ponzio, A. (2022a). Quadrilogia. Milan: Mimesis. Ponzio, A. (2022b). La comunicazione come scambio, produzione e consumo. Milan: Mimesis. Ponzio, L. (2015). Roman Jakobson e i fondamenti della semiotica. Milan: Mimesis. Prodi, G. (1977). Le basi materiali della significazione. Milan: Bompiani. Queiroz, J., & Ata, P. (2019). Intersemiotic Translation, Cognitive Artefact, and Creativity. Adaptation, 12(3), 298–314. Rossi-Landi, F. (1968). Il linguaggio come lavoro e come mercato. Milan: Bompiani; Language as Work and Trade. A Semeiotic Homology for Linguistics & Economics. South Hadley: Bergin & Harvey, 1983. Rossi-Landi, F. (1972). Semiotica e ideologia. Milan: Bompiani. Rossi-Landi, F. (1973). Ideologies of Linguistic Relativity. The Hague: Mouton. Rossi-Landi, F. (1978). Ideologia. Milan: Mondadori, 1982; Marxism and Ideology (R. Griffin, trans.). Oxford: Clarendon Press. Rossi-Landi, F. (1985). Metodica filosofica e scienza dei segni. Milan: Bompiani. Rossi-Landi, F. (1992). Between Signs and Non-signs, S. Petrilli (ed., intro.). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Sapir, E. (1949). Selected Writings of Edward Sapir in Language, Culture and Personality (D. G. Mandelbaum, ed.), 4th ed. Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1963. Schaff, A. (1977). Teoria della conoscenza, logica e semantica. Bari: Dedalo. Schaff, A. (1980). Stereotypen und das Menschliche Handeln. Vienna: Europa: Verlag. Scott, C. (2010). Intermediality and Synaestesia. Art in Translation, 2(2), 153–170. Sebeok, T. A. (1976). Contributions to the Doctrine of Signs. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Sebeok, T. A. (1979). The Sign & Its Masters. Texas: University of Texas Press. 367

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19 A social semiotic multimodal approach to translation Elisabetta Adami

Introduction Social Semiotics is a theoretical perspective that has first developed the concept of multimodality and provided heuristic tools to understand sign-making and meaning-making, i.e., how we make signs and sign complexes by combining different semiotic resources and how we make meaning out of anything produced by others and present in our environments. By considering how we make signs and meanings with more than language, we can question established assumptions about what translation is. This is particularly useful today, given the complexities of contemporary communication and the challenges faced by Translation Studies and translation practice. Social Semiotics provides a theoretical perspective and conceptualization of sign- and meaning-making that can be useful in re-framing possible approaches to translation. Social Semiotics is a theoretical perspective that has first introduced the concept of ‘multimodality’ (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2001), and has proposed a take on communication, social interaction and semiosis that accounts for the fact that humans make meaning by combining multiple semiotic resources, or modes. In recent years Translation Studies – along with much research in linguistics as well as education and other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences – have been undergoing a ‘multimodal turn’ (Adami & Ramos Pinto, 2020; Boria & Tomalin, 2020), stemming from the recognition that communication is multimodal and humans make meaning with more than language. This has helped the field to draw attention to non-linguistic aspects of texts, such as images and layout in static texts (e.g. in comics, Borodo, 2015), and moving images in audio-visual texts (e.g. for subtitling, Taylor, 2004). Yet most studies considering multimodal aspects of translation focus on interlingual contexts, i.e., from a source named/national language1 or ‘languaculture’ (Agar, 1995) to another. Thus, even when expanding the attention to translation resources other than speech and writing, an overall logocentric and interlingual definition of the contexts and needs for translation still remains (Marais, 2019; Adami & Ramos Pinto, 2020). If instead we shift from a linguistic to a Social Semiotic perspective and consider meaning-making and re-making taking place in and across all modes, media, genres, domains, semiotic spaces, and discourses, we can conceive of translation as resemiotization (Iedema, 2001), that is DOI: 10.4324/9781003161448-23

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how ‘semiotics are translated from one into the other as social processes unfold’ (Iedema, 2003, p. 29). Translation then becomes the ‘transposition of meaning’ (Kress, 2020) across modes, media, genres, domains, semiotic spaces and discourses regardless of whether the re-making of meaning involves addressees that speak a different named/national language. As a consequence, a wealth of questions and possibilities open as to how we should or could re-conceptualize translation contexts and practices. This is particularly relevant in the light of the complexities of the contemporary communication landscape, characterized by an increased transnational circulation of people, multimodal artifacts and semiotic practices as well as an increased multiplication of equally transnational yet fragmented and connected semiotic spaces, which redefine boundaries of sharedness and non-sharedness in semiotic knowledge (Adami & Ramos Pinto, 2020). The present chapter tries to unpack the above by introducing a Social Semiotic perspective on translation. It first presents key tenets of Social Semiotics. It then introduces key concepts and frames them as dimensions of translation, conceived as a process of resemiotization at the intersections between modes, media, genres, domains, semiotic spaces and discourses.

Social semiotics and multimodality Social Semiotics developed in the works of Robert Hodge, Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen (for key references see Hodge & Kress, 1988; van Leeuwen, 2005a; Kress, 2010). It stemmed from Michael Halliday’s functional linguistics, chiefly in his work ‘Language as a Social Semiotic: The social interpretation of language and meaning’ (Halliday, 1978). Against generativist and structural approaches, which explained language on the basis of either mindinternal or system-internal rules and processes, Halliday pointed to social dynamics as the reason for how language and its resources are as they are at any given time and in any social group. Humans develop their linguistic resources to respond to the social functions they need to fulfill. Social groups’ communicative functions, including establishing, maintaining and contesting power relationships, explain levels of variation in language choices and use. Language represents society and contributes to shaping it – for example, how it categorizes power relations between speaker and listener (i.e., through systems of deference or distance that languages might express through pronouns, morphological traits, and/or honorifics) both represent and shape their roles in the communicative event and in their societies. Social Semiotics has expanded this approach from language to all semiotic resources. It has drawn on Halliday’s concept of ‘mode’ (which he used to distinguish between speech and writing) to label all socially-developed organized sets of resources for meaningmaking, including speech, writing, image, gaze, facial expression, music, proxemics, color, dress, architecture and so on. Starting from Kress and van Leeuwen’s (1996) seminal work on the analysis of texts combining writing and image, multimodal analysis frameworks have been developed through different theoretical perspectives (for a review Adami, 2017; for an introduction Jewitt, Bezemer, & O’Halloran, 2016), to investigate meaning made by the combined use of different semiotic resources (or modes) both in disembodied representations and in embodied interaction. Research in multimodality has led to increased attention to resources other than language and their role in meaning-making, and to questioning a supposed primacy of language as paradigmatic to understand the whole of communication. While other theoretical perspectives in the field of Multimodal Studies (K. O’Halloran & Smith, 2011) have taken a more systemic approach from Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar (Halliday, 1985; for a systemic functional approach to intersemiotic translation 370

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see O’Halloran et al., 2016), aimed at investigating the ‘grammatics’ (O’Halloran et al., 2016, p. 204) of semiotic systems from their use in multimodal texts, Social Semiotics has instead taken chiefly Halliday’s social stance to language, to focus on instances of sign- and meaning-making as revelatory of the sign- and meaning-makers’ interest, and hence their positioning in relation to broader social dynamics. This focus on the relation between social dynamics and individual agency is both a theoretical approach and a call to respond to the complexities of contemporary communication. We live in and make meaning of a world that is characterized by instability, fragmentation and provisionality, with an increased circulation of people, multimodal texts and semiotic practices, combined with a multiplication of interconnected and yet fragmented semiotic spaces both online and offline, and we do this in interaction with others as well as with machines. Rather than systems and rules of usage, investigating the processual and emerging aspects of sign- and meaning-making, and what they reveal of people’s positioning in relation to social dynamics seems not only more feasible but also more useful to help navigate such a complex, variable and ever-changing landscape and ecology.

Mode as a heuristic tool; mode vs code Although in academic fields outside Multimodal Studies, modes are often thought of chiefly in terms of image and writing, or speech and gesture, multimodal analysis has developed frameworks to research also semiotic resources such as sound and music (van Leeuwen, 1999), color (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2002), architecture and space in the built environment (Ravelli & McMurtrie, 2018), dance (Maiorani, 2021), touch (Bezemer & Kress, 2014; Jewitt et al., 2020), typography (van Leeuwen, 2005b) and texture (Djonov & van Leeuwen, 2014), for example. Most importantly, beyond the investigation of specific modes in isolation, multimodal analysis concerns meaning that is produced through the relation of different modes in texts and communicative events. Mode is a socially developed organized set of resources to make meaning; it is material that has been socially developed to make meaning. Debates on what constitutes a mode and how to categorize different modes abound in Multimodal Studies (see for example Stöckl, 2009; Bateman, 2011). In Social Semiotics, the concept of mode is a heuristic and is not predefined in its boundaries. Given the ‘social’ as the primary principle driving semiotic dynamics, what constitutes a mode is socio-culturally determined in that it varies across social groupings and their specific meaning-making needs (Bezemer & Kress, 2008). Wine can be considered a mode among wine makers and tasters, as they have developed its resources to express a full range of meaning potentials (Adami, 2017); the same is for fonts for typesetters, perfume for perfume designers and so on. Boundaries between modes are also not clear-cut. For example, by relying both on the visual channel of perception, writing and image share the potential of blurring their boundaries in semiotic properties; so, graphic designers and graffiti artists, for example, often exploit and develop the visuality of writing and blend letters with shapes and other resources of images. In sum, ‘mode’ is a flexible label useful if conceived as a heuristic for analysis, rather than as a set-in-stone categorization that reifies and essentializes semiotic resources and the many uses that social groups make of them. ‘Mode’ in Social Semiotics is preferred to the concept of ‘code’ used in traditional semiotic approaches (as well as in linguistics, e.g., in ‘code-switching’), as it allows for a less stable, fixed and rule-determined approach to communication and sign- and meaning-making. Social semiotics moves away from models of communication that explain it in terms of coding and decoding processes, according to which successful communication is a matter of 371

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using signs by applying the rules of a shared code in a specific context. Rather than codes and rules, Social Semiotics instead refers to modes or semiotic resources and regularities, in terms of communalities in patterns of form-meaning association emerging and traceable in specific social spaces, which reflect hegemonic social dynamics – with exceptions to these regularities being equally relevant for the understanding of meaning-making in actual instances of communication. Rather than sign use/usage, Social Semiotics conceives of communication in terms of sign-making.

Sign-making and meaning-making2 In Social Semiotics, particularly in Gunther Kress’ (2010) conceptualization, signs are not used. Signs are made every time somebody chooses a semiotic resource (some material form) to express selected aspects (i.e., aspects that the sign maker considers as ‘criterial’) of the meaning which they wish to express. They do so by choosing the most apt resource (or form/signifier) that is available to them to express that meaning (or signified). Aptness is in relation both to the materiality and the (sign-maker’s experience of ) past uses of that specific resource. Analogously, in ‘meaning-making,’ somebody makes meaning of a form they encounter on the basis of criterial aspects of its materiality and (the meaning-maker’s experience of ) its past uses. In this perspective, ‘past uses’ is a label that, compared to ‘conventions,’ allows for a less stable, fixed and rule-governed take on regularities and dynamics of sharedness in semiotic practices. It is preferred over conventions also because, in this approach to signs and meanings being newly made in every instance of communication, the association between form and meaning is never arbitrary but motivated (Kress, 1993). In this sense, Kress’ Social Semiotics stresses the relation between the social and the agency of sign- and meaning-makers, and, in Saussurean terms, shifts its focus of attention from the langue to the parole. It does so also by reviewing Saussure 3 in the light of Peirce’s (1931) tripartite conception of sign-object-interpretant, thus stressing the interpretant as a key element in all signification.

Sign as motivated; meaning-making as hypothesis making Any act of sign-making and meaning-making is the result of a process of making hypotheses on the most apt association between forms and meanings, motivated on the basis of the materiality and past uses of semiotic resources. This is so in sign-making, as I choose the form that is most apt to express (criterial aspects of ) the meaning I want to make, in relation to my interest, aims and (my hypotheses onto) the meaning-making universe of my addressees. It is also the case in meaning-making, as I make meaning of somebody else’s sign by making hypotheses on the basis of the materiality of the form used and (my experience of ) its past uses; by doing so, I make hypotheses on the interest (in terms of overall social positioning and specific positioning in the situation at hand) of the sign-maker who produced the sign. Hence, in a Social Semiotic perspective, there is no fixed (or established) meaning, but always a meaning potential. Meaning (i.e., what one wants to communicate) is prior in driving forms of expression, in that forms develop as choice options on the basis of the meanings that need to be made. At the same time, whenever there is a choice among forms, there is meaning potential. As an example, since when our mobile phones have introduced ‘heart’ emojis in different colors, the difference in color has become a potentially signifying resource, as I have personally 372

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learned through discussions with my students. Some of them would use a red heart emoji only with their romantic partner, to signify ‘love,’ while they would use a yellow one with an acquaintance, a purple one with their (women) friends, and a green one with mixed gender groups of friends. Other students in my classroom would make a different meaning out of different colored heart emojis, instead. What matters is that when options among different forms exist, the choice we make is potentially meaningful. The choice among possibilities in semiotic resources is what has meaning potential. And, as emerged in my class discussion on the color of the heart emoji, we make meaning by making hypotheses on others’ uses of resources on the basis of their materiality and our (experience of ) past uses. In that discussion, those students (and myself ) who normally would not intentionally make meaning through the choice in color in that emoji, then realized that our addressees might well have instead made meaning out of our own use of color, always in a motivated way through their experience of past uses and materiality.

Three levels of meaning (or meta-functions) While discussing differences in my class on the use of color as a resource to make meaning with heart emojis, we were able to see how each student drew both on the materiality and on their experience of past uses of these colors (including immediate past uses, as in the color used by others in that or other interactions) to associate them to different types of affection and appreciation for different types of relationships in their networks. Colour in the heart emoji would be used to make specific ideational and interpersonal meanings. Always drawing on Halliday, Social Semiotic multimodality uses a three-layered system to analyze meaning. Modes have resources to (1) express something about the world, i.e., the ‘ideational metafunction’ (in the heart emoji case, the type of affection expressed by the color red as ‘romantic love’ vs yellow as ‘friendly love’); (2) express something about the producer and the addressee of the message, and their relation, i.e., the ‘interpersonal metafunction’ (the type of relation with the addressee expressed by the specific colored heart emoji, i.e., ‘my relation with you is romantic’ vs ‘we are friends’); and (3) express relations within the text, such as cohesion, information structure, etc., i.e., the ‘textual metafunction’ (the relation of meaning that the colored heart emoji establishes with its co-text in the interaction as ‘approval,’ ‘solidarity,’ ‘sympathy,’ or ‘encouragement’). When I met a neighbor while climbing the stairway that leads to my flat, I smiled and turned my back to him. I chose to do so because the materiality of turning the back helps distance their face from mine and hence, while we have been undergoing the Covid-19 pandemic, in a space such as a stairway that does not allow for social distancing, turning the back mitigates the risks of possible contagion. Hence, by virtue of its materiality, I associated that body movement, in that specific situation, with a meaning of respect and thoughtfulness toward my neighbor. Yet I also hypothesized that my neighbor’s experience of past uses of turning the back could associate it instead with a meaning of avoidance and hence possible rudeness (again, historically developed with that meaning because of its materiality, in that you hide your face from the other hence refuse to interact). Ideationally, the turning of the back signifies ‘avoidance of contact’; interpersonally it can signify either ‘I do not want to interact with you; I disrespect you in not engaging with you’ or ‘I care for you and want to avoid any possible contagion risk in case I am positive’. By smiling at the neighbor before turning, I hypothesized that, at the textual level of meaning, the relation with the smile could help my neighbor disambiguate which of these meaning potentials my turning of the back had in my making of the sign. 373

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Communication as interpretation Communication happens when there is interpretation (Kress, 2010). Stemming from Roland Barthes’ Death of the Author (Barthes, 1977), communication is not defined by successful decoding of the producer’s intended meaning (whatever that could ever mean), but by interpretation, any sort of interpretation. Sign-making is a punctuation of the ceaseless process of semiosis (Kress, 2010), of which it leaves some traces. These traces enable us to make some hypotheses about it and hence try to reach some level of understanding. Following this view, and combining it with recent complexity approaches to language (Larsen-Freeman, 2015), I conceive of meaning-making as always processual, situated, dynamic, relational and emergent in actual instances of interaction with others, with texts and the environment. In a research project I was involved in, we collected data on communication practices in the superdiverse context of Kirkgate Market, in the city center of Leeds, UK (Adami, 2018). A butcher had placed a lucky cat in his shop window. In an interview with him, it emerged that he had done so to attract the attention of potential Chinese customers; he had placed the lucky cat on the window close to pork belly because in his experience Chinese customers use to buy that cut of meat. He made a sign out of an object, by associating the signifier ‘lucky cat’ to meaning along all three metafunctions: (1) ideationally, he associated it to a meaning ‘Chinese’, out of its materiality – the object has Chinese scripts on, for example – and his experience of past uses, e.g., contexts where he had seen the object, including shops that he would interpret as Chinese as well as media products such as films; (2) interpersonally, to address Chinese customers – the materiality of the object, with the cat looking in front of itself, and its arm moving up and down in a form of salute, addresses directly the viewer, thus calling for attention; and (3) textually, through positioning it in front of the window shop to achieve salience and through proximity with the pork belly, just behind it on the shelf, to point deictically their attention to that cut of meat. Thus, he made hypotheses on the lucky cat ‘speaking’ to Chinese customers and on its proximity to the pork belly as directing their attention to it. During our fieldwork, we did not verify how potential Chinese customers interpreted that sign (most likely we would have found very different interpretations among them). I, however, had interpreted it differently before hearing the butcher’s account. I had recently moved from Italy to live in the UK; the Brexit referendum had just taken place and had made me particularly aware of possible anti-immigration stances among British citizens. The butcher had also a Union Jack (i.e., the British national flag) on the banner of his shop, which he used to signify the tradition of his activity and the provenance of the produce he sold. Because of my own social positioning, I had become alert whenever encountering a national flag of a possible nationalist and anti-immigrant meaning association. When I saw the lucky cat, I interpreted it as a sign of openness toward foreign cultural practices, thus mitigating that possible association. So my meaning-making of the lucky cat as a sign was, ideationally ‘not-British,’ interpersonally ‘this butcher is open to migrants, hence I as a migrant am welcome here,’ and textually, in relation to the Union Jack ‘this flag is not meant as a nationalist and anti-immigrant sign.’ *** To sum up, from a Social Semiotic perspective, we communicate by combining different semiotic resources, and we use a form/signifier and associate it with a meaning/signified, in making a new sign. We orchestrate our communication through sign complexes that make meaning through the intertwined combination of different resources in different modes. 374

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We do this in relation to our interest, both in terms of our social positioning and of our specific interest at hand at our moment of sign-making, and in relation to our assumptions (or hypotheses) on the meaning-making of our addressees. Meanings can be analyzed through their intertwined three-layered function, i.e., ideationally, for what they represent about the world, interpersonally, for what they express about the relation between the sign-maker and their addressee, and textually, for what they express in relation to other signs in the same text or communicative event. Any interpretation of meaning, both in analysis and in everyday communication, is always a matter of hypotheses, informed by the materiality and (our experience of ) previous uses of the resources chosen to make signs. This does not mean that regularities cannot be traced, as the reflection of people’s associations with broader social forces, in terms of hegemonic ways of doing things, yet these are – also in analysis – always in terms of hypotheses, and are always dynamic, relational and emergent in the unfolding of the interaction. Some social groups have also developed more fixed systems of association between forms and meanings in specific modes, through a codification process, for example, in specific fields of technical drawing for images (think of maritime maps, MRI scans, or engineering circuit diagrams, for example), symbolism in mathematics, notation in music, body movement in codified dance traditions like ballet (unlike more contemporary dance) and so on. The mode of writing (more than speech) has been codified in script systems, and in named/national languages, and so has the mode of gesture in sign languages. This has been done through literacy education, the production of dictionaries and also the development of canons and systems of equivalence between named languages in the long history of interlingual translation. Yet even for languages, the form-meaning association is not fixed as mode per se, as the degree of codification depends on contexts and genres; normally only highly specialized and technical contexts have developed high levels of codification in form-meaning associations. In this sense, for all modes, codification is a process developed to restrict the range of meaning potentials of semiotic resources when used in specific social contexts and organizations that require fixity for carrying out their social actions (e.g., consider the army, for example, and how interaction in all resources is highly codified, from dress, to body posture, to gaze, to facial expression) – in sum, it is the character and needs of the social practice, rather than the nature of human semiosis or the type of semiotic resource, that determines more or less fixed associations of form and meaning in sign- and meaning-making. If we consider the whole of communication in its many contexts and functions, and, even more importantly, all resources used in combination whenever we communicate, we realize that codification phenomena are relatively an exception in sign- and meaning-making. Besides and beyond individual modes, conceiving meaning-making as hypotheses on the motivation between forms and meanings is especially useful at the level of actual instances of communication. We do not communicate through isolated signs, made in one single semiotic resource, but by orchestrating multiple sign-making acts together into sign complexes combining different semiotic resources (i.e., a gaze, with a smile, with a gesture, with body proxemics, handling of objects, spoken words, and so on – or an image, with some writing, with specific fonts, colors and layout). Thus, a perspective that looks at sign-making rather than sign use is particularly useful when considering the complexities of actual situated communication. Translation is an excellent example in this regard. If signs as sign complexes were simply used out of a shared code or system of form-meaning association rules, translation would be reversible. Instead, even in a strictly interlingual conception of translation, given a translated text from language A to language B, no reverse translation into language A will ever produce 375

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exactly the same ‘source’ text. If, beyond strictly linguistic conceptions of text, we consider the multimodality of communication, this becomes even more evident as no reverse translation of a written description of an image will ever produce the same ‘original’ image (see an illuminating example of this discussed in Kress, 2020); no reverse translation of a film adaptation will ever produce the same ‘original’ novel; and no reverse translation of the whole complex of social distancing practices taking place between staff and customers in a shop will ever produce the same ‘original’ written and spoken regulations given by shop owners to shop assistants, nor a reverse translation of these regulations will ever produce the same ‘original’ government directives that led to the enforcement of social distancing in the shop. From the above examples, it might become clear how a Social Semiotic perspective on sign- and meaning-making (and its re-making) has the potential to reframe conceptualizations of translation.

Multimodality and translation in the contemporary semiotic landscape Although communication has always been multimodal, in recent years the multimodality of communication and its import on translation have come to the fore in academic debate, mainly because of two interrelated factors, i.e., globalization and technological innovation in means of text production and distribution. The increased transnational flows of goods, people and money of today’s globalized world involve an increased circulation of representations, media products, communications and cultural artifacts, as well as an increased transnational composition of our social and semiotic environments, in terms of people, objects, and texts that characterize the landscape of social interactions, both offline and online. At the same time, corporations have increasingly perceived the need to adapt their products, branding, and advertising/marketing strategies to the cultural specificities of local markets; so, globalization dynamics have intertwined with localization practices of both verbal and nonverbal resources in corporate and media products targeting different local audiences/consumers, such as websites, packaging, and advertisements, as well as audio-visual products, such as games and TV adverts. Technological innovation, through digital means of text production, has facilitated the creation of representations combining different semiotic resources, beyond specialized professional production. Along with facilitated means for multimodal text production, technological innovation has also enhanced means of text distribution, through online environments that enable immediate transnational circulation. As a consequence, the semiotic composition of texts (broadly defined as meaningful wholes) has changed, with a salient presence of visual resources. This ‘visual turn’ ( Jay, 2002) in text-based communication has questioned the role of writing as the sole or main resource making meaning in a text. Technological innovation has also increased the number of tools facilitating interlingual translation, either machine-generated (such as built-in functionalities for automatic translation, like those available on Web browsers, and automatic translation captioning, like those available on YouTube), or user-generated (e.g., in the case of subtitling tools that facilitate ‘from below’ practices, as in fansubbing), which is de facto challenging the role and import of professional translation. Both globalization and technological innovation are complex phenomena characterized by contradictory dynamics (Lash & Urry, 1994; Appadurai, 1996). Technological innovation has led to a re-distribution of power from ‘one-to-many’ to ‘many-to-many’ (Rafaeli & LaRose, 1993) forms of text production and distribution, with sign-making and translating practices originating ‘from below’ (see the concept of ‘produsage’ in Bruns, 2006) and 376

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responding to diversified community-specific needs (e.g., fan-communities in the case of fansubbing). This new semiotic backdrop has exposed us to visual, auditory and material resources produced in other areas of the world, while contributing to multiplication and fragmentation of communities with their own specific and ever-emerging sign-making practices (New London Group, 1996), leading us to question the idea of homogeneous nationally- and language-bound communities sharing the same cultural background for meaning interpretation (see discussion in Adami & Ramos Pinto, 2020). In simple terms, if meanings belong to cultures rather than to codes (Kress, 2020), who shares the ‘same’ culture (and hence meanings) for specific uses of, e.g., image+music+writing is now increasingly difficult to determine. New contradictions and challenges arise for translation when conceived as translating a text from a source culture and language to a target one. First, with fragmentation and multiplication of communities, affinity spaces (Gee, 2005) and sign-making practices, as well as with enhanced transnational circulation, it is increasingly difficult to draw on the elusive concept of ‘target audience’ as defined by a supposed ‘shared culture.’ Second, facilitated tools for user-generated translation enhance issues of professional recognition, in a world where virtually ‘anybody can translate’ (even machines). This is particularly the case when artifacts are designed to facilitate transnational circulation while minimizing the need for interlingual translation, like, e.g., video recipes circulating on social media, which use writing only for ingredients and units of measures. Thirdly, while texts are increasingly multimodal, so that meaning can hardly be made by relying on language alone, time- and cost-pressures in professional translation practice have led to technological innovations that isolate the verbal component (as in the case of Computer-Assisted-Translation Tools, but also in remote interpreting), thus de facto constraining professionals to make translation choices relying on partial renditions of the overall meaning of a multimodal text. Academic research has started to address some of these issues. An increased acknowledgment of a changing semiotic landscape has brought attention to the concept of multimodality in Translation Studies. An increasing number of works analyze translation and localization of multimodal products (e.g., O’Hagan & Mangiron, 2013; Dicerto, 2018); yet the cases examined are still very specific and isolated, making it difficult to compose a wider picture of generalizable significance for the field as a whole and for day-to-day translation practice. Useful theoretical discussions have so far made sense of the state of the art on the issue (O’Sullivan, 2013; O’Sullivan & Jeffcote, 2013; Pérez-González, 2014; Gambier & Ramos Pinto, 2016; Dicerto, 2018;Tuominen et al., 2018; Boria & Tomalin, 2020). In the overall majority of cases (with notable exceptions in works on accessibility and multisensory translation), also when considering multimodal aspects of translations, the research draws on data from interlingual contexts – hence even in works on multimodal translation, the context is logocentrically and interlingually defined and looks at – say – images as rendered in a target text in a different named/national language. However, the scope of translation is potentially much wider than the sole making of meaning (of even multimodal aspects of texts) from one language to another. Among those few who push for a move from a linguistic to a semiotic approach to translation, Marais (2019) makes an extremely convincing case for how such a shift could help re-conceptualize translation, both in its field of study and for the possible developments in its professional domain and applications. Still, Marais’ work considers multimodality only as a communicative phenomenon that drives needs and demands for changes, without drawing on multimodal theories on meaning- and sign-making to reconceptualize translational phenomena. Instead, Kress (2020) as well as my own co-authored work (Adami & Ramos Pinto, 377

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2020; Ramos Pinto & Adami, 2020) have started to outline a Social Semiotic multimodal approach to translation. In what follows, I build on this approach to suggest how Social Semiotic concepts could reframe the dimensions of translation, and hence the scope of translation as a whole.

Social semiotic concepts for rethinking the dimensions of translation Social semiotic research has developed various detailed frameworks for the analysis of specific aspects of texts and communicative events. Here I am proposing only a few key concepts that are relevant to grasp the broad dynamics of semiotic practices in situated communication, specifically for how they can help to shed light on translation.

Modes, media and affordances Although ‘multimodal’ can be often confused with ‘multimedia’ and used interchangeably (see for example Marais, 2019), in Social Semiotics the concept of mode does not coincide with that of media (for a detailed discussion, Jewitt, 2004). Modes are technologies for representation, i.e., the socially-shaped material we use to make meaning. Media are technologies for designing, producing and distributing4 these representations (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2001; Kress, 2010). A text in the mode of speech can be designed through different media, e.g., by rehearsing thoughts out loud through our phonatory apparatus or by typing on a laptop (when writing notes for a speech, or the script of a presentation); it can be produced through our phonatory apparatus or through a writing-to-speech software app; it can be distributed through a microphone, a radio, or a WhatsApp audio message. Analogously, an image can be designed through sketches with a pencil on paper or through various preparatory attempts by looking at a camera (without considering the media used in staging the components to be captured on camera for a staged image). The ‘same’ image can be produced through paint on canvas, through a professional camera or a webcam, through knitting, or through a drawing software app. It can be distributed printed on paper, on a mug, on a knitted jumper, shared on social media, shown on screen or projected onto a wall, for example. When designed, produced and distributed in different media, the material actualization of any mode and their combination as a text will be different, and so will their meaning potentials differ to some extent (e.g., whether moving image, in the format of a video, is produced through a mobile phone or through a professional camera), and so will also our ways of engaging with them and experience them, e.g., whether the same video is watched on a social media platform on a mobile phone, on a large TV screen or in a cinema. From design, through production up to distribution, the media carrying meaning and the modes representing it will change, hence meaning is transformed, i.e., translated into different materialities. Different media also afford different modes and multimodal combinations, e.g., the radio affords speech, sound and music; the TV affords also writing and moving images and, within it, gestures, facial expressions, body movements, etc. Media, like all tools, have affordances (Gibson, 1979), in terms of possibilities and limitations for designing, producing and distributing multimodal texts, and for engaging with them. These affordances are material and become also socially meaningful, hence the choice of a medium rather than another can be interpreted as a sign in itself, e.g., whether somebody breaks up a relationship by meeting face to face or through a mobile phone message (see in this regard research on ‘polymedia’ Madianou & Miller, 2013; Madianou, 2015; Jansson, 2016). 378

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Remediation involves translation, as website designers well know when coding a website with a so-called ‘adaptable layout’ so that it translates by re-arranging its content and visual appearance (i.e., its semiotic resources) when accessed on a desktop, tablet or mobile phone screen (i.e., different dissemination media). Analogously, a train ticket will have a different materiality and multimodal composition of its semiotic resources if it is printed from a machine at the station, purchased on an app, or sent as a pdf receipt through an email. Somebody has designed templates for these different versions to enable the same genre to be produced and disseminated in different media. These different versions are translations of the ‘same’ ticket. Modes too have affordances, rooted in their materiality and in how social groups have developed their resources for specific uses. Image makes meaning through the simultaneous co-deployment of elements in space while speech does it through sequential unfolding in time; gesture makes meaning both in space and time. Simultaneity and sequence are two different logics that impose an ‘epistemological commitment’ (Kress, 2010, pp. 16–17) onto representing reality, and hence onto the meaning that is made. Image shows while writing names, so while image represents reality analogically, writing labels it discretely. The fact that modes have different affordances, makes them more suitable for making certain meanings rather than others, e.g., image can more easily show relations between elements while speech can more easily tell sequences of events. Humans can work around these material affordances to stretch the meaning potentials of modes, so comics have been developed to represent sequences of events through the sequencing of images, while in speech we have developed resources to describe relations, compare and measure. In sum, the affordances of modes at any given time and for any social group derive both from their materiality and from their social histories, i.e., the semiotic work that has been done by that social group onto the materiality of the mode. Because of the epistemological commitment involved in the affordances of each mode, one can never express exactly the same meaning across two different modes. Transposing meaning from one mode to another involves translation. Kress names ‘transduction’ (Kress, 2010, p. 123) this specific type of translation. Possibly more significantly, the fact that modes have affordances, i.e., they are more readily available to produce certain meanings rather than others, is the very reason why humans communicate multimodally; quite simply, to express our meanings, it is more efficient to combine different resources, each playing a specific role, for what it can do best. This means that, while meaning re-making from one mode to another and from one media to another are two different and intertwined translation processes, the translation of texts as products of meaning re-making, involves more than translation from one mode to another; it involves translation of multimodal wholes.

Genres and domains Humans communicate by means of multimodal texts, artifacts and events, designed, produced and distributed through media, to fulfill specific social functions. ‘Genre’ is the semiotic label used to distinguish between text types and events that fulfill different social functions; it ‘addresses the semiotic “emergence” of social organization, practices and interactions’ (Kress, 2010, p. 113). Genre frames social action in terms of recognizable practices and hence it ‘mediates between the social and the semiotic’ (Kress, 2010, p. 116). A ticket is a type of multimodal text or genre that fulfills the function of giving access to a specific service, like a train ride; the way it is shaped frames the social actions involved in providing and gaining access to a service. A CV is a genre that fulfills the function of presenting myself 379

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in applying for a social position – the way it is shaped in different domains and contexts gives indications on the aspects of life that are significant or not, as well as the social relations among those involved in a recruitment process in a given social context (in terms of formality and distance, expressed in the register of its semiotic resources, for example, from image, font, layout and writing for a traditional CV, to moving image including speech, gaze, facial expression, dress code, location and sound/music for a video CV). I will pose differently for an online dating profile photograph or for a CV photograph. They both mean ‘this is me,’ yet, through the semiotic resources I will choose, I will select different aspects of my identity for each, and will shape differently the relation with my addressee. Transposing meaning across genres too involves translation. As abstract categories, modes, media and genres do not coincide but always come in an interrelated relation instantiated in actual texts and communicative events. Changes in genres may and often do involve also changes in modes and media, which invariably produce differences in meaning. The translation process in transposing meaning across genres is significant also when this involves changes in genres within broadly the same intended audience and domain. For example, the modes and media I would use to present the ‘content’ of the present chapter at a conference would be different, combining modes such as speech, facial expression, gesture, and body movements, along with images and writing, for example, produced through media composed of different parts of my body and through Powerpoint slides on a laptop projected onto a screen. The different affordances of both modes and media, combined with the different material constraints of these genres (e.g., word limit for a chapter vs time limit for a conference presentation) and my experience of past uses of resources in them (e.g., different levels or degrees of formality, of abstraction, detail and exemplification in each) require a considerable translation effort in terms of choices in transposing meaning from chapter to presentation, which of them to transpose, which to leave out, and in which forms (all of which will inevitably result in new meanings). Genres cross domains, i.e., subject areas, or fields of social practice, such as finance, sport and medicine. Like all the other concepts introduced in this section, I conceive of domains as heuristics that can be applied to different levels of generalization and intersection (so banking could be a domain or a sub-domain of finance; academia could be a domain, intersecting with education and research, while different disciplines could be sub-domains in it; sport could be further sub-divided in different domains for different sports, etc.). Translation occurs also when meaning is re-made in a different domain; so, for example, a presentation of the contents of this chapter will have to be changed if given at a conference in linguistics, semiotics or Translation Studies. Translation (in the sense of meaning re-making) across domains involves also translation of genre practices. Genres, media and modes move and are shared across domains (so you can have an advertisement for banking products, for a university degree and for a sport event), while texts and events belonging to the ‘same’ genre in these domains have specific realizations and regularities, as well as borrowing practices from each other (consider for example the differences and similarities between an academic article in physics and in linguistics). Those who produce advertisements, for example, need to translate advertising as a genre to the specificities of each domain, whenever they have commissioned an advertisement in finance rather than in education. Those who change domains in their profession need to translate the knowledge they have achieved for carrying out social actions from the old to a new one (education names this kind of translation as ‘transfer’, as in ‘knowledge transfer’ between academia and the industry, and in ‘transferrable skills’). 380

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Semiotic spaces and discourses (or the issue of culture) Actual texts and communicative events (in different modes, media, genres and domains) occur in contexts, that is, specific semiotic spaces in which participants play different roles and carry out specific social practices. Different semiotic spaces develop different semiotic practices, i.e., different ways of carrying out social practices and interacting with other participants. Semiotic space too is a heuristic that can be applied at different levels of abstraction, each sharing some degree of sharedness in semiotic practices. We can conceive of Instagram as a semiotic space when trying to define the emerging semiotic practices that are common in that media platform and distinguish it from other social media spaces. But we can also consider a specific Facebook group or a football fan club as a semiotic space. The more I am familiar with a space and its practices, the more I will be able to perceive differences in it and hence sub-divide it into different semiotic spaces. A semiotic space is a (metaphorical rather than necessarily physical) space that gathers people who share similar interests to perform shared activities, and hence develop shared semiotic practices. In this sense, following Gee (2005), I choose the label ‘space’ instead of ‘community’ to shift the focus from people’s identity and membership to the actual semiotic practices that emerge and develop through people’s participation. This is for a series of reasons. First, space rather than community avoids essentializing people by forcing them into identity labels (for a critique of essentialism, see Phillips, 2010). Each of us is in fact a dynamic and relational conglomerate of multiple emerging identities, which are activated and performed selectively only in relevant contexts, or spaces; so, for example, my being an academic is relevant only in some spaces, and can be occasionally activated in others, such as at the pub with friends if I am asked about aspects related to my work. Second, space rather than community avoids the problematic issue of defining membership, and hence who belongs or not in a specific community, and by which defining criteria this is so. There are indeed different levels of participation and also self-identification in different spaces; I cycle, but I would not define myself as a cyclist, although others who cycle as much as I do might instead; I participate in a series of Facebook groups but I do not necessarily identify myself with them. Third, space frames more immediately the character of contemporary communication and our forms of participation in it; indeed we all participate in multiple spaces and, although this is acknowledged also for contemporary definitions of the concept of ‘community’ (e.g., the literature on communities of interest and communities of practice Wenger, 1998; Barton & Tusting, 2005), the term lends itself more easily to exclusivity and exclusionary inferences, in terms of either/or belonging. This is the case, for example, of national labels; so, being born in Italy and living in the UK, I would find it problematic to relate to labels such as ‘the Italian community’ and ‘the British community,’ while I can say that I have participated in and have some knowledge of semiotic practices taking place both in Italy and in the UK as national semiotic spaces (whatever that might mean, in terms of generalizations that I might activate), and I also have some familiarity with and access to online semiotic spaces such as Facebook groups that are participated by some Italians living in the UK. Finally, and possibly more importantly both epistemologically and pragmatically to research and practice in communication and translation, a focus on semiotic practices is both more feasible and more useful than a focus on people themselves. Indeed, practices can be observed, analyzed, understood and compared, both in research and in our own practice, to make informed choices on how to make our meanings and signs in the most apt ways. In the example of interlingual translation practice and training, observing semiotic practices in specific semiotic spaces (i.e., researching parallel corpora) can enable more evidence-based translation choices than any reference to any supposed ideas of the intended audience. 381

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In sum, texts and communicative events not only combine different modes, produced in different media and belonging to different genres in different domains but also occur in semiotic spaces that share specific semiotic practices. Transposing meaning across spaces (in the sense of changes in positioning, which inevitably involve changes in meaning) involves translation. Social media managers are well aware of this when re-designing the ‘same’ post for different social media spaces. I too, would have to reshape and reconfigure the meanings of this chapter if I had to talk about it with friends in a pub. Again, changes in semiotic spaces involve changes in modes, media, genres and/or domains. For what I propose as semiotic spaces, Translation Studies and practice tend to use the label of (source and target) audience and the even more problematic one of (source and target) culture, associated with different languages in interlingual translation contexts. Even when liberated of essentialized associations of nationality, and even when not simply referred to as named/national languages (as instead is often done in Translation Studies or at least teaching), culture presupposes sharedness among all members. Besides the thorny issue of defining membership mentioned earlier, this is problematic for two further reasons. First, if we conceive of texts as multimodal, the concept of a source and target culture would imply sharedness in form-meaning associations in all semiotic resources. Yet, as discussed by Adami and Ramos Pinto (2020), because of their different histories of social development and type of transnational circulation, we cannot assume that sharedness in a given language coincides with sharedness in gesture or image, for example. Semiotic resources such as music, gesture, image, clothing and architecture travel across linguistic borders and we make meaning with them and engage with them differently than language – for one, irrespectively of where they come from, we normally engage with them without anybody translating them for us, unlike language. This makes our meaning-making with them both potentially more transnationally shared (on the basis of hypotheses on their materiality) and more individualized, on the basis of the different semiotic spaces that each of us participates in (hence on our different experience of past uses of these resources) – consider the example of music or facial expressions, of clothing as well as ways of walking, and of entire lifestyles and associated semiotics (e.g., in gesturing, clothing, facial expressions, body movements and music of hip hop, how they circulate globally and yet in specific spaces, and how the meanings we make of these semiotic ensembles are both transnationally shared and individualized at the same time). In banal terms, we cannot speak of English-native semiotics vs Italian-native semiotics, because the use of different semiotic resources will not map onto meaning associations across the same English vs Italian borders. Secondly, the contemporary media landscape is characterized by a multiplication and fragmentation of semiotic spaces (consider, for example, the multiplicity of spaces offered by social media platforms today, compared to the very few handfuls of institutional media sources provided by national newspapers and TV channels of a few decades ago), and each of us participates in multiple ones, bringing with us knowledge of semiotic practices from the spaces we are familiar with. Hence an approach like the one sketched in the previous section is particularly useful in conceiving of signs being made every time rather than used, and meanings being made through hypotheses on materiality and past uses. In sum, instead of concepts of source and target culture, language and/or audience, which trigger conceptions of shared knowledge in all resources (and coinciding with national languages), it seems more realistic to work with concepts of source and target semiotic spaces. Semiotic knowledge will always vary to some extent between producer and audience; doctors around the world could read MRI scans, engineers could read circuit diagrams, and seafarers could read maritime maps, 382

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while they might not share the same language instead. At the same time, sharing the same language would not enable somebody without knowledge of these codified uses of image to read them. Translation across spaces in this sense would involve translating the meaning of an MRI scan to a patient, for example, that is, translation across non-sharedness in semiotic knowledge – which might most likely involve also translating meaning across modes, media and genres (e.g., from the image of the MRI scan to a speech+gaze+gesture multimodal complex, during a doctor-patient consultation). One last aspect to consider is the fact that, because people participate in multiple semiotic spaces, the same space is both characterized by emerging shared semiotic practices and participated by people having different semiotic knowledge and worldviews, or ideologies. For example, in a Facebook group, some semiotic practices will be shared (say, for example, whether to take things posted seriously or as a joke, or how to interpret intertextual references in relation to the theme of the group), while in the comments of any post participants might argue showing different values and attitudes, or mindsets toward the same topic. So, even in the same semiotic space, to find common ground and pursue understanding, one will have to ‘translate’ their meanings so that they speak to the other’s worldviews. Here too, to avoid essentialized and reified approaches in labeling worldviews, instead of using the concept of culture, I prefer the concept of discourse, following Scollon et al. (2012) who propose to reframe instances of intercultural communication as interdiscursive communication. Discourse in this case, in the Foucaultian tradition, refers to ‘big D’ Discourse in Gee (2004), as socially constructed knowledge of the world (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2001; Kress, 2010). As a banal example, immigration can be seen as a crisis or a need, as an invasion or as a resource, and so on for any aspect of life (consider for example how also in the same social media space people clash on different discourses about COVID-19 vaccination, with some seeing it as an act of collective and civic responsibility and others as a control strategy and an imposition to individual freedom). Any text contextualizes multiple intertwining discourses. Discourses are realized through modes, produced through media, in texts of different genres, in specific domains and in semiotic spaces. Making signs and meanings in different modes, media, genres, domains and semiotic spaces involves translation across discourses, to respond to the different worldviews of these spaces and then, in interaction, also to the possibly different worldviews of the participants within the same space.

Conclusions: Dimensions of translation processes Texts combine multiple modes, and take place through media, as instantiations of genres in specific domains and semiotic spaces, characterized by emerging, dynamic and relational sharedness in practices and knowledge, and differently shared discourses. As a consequence, the variables for what we consider translation processes and needs multiply compared to when one considers only interlingual translation. Any form of meaning re-making involves some changes in (aspects of ) mode, media, genre, domain, semiotic space and/or discourse. It all requires translation. While we are all familiar with Jakobson’s tripartite categorization of translation as intersemiotic, interlingual and intralingual ( Jakobson, 1959), it becomes apparent from the above that this taxonomy is not sufficient to consider all the dimensions that come into play whenever meaning is re-made. Given the aspects that are always involved in any instance of meaning-making, i.e., Mode, Media, Genre, Domain, Semiotic Space and Discourse, a translation process is in place whenever resemiotization (i.e., the remaking 383

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of meaning in social practice) crosses any of them. So we can consider the following dimensions of translation: Intramode and intermode: if meaning is re-made in the same mode or into a different mode; Intramedia and intermedia: if meaning is re-made in the same media or into a different media; Intragenre and intergenre: if meaning is re-made in the same genre or into a different genre; Intradomain and interdomain: if meaning is re-made in the same domain or into a different domain; Intraspace and interspace: if meaning is re-made in the same semiotic space or into a different semiotic space; Intradiscourse and interdiscourse: if meaning is re-made in the same discourse or into a ­different discourse. All these dimensions come into play in communication if we conceive of a text as the punctuation of a ceaseless process of semiosis as resemiotization. Furthermore, intra- and intermight not be mutually exclusive. This is the case, for example, for the ‘modal’ dimension, given the multimodal nature of our text production; so, within the translation of or into the same text, some meanings might be translated in the same mode, and others in a different one. The same is for the discourse dimension, as some worldviews entextualised in a text might be shared and others might not. In sum, following Marais’ (2019) stress for the need of conceiving translation as a process, to counterbalance a research tradition too focused on the products of translation, these dimensions do not define translation as product, but rather identify dimensions of the translation process, which might (most likely often) intertwine together in a translation product i.e., a text or communicative event as the punctuation of a ceaseless process of resemiotization. One could ask at this point about the place of interlingual translation in this. The remaking of meaning into a different language is intramodal and interspace, as it deals with re-making meaning in the same mode (if it is always in writing) for a space that has different form-meaning associations (or semiotic knowledge) in that mode (this of course does not mean that semiotic spaces are necessarily monolingual, only that interlingual translation is translation made for a space that has different practices in terms of named languages used). It might be intermodal if meaning is re-made from writing to speech or sign language, and might always involve interdiscourse aspects too (as in the very well-known phenomenon of handling cultural references in interlingual translation practice), in the same or different media, genres and domains. Assessing the translation process involved in which of these dimensions is useful when approaching also translations as products in the current interlingual translation practice. For example, when translating an audiovisual text, like an anime, it might be useful to consider the semiotic knowledge in each mode for the ‘target’ semiotic space as some uses of resources of image might be shared (given that anime circulate in transnational semiotic spaces), while language might not. *** Whenever we make meaning of something, we translate – or better, some translation process takes place to relate that reality to our personal (and socially-acquired) universe of reference. The process might be more visible when we face a reality that stands out as ‘new’ for us (something we have not seen, heard, touched, tasted, smelled before, or more generally encountered and experienced before) or as ‘unexpected’ in the way it appears in some context 384

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(something that, in its form, we know, but if we apply to it the meaning association that we are familiar with, the ‘sign’ does not quite make sense in that context, as when, for example, our neighbor turns their back at us when we encounter them on the stairway leading to our flat and we ask ourselves what that might mean). Yet, although more frequently unnoticed, some translation process occurs every time we make meaning, even when faced with apparently more familiar realities or sign complexes. Translating is about establishing some new relations – i.e., making new meaning – for us and/or for others. It is a key process of all communication in that, by definition, every instance of communication presents something new to its addressee, or – quite simply – there would be no purpose in communicating at all (see in this regard Lotman, 2009, in his assumption that human communication presupposes non-identity between ‘producer’ and ‘receiver’). Far from a mere application of pre-given coding-decoding rules or pre-fixed systems of equivalence, making meaning (and translation as part of it) is about making hypotheses on what a certain form could mean for the other and for us. A Social Semiotic perspective on communication and translation, as sign- and meaning-making and re-making as hypotheses making seems more suitable to handle the complexity of the contemporary semiotic landscape. Conceiving translation along the dimensions of modes, media, genres, domains, semiotic spaces and discourses could be useful also in rethinking the possible social role of translators today, beyond the strict domain of interlingual practices (increasingly challenged in its scope). Translators as ‘expert’ meaning re-makers, as mediators of meanings in all forms could become key figures for positive change, in societies that are traversed by a multitude of different semiotic practices and increasingly divided in worldviews (or discourses), in spite of speaking the same (national) language.

Notes 1 I follow the works on translanguaging in using the label ‘named language’ to signal the socially constructed nature of what we traditionally conceive of ‘national languages,’ whose boundaries are defined politically rather than by intrinsic language properties or actual speakers’ linguistic practices – see in this regard, e.g., Otheguy et al. (2015). 2 There is no explicit distinctions between ‘sign-making’ and ‘meaning-making’ in works that use a social semiotic approach and the terms are often used interchangeably. I instead (Adami, 2023) find it useful to distinguish between‘sign-making’ and ‘meaning-making’ in what Kress (2010) mentions respectively as meaning made ‘outwardly’ (when expressing something, by making signs through the use of forms) and as meaning made ‘inwardly’ (when interpreting something, by giving a meaning to a form produced by others or present in our environment). In both cases new signs are made, either outwardly, through expression, or inwardly, through interpretation – so in some sense, we are making meaning and making signs in both cases. However, the two labels of sign-making and meaning-making, and consequently of sign-maker and meaning-maker, to distinguish between the two cases and roles is useful as a heuristic, to avoid reductionist binaries such as ’production vs reception’ (as there is always production of form-meaning associations, also in interpretation), and to respond to the need to distinguish between outward and inward processes and roles in communication. 3 Or more precisely, the Saussurean structuralist tradition, given that, from unpublished writings (Saussure, 2005), Saussure seemed much less focused on langue and more concerned with social aspects than his pupils transcribed in his Cours (Saussure, 1916) and his followers interpreted thereafter. 4 The stages of design, production and distribution can be separate (i.e., taking place at different times, carried out by different people, and/or different media) or coincide – so for example, speech in a face-to-face conversation is not pre-designed, while production and distribution coincide both in media and in the speaker. For a detailed discussion see Kress and van Leeuwen (2001) who devote a chapter for each stage with a specific discussion of how modes and media intertwine in each and how meanings change upon changes of modes and media in each stage and across stages. 385

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20 Intermedial approaches Lars Elleström

Introduction For many people, laypersons as well as scholars, translation is virtually synonymous with translation of verbal languages to other verbal languages, such as translating a legal document from English to Hindi. However, advocating Charles Sanders Peirce’s semiotic thinking, Dinda L. Gorlée has long argued that translation should be seen as ‘a phenomenon which, at least on an abstract level, may be dealt with more fruitfully in the framework of a general theory of signs than with research methods – semiotic or otherwise – which are language-based’ (Gorlée, 1994, p. 11). Although several researchers have connected the issue of translation with various semiotic frameworks during the decades following this remark, Kobus Marais (2019), who also explores the potential of Peirce’s semiotics, only recently criticized translation studies for still confining itself to interlingual translation. It is also my own opinion that research on translation and neighboring areas, including studies confined to language-related translation, profits from a broad contextualization including a variety of communicative forms. However, a non-linguistic semiotic framework for translation studies is not enough if it builds on ‘disembodied’ or ‘dematerialized’ semiotics. Instead, one should ask how translations are materialized and thus made available to communicating bodies and minds interacting in social contexts (Elleström, 2018). I hence argue that if one wants to be able to analyze translation not only in an abstract manner but also as concrete processes involving people using their bodies and sense faculties in communicating with each other, one must scrutinize the issue of mediality. Otherwise, crucial factors in translational processes remain inaccessible. A central part of examining meaning-making in communication is to explore how physical objects and phenomena act as intermediate entities that interconnect producing and perceiving minds. When going into depth with the issue of mediality, one soon realizes that there is an abundance of very different media types – forms of communicative tools. Whereas many of these media types do not involve language at all, others include various forms of languages, and sometimes verbal languages, to some extent. Translations within or among media types, including or excluding language elements, are exceedingly diverse and only a few of them have been researched. To disentangle some of these complexities in the area of mediality, DOI: 10.4324/9781003161448-24

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one needs a multitude of interrelated concepts. Whereas some of the notions that I present in this chapter are merely variants of familiar ideas within the humanities, others add some novelty. They are all thoroughly interrelated and offer ways of discerning detailed similarities and differences among communicative media in general. Thus, when I depart from standard terminology, my aim is always to make intermedial comparisons and analyses more efficient and to the point. This requires conceptual adjustments, because many concepts used in various disciplines, including translation studies, are unsuited or downright misleading – too media-specific – for work with the whole area of communicative media far beyond language-based media types. One central aim of intermediality studies is to conceptualize a broad area of translational phenomena, including transmedial processes that are more rarely called translation. Therefore, I propose a conceptual framework for studying ‘media translation’ and ‘media transformation.’ I do not use the term ‘translation’ in the broad (sometimes Peircean) way that includes the idea of the interpretation of signs outside of communication and of signs in single media. As I define it, all signification involves interpretation – the creation of interpretants in the mind. Translation and transformation more specifically involve relations between several interpretations evolving from at least two different signification processes emanating from several media that are understood to be interrelated. The present chapter is methodically structured with stepwise introductions of a range of concepts that prepare the ground for final discussions of the proper subject: translation. Only after extensive sections devoted to human communication at large, several interrelated concepts of mediality and my core idea of media modalities help to reemerge the concept of translation. When it does, it is in company with several other concepts that might be unfamiliar to many translation scholars, in relation to which translation can be simultaneously relativized and specified.

Human communication Cognitive import The most general framework for my conceptualization of translation is human communication. I use the term ‘cognitive import’ to refer to those mental configurations that are the output and input of communication (one should thus not here understand ‘import’ in contrast to ‘export’). The notion that I want to suggest using this term is clearly closely related to notions captured by terms such as ‘meaning,’ ‘significance’ and ‘ideas.’ However, the term ‘cognitive import’ is perhaps less burdened with certain notions that a term such as ‘meaning’ seems to have difficulties getting rid of; meaning is often understood to be a rather rigid concept of verbal, firm, definable or even logical sense. Instead, the cognitive import should be understood as a broad notion including also vague, fragmentary, undeveloped, intuitive, ambiguous, non-conceptual and pragmatically oriented meaning that is relevant to a wide range of media types and communicative situations. It is imperative to emphasize that although cognitive import is always a result of mind work, cognition is embodied and not always possible to articulate using language; hence, according to my proposed model, one cannot reduce communication to simply communication of verbal or verbalizable significance. My suggestion is to use the terms ‘producer’s mind’ and ‘perceiver’s mind’ to refer to the mental places in which cognitive import appears; first, there are certain mental configurations in the producer’s mind and then, following the communicative transfer, there are mental configurations in the perceiver’s mind that are at least remotely similar to those in 390

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the producer’s mind. ‘Cognition’ is understood as those mental processes that are involved in gaining knowledge and comprehension, including, among other higher-level functions of the brain, thinking, remembering, problem solving, planning and judging. However, even though the mind and its cognition are founded on cerebral processes, mental activities are in no way separated from the rest of the body. On the contrary, I subscribe to the idea that the mind is profoundly embodied – formed by experiences of corporeality and bodily interactions with the surrounding world ( Johnson, 1987).

Media products I furthermore propose to use the term ‘media product’ to refer to the intermediate stage that enables the transfer of cognitive import from a producer’s to a perceiver’s mind. This is close to what Irina Rajewsky has called a ‘medial configuration’ (2010) (she earlier used also the term ‘media product’ but described it only briefly as ‘a text, a film, etc.’ [Rajewsky, 2005, p. 51]). As the bodies of these two minds may well be used as instruments for the transfer of cognitive import, they have the potential to attain the function of media products. I propose that a media product may be realized by either non-bodily or bodily matter (including matter emanating directly from a body), or a combination of these. This means that the producer’s mind may, for instance, use either non-bodily matter (say, paper) or her own body and its immediate extensions (moving arms and sound produced by the vocal cords) to realize media products such as printed texts, gestures and speech. Furthermore, the perceiver’s body may be used to accomplish media products; for instance, the producer may realize a painting on the perceiver’s skin or push her gently to communicate the desire that she moves a bit. Additionally, other bodies, such as the bodies of actors, may be used as media products. In contrast to an influential scholar such as Marshall McLuhan, who very broadly conceptualized media as the ‘extensions of man’ in general (McLuhan, 1994 [1964]), I thus define media products as ‘extensions of mind’ in the context of inter-human communication, again emphasizing the embodied nature of mind. Thereby, I avoid the classical distinction in communication studies between mediated and interpersonal communication – communication that needs and communication that supposedly does not need mediation. This distinction has been criticized because of practical difficulties in upholding it (see Rice, 2017); I furthermore avoid it because of the theoretical and more profound obstacle of thinking about interpersonal communication as not being mediated. I find it quite absurd to consider interpersonal communication independent of media capacities and media limitations. The only thing that justifies such a distinction is that interpersonal communication is entirely dependent on specific (but not fundamentally different) forms of media products, namely those that rely on the producer’s and perceiver’s human bodies and their immediate extensions instead of external devices. Since being a media product should be understood as a function rather than an essential property, virtually any material existence can be used as one, including not only solid objects but all kinds of physical phenomena that can be perceived by the human senses. In addition to those forms of media products that are more commonly categorized as such (written texts, songs, scientific diagrams, warning cries, road signs, etc.), there is an endless row of forms of physical objects, phenomena and actions that can function as media products given that they are perceived in situations and surroundings that encourage interpretation in terms of communication. These include nudges, blinks, coughs, meals, ceremonies, decorations, clothes, hairstyles and make-up. In addition, dogs, wine bottles and cars of certain breeds, brands and designs may well function as media products to communicate the embracing of certain 391

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values or simply wealth, for instance. Within the framework of a trial, both the footage from surveillance cameras and spoken word from witnesses function as media products as well as fingerprints, DNA samples and blood stains presented by the prosecutor.

Technical media of display At this stage of the account, it may be helpful to introduce a delicate but sometimes vital distinction between media products and technical media of display. I have stated that media products are physical entities or processes that are necessary for communication in that they interconnect minds. To be more precise, one must additionally emphasize that being a media product is a function that requires some sort of perceptible physical phenomenon to come into existence. I call these physical items or occurrences technical media of display (cf. Jürgen E. Müller’s distinction between ‘technical conditions’ and ‘media products’ [1996, p. 23; see also pp. 81–82]). I choose the term ‘technical’ to attach to one of the meanings of the Greek word téchnē: practical skill and the methods employed in producing something. Technical media of display should thus be understood as entities that realize media products; they distribute sensory configurations with communicative function. Hence, a technical medium of the display is any object, physical phenomenon or body that mediates sensory configurations in the context of communication; it realizes and displays the entities that we construe as media products. Technical media of display are those perceptible physical items and processes that, when used in communicative contexts, acquire the function of media products. Strictly, that means that when the same physical items and processes are not used in some communicative context, they are not technical media of display. Technical media of display exist in very diverse forms. I have already suggested that media products may be realized by either non-bodily or bodily matter. From the perspective of the producer’s mind, situated in a human body, this means that there are external technical media (extra-bodily materialities such as clay, screens, ink on paper, sound waves from loudspeakers or just about anything chosen from the surroundings – including other bodies) and there are internal technical media (the producer’s body in its entirety, parts of it or physical phenomena emanating directly from it, such as a voice). All forms of external and internal technical media may be combined with each other in countless ways. Regarding external technical media of display, it must be noted that any perceptible physicality may be used in the function of a media product. Stones or tree branches lying on the ground are only stones and branches. However, if they are picked up and used to intimidate somebody else (to communicate threat) or to manufacture sculptures (to communicate something aesthetic) they become technical media of display – physical entities with the communicative function of being media products.

Presemiotic mediation and semiotic representation As the complex process of transfer of cognitive import from a producer’s to a perceiver’s mind involves both material and mental aspects, I find it helpful to observe that there are two profoundly interrelated but nevertheless discernible basic facets of the communicative process: mediation and representation. Mediation is the display of sensory configurations by the technical medium (and hence also by the media product) that are perceived by human sense receptors in a communicative situation. It is a presemiotic phenomenon: the physical realization of entities with material, spatiotemporal and sensorial qualities – and semiotic potential. For instance, one may hear some sounds. Representation is a semiotic phenomenon that one 392

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should understand as the core of signification, which is delimited in this research to how humans create cognitive import in communication. When a perceiver’s mind forms a sense of the mediated sensory configurations, sign functions are activated and representation is at work – always accompanied by interpretation. For instance, one may interpret the heard sound as a voice uttering meaningful words. To say that a media product represents something is to say, in general terms, that it leads to a certain type of interpretation. This interpretation may be more or less hardwired in the media product and the manner in which one perceives it with one’s senses, but it never exists independently of the cognitive activity in the perceiver’s mind. When something represents, it calls forth something else; the representing entity makes something else – the represented – present in the mind. As already noted, this is to say, in terms of Charles Sanders Peirce’s foundational notions, that a sign or representamen stands for an object. Peirce’s third sign constituent, the interpretant, may be understood as the mental result of the representamen–object relation (see for instance, 1932: CP 2.228–229 [c. 1897]). As stated earlier, my notion of cognitive import created in the perceiver’s mind in communication can be understood as an instance of Peirce’s notion of interpretant – and, as earlier emphasized, the concept of interpretation has everything to do with the semiotic idea of interpretants in signification. My current emphasis is on the notion that both a presemiotic and a semiotic side exist in basic encounters with media. Whereas the concept of mediation highlights the material realization of the media product, made possible by a technical medium of display, the concept of representation highlights the semiotic conception of the medium. Although mediation and representation are clearly entangled in complex ways, upholding a theoretical distinction between them is helpful for analyzing complex communicative relations and processes. However, in practice, mediation and representation are deeply interrelated. Every representation is based on the distinctiveness of a specific mediation. Furthermore, some types of mediation facilitate certain types of representation and render other types of representation impossible; different kinds of mediation have different kinds of semiotic potential. As an obvious case in point, vibrating air emerging from the vocal cords and lips that one perceives as sound but not as words is well suited for the iconic representation of bird song, whereas such sounds cannot possibly form a detailed, three-dimensional iconic representation of a cathedral. However, distinctive differences among mediations are frequently subtler and less easily spotted without close and systematic examination.

Media modalities and media types Four categories Having described media products in relation to other communicative entities, I will now circumscribe their own properties. Because differences in these properties are crucial for the outcome of media translations and media transformations, they need to be properly investigated. I propose to think in terms of media modalities – types of media traits. The modalities are the indispensable cornerstones of all forms of media and together they build a medial complex integrating physicality, perception and cognition. Separately, these modalities constitute complex fields of research and they are crucial in efforts to describe the character of every single media product. They are all familiar for research although one has not systematically accounted for their interrelations. I call them the material modality, the spatiotemporal modality, the sensorial modality and the semiotic modality, and one finds them on a scale ranging from the material to the mental. The first three modalities are presemiotic 393

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and concern mediation. The semiotic modality concerns representation or more broadly signification: how the mediated sensory configurations come to represent cognitive import in the perceiver’s mind. Media are constantly described and defined based on one or more of these modalities. However, this is not sufficient, because all media are necessarily realized in the form of all four modalities. I therefore argue that one must consider all four of them. In this respect, there is a fundamental difference between my approach and the systematic, often hierarchic but simplistic classifications and divisions of the arts, the aesthetic media types, which were put forward from the eighteenth century and well into the twentieth century (see Munro, 1969, pp. 157–208). Nevertheless, the roots of thinking in terms of media traits are old. Various ideas have been put forward by scholars such as Moses Mendelssohn (1997 [1757]), Roman Jakobson (1971 [1964], 1971 [1967], 1971 [1968]), Jiří Veltruský (1981), W. J. T. Mitchell (1987), Helen C. Purchase (1999) and Eli Rozik (2010). In 2010, I published the first version of the article ‘The modalities of media’ (Elleström, 2010), followed by a modified and substantially expanded version a decade later (Elleström, 2020). In this piece, I introduced a distinction between two levels to facilitate and sharpen methodical descriptions and analyses of media products. On one hand, there are the types of traits that are common for all media products, without exception, and on the other hand, there are the specific traits of particular media products or types of media products. To make the distinction transparent, I call the former modalities and the latter modes. In brief, then, media modalities are categories of basic media traits, and media modality modes (or simply media modes or modality modes) are basic media traits. I have argued that there are four media modalities; four types of basic media modes. For something to acquire the function of a media product, it must necessarily be material in some way, understood as a physical matter or phenomenon. Such a physical existence must necessarily be present in either space, time or both to exist; it needs to have some sort of spatiotemporal extension. It must furthermore necessarily be perceptible to at least one of our senses, which is to say that a media product needs to be sensorial. Finally, it must necessarily create meaning through signs; it requires being semiotic. This adds up to the material, spatiotemporal, sensorial and semiotic modalities. It follows from the definition of a media product as the intermediate stage that enables the transfer of cognitive import from a producer’s to a perceiver’s mind that no media products or media types can exist unless they have at least one mode of each modality. One should understand the modalities as categories of related media modes that are basic in the sense that all media products have traits belonging to all four modalities. All media products appear as specific combinations of particular modes of the four media modalities. A certain media product must be realized through at least one material mode (as, say, a solid or non-solid object), at least one spatiotemporal mode (as three- dimensionally spatial or temporal, or both), at least one sensorial mode (as, for instance, visual, auditory or audiovisual) and at least one semiotic mode (as mainly iconic, indexical or symbolic). Hence, the four media modalities form an indispensable skeleton on which all media products are built. Thus, when I mention modalities, I thus mean the four necessary categories of media traits ranging from the material to the mental, and when I mention modes, I mean the specific media traits categorized in modalities. I do not define entities such as ‘text,’ ‘music,’ ‘gesture’ or ‘image’ as modalities or modes (which most multimodality scholars do). As emphasized, three of the four modalities are presemiotic, which means that they cover media modes that are involved in signification – the creation of cognitive import in the 394

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perceiver’s mind – although they are not semiotic qualities in themselves. The material, spatiotemporal and sensorial modalities are thus not asemiotic; they are presemiotic, meaning that the modes that they cover are bound to become part of the semiotic as soon as the communication is established. The presemiotic media modes concern the fundamentals of mediation, which is to say that they are necessary conditions for any media product to be realized in the outer world by a technical medium of display and hence for any communication to be brought about. All four modalities obviously strongly depend on each other – just as the modes may be entangled with each other in several ways, depending on the character of the media product. With the aid of this theoretical framework, one can pinpoint basic media differences as well as media similarities. One can highlight crucial divergences and fundamental parallels among all conceivable sorts of media forms – existing and yet to be devised – which gives a firm ground for understanding, describing and interpreting the most elementary media interrelations. I can here only hint at the complexity of the innumerable interrelations that one can derive from the four modalities and their modes.

Two types of media types In my considerations of media products, I have already touched upon the fact that they are often categorized. This is also a phenomenon that must be dealt with briefly because not only individual media products but also media types are involved in transmedial processes – media translations and media transformations. I find it helpful to work with the two complementary notions of basic media types and qualified media types – two types of media types. Sometimes one mainly pays attention to the most basic features of media products and classifies them according to their most salient material, spatiotemporal, sensorial and semiotic properties. One thinks, for instance, in terms of still images (most often understood as tangible, flat, static, visual and iconic media products). This is what I call a basic medium (a basic type of media product) and it is relatively solid because of its perennial fundamental traits. Basic media types are categories of media products grounded on basic media modality modes. However, such a basic classification is sometimes not enough to capture more specific media properties. What one does then is to qualify the definition of the media type that one is after and add criteria that lie beyond the basic media modalities; one also includes all kinds of aspects on how the media products are produced, situated, used and evaluated in the world. One tends to talk about a media type as something that has certain functions or begins to be used in a certain way at a certain time and in a certain cultural and social context. Qualified media types are simply categories of media products grounded not only on basic media modality modes but further qualified. For instance, one may want to delimit the focus to still images that are handmade by very young persons – children’s drawings. This is what I call a qualified medium (a qualified type of media product) and it is less definitive than the basic medium of the still image simply because the added specific criteria are vaguer than those captured by the media modalities. It may be difficult to agree upon what a handmade drawing actually is: should drawings made on computers or scribblings on the wall be included? And when is a child not a child any longer but rather a young adult? The notion of childhood varies significantly among cultures and changes over time, not to mention individual differences in maturity. The limits of qualified media are thus bound to be ambivalent, debated and changed much more than the limits of basic media. 395

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Media interrelations Intramediality and intermediality Given that media types are of various sorts and have different degrees of stability, and that they furthermore may include a broad variety of languages – communicative symbol systems – it follows that media interrelations, including transmedial processes, are multifaceted. Therefore, it can be helpful with some elementary divisions regarding the general nature of media interrelations. I first postulate that mediality is everything pertaining to media in communication. Intramediality concerns all types of relations among similar media types, and intermediality involves all types of relations among dissimilar media types. The term ‘intramedial’ is commonly used to refer to slightly different conceptions depending on how the notion of medium is circumscribed (see, for instance, Rajewsky, 2002, p. 12). This is the case also for ‘intermedial.’ I here follow the distinctions that I have recently expounded and suggest that media relations can be intramedial in a narrow and in a broad sense. Intramediality in a narrow sense regards relations among (media products belonging to) similar basic and similar qualified media types, such as between different television commercials. Intramediality in a broad sense regards relations among (media products belonging to) similar basic but dissimilar qualified media types or similar qualified but dissimilar basic media types. Likewise, I suggest that media relations can be intermedial in a narrow and in a broad sense. Intermediality in a narrow sense regards relations among (media products belonging to) dissimilar basic and dissimilar qualified media types, such as between television commercials and radio news. Intermediality in a broad sense regards relations among (media products belonging to) dissimilar basic but similar qualified media types or dissimilar qualified but similar basic media types. Thinking of intramedial and intermedial relations in a narrow and a broad sense is useful for disentangling the intricate notion of crossing media borders. However, whereas the two notions of narrow intramediality and narrow intermediality are mutually exclusive, with a border zone between them, the two notions of broad intramediality and broad intermediality overlap and cover common ground. Another option is to divide the field of media relations into semi-narrow intramediality and semi-narrow intramediality. Semi-narrow intramediality would thus simply include all media relations involving similar basic media and seminarrow intermediality would include all media relations involving dissimilar basic media – in both cases disregarding the qualified media aspects. Intermedial relations in a semi-narrow sense – relations among dissimilar basic media types – are relations among media types based on different media modes. This involves transgressing relatively strong media borders when moving between them. Intermedial relations in a broad sense, on the other hand, include cases where no differences in modality modes are present – only qualified media differences. Several qualified media types are based on the same modality modes; consequently, they belong to the same basic media type and their interrelations are intermedial only in a broad sense. This involves transgressing relatively weak media borders when moving between them. The two media types, for instance, written poetry and scholarly article, are clearly qualified in different ways, although they are both typically understood to consist of visual, static and mainly symbolic signs on a flat and generally solid surface. Whereas the interrelation between written poetry and scholarly article is intermedial in a broad sense, it is not intermedial in a narrow sense. One can quite seamlessly incorporate sections of poetry in scholarly articles (and vice versa) without modifying modality modes. 396

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Intermedial relations in a semi-narrow sense are thus largely a question of ‘finding’ or identifying media borders between dissimilar basic media types. Intermedial relations in a broad sense are often rather a question about ‘inventing’ or construing media borders between dissimilar qualified media types based on similar basic media types. As the mechanisms for classifying media products into media types are anything but clear-cut, it is in reality often not evident how to apply this seemingly straightforward distinction between different forms of media interrelations. However, the division of intermedial relations into narrower and broader senses offers a methodical way of considering the intricate nature of intermediality and identifying the many different ways in which media can differ.

Heteromediality and transmediality Media interrelations are multifaceted and apart from the views presented so far, I now want to add another viewpoint on media interrelations to be placed on top of the ones already discussed. I suggest distinguishing between a synchronic and a diachronic perspective on media interrelations. Having a synchronic perspective means considering how media features appear at a certain moment. Having a diachronic perspective means considering how media features appear in relation to preceding and possibly subsequent media. Evidently, these two perspectives are analytical outlooks; I do not suggest categorizing media products. One can investigate all media products from both a synchronic and a diachronic perspective. Without a doubt, certain media products are remarkably apt for diachronic analysis; however, no media products exist that cannot be treated in terms of diachronicity without some profit. I propose calling the synchronic perspective on media interrelations heteromediality. With references to Mitchell (1994) and Elleström (2010), Jørgen Bruhn has defined heteromediality as ‘the multimodal character of all media and, consequently, the a priori mixed character of all conceivable texts’ (Bruhn, 2010, p. 229). I think this is an apt description of how media exist from a synchronic perspective. For me, the term ‘heteromediality’ thus refers to the general concept that all media products and media types, having partly similar and partly dissimilar basic presemiotic modes, overlap and can be described in terms of amalgamation of material properties and abilities for activating mental capacities that can be understood as various sign functions. This implies that one can properly understand media products and media types only in relation to each other. In my view, heteromediality, the synchronic perspective on media interrelations, is equally relevant for intra- and intermedial relations. It is the fundamental condition for mediality as such. I furthermore propose calling the diachronic perspective on media interrelations transmediality. Transmediality has been widely discussed and defined in various but fairly consistent ways. For instance, Irina Rajewsky circumscribed transmediality in terms of phenomena that are not media specific, such as parody (Rajewsky, 2002). I here put forward a very broad delineation of transmediality to match the comprehensive concept of heteromediality. For me, the term ‘transmediality’ thus refers to the general concept that media products and media types to some extent can represent the same or at least similar objects (in Peirce’s sense of the notion); in other words, they may communicate comparable things. This means that there may be transfers in time among media. Transmediality involves potential or actual processes among different media. Even though multitudes of more or less different media products and media types are used, communication can be grasped as a succession of interconnected representations, intrinsically interwoven with interpretants. Hence, in addition to the transfer of cognitive import among minds, the core of communication, we also have the even more complex phenomenon of transfer of cognitive import 397

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among media – that is, the transfer of cognitive import among entities that themselves already involve the transfer of cognitive import among minds. This is where phenomena and practices of translation belong according to my understanding. Clearly, one cannot properly grasp transmediality, the diachronic perspective on media interrelations, without profoundly comprehending heteromediality, the synchronic perspective on media interrelations. As heteromediality, transmediality is relevant for intra- as well as intermedial relations. However, because of the complicated nature of media differences, I give more attention to transmediality in intermedial relations. In these discussions, intermediality means interrelations involving dissimilar basic media types (intermediality in a semi-narrow sense) and to match this intramediality means interrelations involving similar basic media types (intramediality in a semi-narrow sense). I focus specifically on the role of media modalities.

Media integration, media transformation and media translation Heteromediality concerns combination and integration of media products and basic or qualified media types. How can one understand, analyze and compare media in terms of the combination and integration of modality modes and qualifying aspects? This viewpoint emphasizes an understanding of media as coexisting modality modes, media products and media types. Therefore, one may also call (intramedial and intermedial) heteromediality media integration. It is imperative to keep an emphasis on both the notion of combination and the notion of integration, stressing that sharing and combining media properties always entails integrating them to some degree. That is why I refer to heteromediality also as media integration. Compared to other scholars, I more strongly emphasize that there is a floating scale between combination and integration and avoid stricter divisions. The core of heteromediality consists of the multimodal character of media products, as explained in some detail in the earlier sections of this chapter. Every single media product is made of a combination and integration of media modality modes, generally including several modes from at least some of the modalities. Consequently, it is fair to say that media products consisting of many different modes are integrated or even mixed already as single media products, as Mitchell emphasized (1994). However, it is vital to note that media types are modally mixed or integrated into very different ways, allowing different kinds of media integrations with other media types composed of dissimilar modal mixtures. These differences are also crucial for understanding transmediality. Intermedial transmediality concerns transfer and transformation of media products and basic or qualified media types. How can one adequately comprehend and describe the transfer and transformation of cognitive import among dissimilar basic media types? This viewpoint emphasizes an understanding of media involving temporal gaps among modality modes, media products and media types – either actual gaps in terms of different times of genesis or gaps in the sense that the perceiver construes the import of a medium based on previously known media. Because basic media differences bring about inevitable transformations, one may also call intermedial transmediality media transformation. Intramedial transmediality concerns transfer and translation of media products and basic or qualified media types and concerns the transfer and translation of cognitive import over temporal gaps among similar basic media types. I use the term ‘translation’ to adhere to the common idea that translation involves the transfer of cognitive import among similar basic media types, such as translating from a medium containing one written verbal language to another similar medium containing another written verbal language – for instance from Chinese to English. Therefore, one may broadly refer to intramedial transmediality as media translation. 398

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The difference in terminology is not intended to mark a definite separation between translation and transformation. Considering their etymologies, both terms are apt for representing the phenomena that are scrutinized in this chapter. Apart from more narrowly meaning to turn from one language to another, ‘to translate’ has Latin roots and means ‘to remove from one place to another,’ ‘to carry over.’ Also stemming from Latin, ‘to transform’ means ‘to change the form of ’; ‘to metamorphose.’ Both terms refer to processes with ‘trans’ as the common denominator, meaning ‘across’ and ‘beyond.’ Clearly, both media translation and media transformation involve aspects of translation as well as transformation. However, because of inherent media differences in what I circumscribe as media transformation, the transfers in media transformations tend to be even more transformatory than in media translation. One can thus conclude that there is simply a difference in degrees between the two. Depending on research perspectives and levels of observation, this difference may be relevant or not. Kobus Marais, for instance, whose conceptualizations aim at grasping semiosis beyond human communication, prefers to use the unifying term ‘translation’ to be able to catch similarities on a very large scale (Marais, 2019). In contrast to such a wide scope, my perspective is somewhat more specific; because I want to be able to mark what I think is a relevant difference in media traits within human communication, I choose a different terminological solution, which does not imply in itself any conceptual conflicts.

Transmediality Source and target media In the remaining sections of this chapter, I will focus on transmediality and explore its features in some detail. In this investigation, I will frequently discuss in terms of source and target media products and media types. ‘Source’ and ‘target’ implies that there is a temporal gap between them. Yet, source media and target media are tied together through some perceived similarity. As in all semiosis, the signs that emerge in what one construes as the source and target media are inscribed in chains of signification. Furthermore, they are not in any way fixed entities. Being a source or target medium is an interpretive function within a communicative process. Whereas all media products are media products not because of some definite inherent qualities, but because of an acquired function of interconnecting minds, some media products gain also more specific functions – such as interconnecting media over temporal gaps. Thus, source media and target media should be understood as instances of ‘before’ and ‘after’ in chains of communication; the concepts work as analytical snapshots of essential links in the greater chains of signification. This implies that media that are perceived as targets in relation to some sources may simultaneously be perceived as sources in relation to other targets. This is perfectly in line with how Kobus Marais circumscribes ‘incipient and subsequent sign systems,’ except for the obvious difference that I conceptualize the phenomenon more specifically in terms of ‘media products’ and ‘media types’ and Marais more generally in terms of ‘sign systems’ (a term that I reserve for more narrowly denoting languages; symbol systems): the semiotic system that is, for any particular observation, chosen as ‘source’ is incipient for that observation only […] the incipient sign system is itself part of a process. Neither is the ‘target’ the end of the process, but just a subsequent sign system in a larger process. In another process, the subsequent sign system could become an incipient sign system 399

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for another translation. It is important to remember that both incipient and subsequent sign systems are recognizable trajectories or habits or forms in processes – they are not stable things. (Marais, 2019, pp. 123–124)

Transmediation and media representation To facilitate a detailed analysis of transmediality I distinguish between transmediation (repeated representation of cognitive import, such as a children’s book that tells the same story as a computer game) and media representation (representation of another medium, such as a review that describes the performance of a piece of music). Compared to other scholars who have employed the term ‘transmediation’ in relation to education (Suhor, 1984; Siegel, 1995), I use it to denote a radically broader concept relevant to all communication. The distinction between transmediation and media representation, two diverse but often coexisting semiotic phenomena, is aided by but very different from the fundamental distinction between mediation and representation that has already been presented and discussed in this study. As noted, I use the term ‘mediate’ to describe the course of a technical medium displaying presemiotic (potentially meaningful) sensory configurations. For instance, a sheet of paper is able to mediate visual sensory configurations that are (once perceived and rudimentarily interpreted) taken to be media products such as drawings, installation instructions or musical scores. If equivalent sensory configurations (sensory configurations that have the capacity to trigger corresponding representations) are mediated for a second (or third or fourth) time by another technical medium of display, transmediation occurs: the musical score on the paper is later heard when it is transmediated by voices and instruments. In other words, the score’s vital characteristics are represented again by other sensory configurations (not visual but auditory representamens) mediated by other technical media of display (not a sheet of paper emitting photons but sound waves generated by vocal cords and musical instruments). Media representation, on the other hand, should be understood as media products representing other media products, such as a drawing on a sheet of paper representing gestures or paintings. The notion of media products representing other media products is obviously one particular instance of representation in communication at large. Media products can represent virtually anything. The reason for highlighting media representing other media is that doing so is part of the diachronic perspective on media interrelations; the representation of media by other media is a kind of transfer of cognitive import among media. Whereas transmediation is about ‘picking out’ elements from a medium and using them in a new way in another medium, media representation is about ‘pointing to’ a medium from the viewpoint of another medium. In other words, whereas in transmediation the ‘frame’ is not included in the transfer from one medium to another, it is in the case of media representation. For instance, a movie representing a theatre performance (a movie that includes the performance of theatre in its plot) can be understood in terms of media representation; however, a movie whose plot closely resembles that of a theatrical play might rather be understood in terms of transmediation. While these two types of transmedial processes are intricately interrelated and overlap in practice, of course, it is convenient to distinguish them theoretically, as they are partly different ways of transferring cognitive import among dissimilar media. Assuming that thinking of a medium as a single sign is accurate, the two types of transmedial processes may be explained as follows in Peircean terms. Transmediation means that the representamen of the target medium (its outward appearance) conjures up in the mind 400

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of the perceiver approximately the same object as the representamen of the source medium conjures up. Media representation means that the representamen of the target medium conjures up in the mind of the perceiver the representamen and possibly also the object of the source medium (together forming a now object). As always, the objects are realized in the perceiver’s mind through interpretants. Consequently, media representation may frequently be understood as also comprising transmediation. Media representation involves transmediation if it includes, to some degree, iterated mediation of equivalent sensory configurations. No contradiction exists between a target medium on the one hand representing a source medium and on the other hand representing again its represented cognitive import. For instance, whereas a photograph representing a drawing of an old windmill is obviously a media product representing another media product, it also clearly includes iterated mediation of equivalent and actually very similar (visual) sensory configurations by another technical medium of display. An auditory, verbal description of a drawing such as, ‘I bought a drawing of an old windmill,’ is also a case of media representation; however, because it includes iterated mediation of equivalent sensory configurations by another technical medium (the voice has the capacity to produce symbolic signs that represent substantial parts of the objects represented by the iconic signs on the paper: the notion of an old windmill), it also includes transmediation. Both examples may be understood as comparatively complex instances of media representation. If a source medium is represented in some detail, its cognitive import becomes transmediated by the target medium. However, a very simple verbal representation such as, ‘I bought a drawing,’ is a media representation but not a transmediation; the cognitive import of the source medium – the old windmill in this case – is not represented again by the target medium. Only the representamen (‘a drawing’) and not the object (‘an old windmill’) of the source medium is represented by the target medium. Hence, one could perhaps dare to say that in pure media representation, only the representamen – the empty shell of the source medium so to speak – is transferred to the target medium. In pure transmediation, only the represented object of the source medium is transferred to the target medium. Frequently, both representamen and object are transferred, which is to say that both media representation and transmediation are at hand. Hence, transmedial processes may be captured in the formula, ‘Cognitive import is Transferred from a source Medium to a target Medium,’ or ‘C is T from M1 to M2.’ The transfer is a transmediation, a media representation or a combination of the two. Although the formula adds nothing new to the previous explanations of transmedial processes in this investigation, it may work as a methodological tool for easily identifying the core aspects of complex transfer processes. Thus, when thinking further about the variations and complexities of media transformation and media translation (intermedial and intramedial transmediality), one might consider what the component parts of the formula actually stand for and how flexible their interrelations are. The formula in itself is simple but it reveals a rather messy world of transmedial processes when applied to media reality. Thus, what do C, T, M1 and M2 represent? In the subsequent pages, I repeat basic aspects of these components that were already either thoroughly discussed or at least touched on. My aim is, to sum up, to specify some facets of the process of transferring cognitive import and to indicate some complications that arise as soon as we leave the most clear-cut examples of media transformation and media translation. C stands for cognitive import that is formed when structuring and interpreting minds make sense of mediated sensory configurations. The virtually infinite list of various cognitive imports includes everything that can be captured by human minds. 401

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M stands for Medium. More specifically, M stands for either Media Product (MP) or Qualified Medium (MQ). To keep the application of the formula manageable, I confine it to modeling transmedial processes among media products and qualified media types, which most of the time involves transmedial processes among basic media types. M1 is the source medium, the ‘first space’ that makes possible the realization of certain cognitive import. M2 is the target medium, and the ‘second space’ is perceived as holding the same cognitive import, to a certain extent. Importantly, M1 and M2 must not necessarily be understood as complete media; considering only parts of the source medium, the target medium or both may be relevant. Transmedial processes are often fragmentary and indeed not in any way self-evidently present for all perceiving minds. When thinking of transfer of cognitive import in the most straightforward manner, M1 and M2 are two particular media products: ‘C is T from MP1 to MP2.’ However, media transformations and media translations also occur in cases in which M1, M2 or both are qualified media or submedia (genres) rather than particular media products. The formula might then be developed to ‘C is T from MQ1 to MQ2,’ ‘C is T from MP1 to MQ2’ or ‘C is T from MQ1 to MP2.’ Finally, T stands for Transfer, a notion no less complicated than the other ones in the formula. Of course, the transfer of cognitive import among minds and among media is very far from the transfer of material items between physical spaces. First, T includes both transmediation and media representation. Because I have already analyzed this conceptual couple, I instead scantily scrutinize three further aspects of the transfer of cognitive import. The first aspect concerns the ‘thickness’ of T, which includes a cluster of interrelated factors. To start with, transfers are said to be stronger or weaker. As noted, cognitive import is generally modified by transmedial processes; crossing the borders between material, sensorial, spatiotemporal and semiotic modes certainly affects the perceived strength of the transfer. Whereas media translation allows for less modification, media transformation strongly tends to adjust the transferred cognitive import. The perceived thickness of T also involves differences in the degree between what I have called simple and complex transmediations and media representations (Elleström, 2014): the greater the complexity of successfully transferred cognitive import, the thicker the T. In a comparable manner, the transfer of cognitive import encompasses degrees of more or less complete transfers. A single media transformation or media translation may involve one, a few or several cognitive elements; the more it involves, the more complete it is considered and the thicker the T. One might also consider the issue in terms of more or less direct transfers. Walter Bernhart wrote about literature and music and emphasized that thinking of adaptation ‘in terms of a direct transposition from one medium into another’ may be difficult (2008, p. 25). This idea is valid for all types of transmedial processes. Considering intermediate stages between what is construed as the source and target media is sometimes necessary; these stages may be difficult to pinpoint because they involve networks of transitional mediations and representations. In any event, I claim that the experienced directness of the transmedial process is partly proportional to the thickness of the T. Ultimately, if the T is perceived as very thin, a valid question is whether the media relation should be treated as a transformation at all. The second aspect concerns the ‘direction’ of the T. In a straightforward standard transfer, the T goes from M1 to M2. In the case of media representation, the direction of the T is never in doubt: one particular media product (MP2) or qualified medium (MQ2) represents another media product (MP1) or another qualified medium (MQ1). No question arises regarding what represents and what is represented. In this respect, transmediation is less 402

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clearly confined. When qualified media are involved in transmediation, the chronological relations are frequently vague, indicating that a diachronic perspective on media interrelations may be somewhat flexible. When both M1 and M2 are qualified media or submedia, there is simply not always a point in saying that cognitive import is transferred in only one direction. Instead, stating that they go back and forth between MQ1 and MQ2, as in the development of forms and motifs in modern literature and film, might be better. Thus, the T may sometimes be said to go in two directions rather than one. The T may also be understood to go in both directions between two media in another way. Even if one identifies a more definite source media product that actually precedes the target medium, from a hermeneutical point of view, the source may be said to be affected by the target: we understand the old media product differently in light of the new media product (see Groensteen, 1998, p. 277; Bruhn, Gjelsvik & Thune, 2011; Bruhn, 2013). Then, in a sense, and because media transformation and media translation are understood as analytical diachronic perspectives on media interrelations, the cognitive import of a new media product may be understood to be transferred to an old media product; the source may become the target. This is possible because interpretants, the results of signification, depend on much more than the physical appearance of media products. The phenomenon is true for both transmediation and media representation, and is also valid for qualified media: new media types that build on old ones may change our view of the old ones. The third aspect concerns the ‘extension’ of the T. Individual transfers may also be viewed as parts of more far-reaching and complex networks involving numerous specific media products (MP3, MP4 …) or qualified media (MQ3, MQ4 …). Several source media may exist that are made into one new medium and, indeed, one single source medium may be translated or transformed into several target media (cf. Yacobi, 1995, pp. 601–603, 1998, p. 25, 2013). This is the case for both transmediation and media representation. For instance, two qualified media types can be transmediated to one media product, as when a specific advertisement borrows traits from both concrete poetry and comics, or when a particular photograph has the appearance of both a classicist painting and a scene from a theatre drama. Furthermore, the T is normally part of chains of Ts. As already noted, a medium that is the target in one specific transmedial process may be viewed as the source of yet another target. In the end, most media products and qualified media types are probably knitted together in a giant and ever-unfinished web of media translations and transformations.

Media transformation Transmediality in general involves the idea that different media products (belonging to the same or dissimilar media types) may trigger the same or similar cognitive import. It is thus only a short step from the idea that cognitive import may be transmedial to different degrees to recognizing that one can transfer cognitive import among similar or different kinds of media. Hence, transmediality involves actual or potential transfers of cognitive import not only among minds (which is the indispensable core of communication as such) but also among media – that is, among minds perceiving various media. Regarding transmedial processes among dissimilar basic media types, I find it imperative to keep an emphasis on both the notion of transfer, indicating that identifiable cognitive import is actually or potentially relocated among media (the narrative of a comic strip can be clearly recognized in a movie), and the notion of transformation, stressing that transfers among different basic media nevertheless always entail changes (the narrative in the movie 403

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can hardly be identical to the one in the comic strip). For the sake of brevity, however, I refer to this perspective simply as media transformation. The idea of media transformation is not new. Although rarely analyzed in depth, it has appeared under several names. In modern times, Roman Jakobson managed to initiate an ever-growing interest in the phenomenon through some brief remarks in a short article (1971 [1959]). Although Jakobson was certainly not the first to dwell on diachronic media interrelations, his statement in a linguistic article on translation that ‘intersemiotic translation or transmutation is an interpretation of verbal signs by means of signs of nonverbal sign systems’ could be viewed as the starting signal of semiotically oriented media transformation research (1971 [1959], p. 261). However, Jakobson focussed strongly on verbal language and was restricted by the plain perspective of verbal versus nonverbal. He did not develop the issue and offered no theoretical tools for analyzing intersemiotic translation. Yet, the article is still widely quoted and the term ‘intersemiotic translation’ lingers on in many publications (see, for instance, the elaborated taxonomy of intersemiotic and intrasemiotic translation offered by Henrik Gottlieb [2018]). Several decades after Jakobson, Claus Clüver (1989) developed the notion using the term ‘intersemiotic transposition,’ which was outlined as an attempt to sketch a general approach to transmedial relations broader than Jakobson’s. Despite its merits, the approach was delimited by the misleading dichotomy of ‘verbal’ versus ‘visual’ texts that obscures the complex nature of overlapping media modality modes. Whereas Clüver developed his ideas in the context of intermedial research, others found the notion of transmedial processes among different media useful for understanding education. Charles Suhor used the term ‘transmediation’ to denote ‘the student’s translation of content from one sign system into another’ (1984, p. 250). Marjorie Siegel, also researching education, defined transmediation as ‘the act of translating meanings from one sign system to another’ (1995, p. 456). Although the multimodal theory has some of its roots in education research, Gunther Kress did not pick up the term ‘transmediation.’ Instead, he used the term ‘transduction’ to mean ‘transitions from one mode of representation to another’ (Kress, 1997, p. 26). Like Suhor and Siegel, Kress did not elaborate on the concept but continued to refer to it. Transduction, he explained in a late publication, ‘names a process in which ontological change takes place. That is, the source and the target mode have entities of a different kind’ (Kress, 2019, p. 46). A related concept in multimodal theory was called ‘resemiotization’ (Iedema, 2003). Writing within yet another research context, Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin, focussed particularly on new, particularly visual media types when introducing a related concept termed ‘remediation’ (1999), which has been important for highlighting the wide area of modern media transformations and their cultural significance. Against the background of Clüver’s intermedial and Bolter and Grusin’s media studies approach, I then started to develop a new conceptual framework that would allow for a more systematic analysis of transmedial processes, termed ‘media transformations,’ and other related phenomena (Elleström, 2010, 2014, 2020). Simultaneously, intermedial researcher Regina Schober used yet another term, ‘intermedial translation’ (2010). The term, she explained is designed to be an umbrella term covering various types of ‘intermedial transformation processes’ (Schober, 2011, p. 77). Lately, semiotician Dinda L. Gorlée (2015) has reintroduced the term ‘transduction,’ using it in a quite different sense than Gunther Kress and without referring to him. For Gorlée, as for Kress, it is pertinent to include communication beyond language, but she focuses mainly on creative transformations among artistic media types and develops transductions to a branch of Peircean philosophy. Even more recently, Hongwei Jia (2018, 2019) has presented an ambitious effort to categorize transmedial processes under the heading of simply 404

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‘translation.’ Although Jia successfully incorporates also cultural translation perspectives and fits in both linguistic and non-linguistic signs as well as tangible and intangible signs, he unfortunately still has linguistic sings at the fore and all non-linguistic signs are lumped together in one category. In parallel with these many developments, adaptation studies has developed from exploring transmedial processes mainly among literature, theatre and film to including a much broader variety of qualified (mainly artistic) media types. Among the many researchers in this field, Kamilla Elliott (2003, 2020) should be mentioned for highlighting theoretically issues that are relevant far beyond novel-to-film adaptations. It is against this rather messy background that I try to form my ideas on media transformation. Obviously, there is neither terminological nor, more importantly, conceptual consensus. That is why I find it most efficient to construct a framework that may appear as free-floating, although it certainly attaches to important research from the past. One of the most important things to highlight, I think, is that just as the combination of media products and media types involves grades of integration, the transfer of cognitive import among media products and media types involves a transformation in different degrees. The human body, a technical medium of display, realizes perfectly a solo dance or a gesture. If one wants to communicate something similar to the dance or the gesture, the technical medium of a television screen will work quite well, a printed still image will do its job less well, and the sound emitted by a radio will only be able to realize media products that are radically altered although perhaps still able to create recognizable cognitive import. This depends on the dissimilar modal capacities of the various technical media of display, suitable for realizing different basic media types. So, when the transfer of cognitive import among media is restricted by the modal capacities of the technical media of display, or when the technical media allow modal expansion – in brief, when the transfer brings about more or less radical modal changes – it may rather be described as transformation. In line with the distinction between two forms of transmedial processes in general, transmediation and media representation, I distinguish between two forms of media transformation (intermedial transmediality). On the one hand intermedial transmediation (repeated representation of already represented cognitive import by a different type of basic medium, such as a person orally communicating the same story as a computer game. On the other hand intermedial media representation (representation of another basic medium of a different type, such as a written review that describes the performance of a piece of music). Examples of intermedial transmediation, cognitive import being represented again by another kind of medium are that the persons in a photograph, in a newspaper or the visual actions in a film are described by spoken words; a musical score is performed by a musician; the oral statements of a witness are written down; story and characters in a theatrical play are adapted to a movie; the gist of a scientific account is rendered into a visual diagram; and written alphabetical text is transformed to Braille writing. Even the recipe in a cookbook that is realized as a meal communicating, for instance, affection, contrasts or the sense of a certain season of the year, can be understood in terms of intermedial transmediation. Examples of intermedial media representation, a medium representing another medium of a different kind, are dialogues, gestures or photographs being heard and seen in a film; a scholarly treatise discussing media interrelations; pictures of drawings on a website; a song about love letters; and a written article in a magazine describing social media. If the written article in a magazine not only describes social media in general but also, say, events that have already been communicated on social media, we have media representation and transmediation. 405

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The two types of media transformation are not in any way mutually exclusive; on the contrary, they often coexist. Furthermore, they include not only transformations among specific media products but also among qualified media types and between media products and qualified media types. If one thinks in terms of filmic qualities in a written article in a magazine, this is a case of transmediation from the qualified medium of film to a specific media product. The artistic genre ekphrasis is generally defined as poems representing paintings, which is a case of qualified submedia representing other qualified media – normally including transmediation of cognitive import from a painting to a poem. I want to emphasize that it is not necessarily the technical medium of display that ‘forces’ the transformations in media transformation. Naturally, media transformations may result also from communicative choices to take advantage of the modal possibilities offered by the target medium. In the classical example of novels adapted to films, it is clearly the case that modal differences between the two qualified media types make it necessary to alter many things; however, transmediations of this kind also offer possibilities for creative choices and voluntary transformations that are desirable. In this case, one can see transmediation as a possibility rather than a problem. In other cases, such as transmediations among statements, written reports and footage from surveillance cameras in criminal trials, transmediation is definitely a problem rather than a creative opportunity; judges rarely appreciate inventive new versions of earlier represented cognitive import. Obviously, there are many kinds of intermedial media transformation. Sometimes these involve fairly clear and complete relations between media products, as when a particular newspaper article is evidently recognizable in its internet version (although with fewer words and added animations and hyperlinks), or when a specific novel can be identified as the source of a feature film (although the narrative has been abridged and sound and visual iconicity have been added). Sometimes it is rather a question of less definitive and fragmentary cognitive import that travels among media products and media types, as when the musical form is traced in a short story, when visual characteristics associated with comic strips can be said to have found their way to a television commercial, or when certain formal characteristics of literature are transmediated to dance (cf. Aguiar & Queiroz 2015). Transfer of cognitive import over modal borders is hence often possible – despite essential presemiotic and semiotic dissimilarities among media, This is not the least because our brains have cross-modal abilities; they can make meaningful transmissions between, say, visual and auditory information, or spatial and temporal forms of presentation. This allows cognitive import to be more or less transmedial. Hence, the fact that there are fundamental or even essential media dissimilarities does not preclude shared representational capacities (to various degrees) and the transfer of cognitive import among dissimilar media (to certain extents). Almost forty years ago, Dudley Andrew noted that in order to explain how different sign systems can represent entities that are approximately the same (such as narratives), ‘one must presume that the global signified of the original is separable from its text’ (Andrew, 1984, p. 101). This is no doubt true, especially if one relativizes the proposition and adds that the represented cognitive import is to some extent separable from the representing sensory configurations. Represented objects, always realized in tandem with interpretants, are, in the end, cognitive entities in our minds, and one can make these entities present by different kinds of signs – although media differences, and indeed the processual nature of semiosis in general, will probably always ensure that they are not completely similar when represented again by another kind of medium. 406

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Media translation Although I have so far discussed transmediality primarily within the frames of intermediality (in a semi-narrow sense, involving dissimilar basic media, which may actually include similar qualified media types), the diachronic perspective on media interrelations is relevant also for intramediality (in a semi-narrow sense, involving similar basic media, which may actually include dissimilar qualified media types). I refer to intramedial transmedial processes as media translation. As stated, I choose this term because ‘translation’ attaches to the common notion of translation as a transfer among verbal languages. Media translation is hence an extension of this standard idea to include transmediality among all forms of similar media types, not only media types including verbal language. Much of what I have said about media transformation is applicable also to media translation, with the obvious difference that whereas media transformation involves dissimilar basic media types, media translation involves similar basic media types, which makes media translation somehow less complicated to grasp. Nevertheless, media transformation categories such as transmediation and media representation have their equivalences in media translation. I thus distinguish between two forms of media translation (intramedial transmediality). Intramedial transmediation should be understood as a repeated representation of cognitive import by a similar type of basic medium; intramedial media representation is a representation of another basic medium of a similar type. Intramedial transmediation includes phenomena such as cover versions of pop songs, remakes of feature films, rephrasing of oral statements and translations of menus from Spanish to English. Intramedial media representation includes, for instance, dinner talks mentioning any form of speech, paintings representing other paintings, television shows discussing television shows or other television programs and news articles in printed daily papers referring to any printed material of a similar kind.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have mapped a vast field of transmedial processes according to some parameters that I find crucial. Whether they are called translation, transformation, transposition or something else, and whether they are understood as intra- or intermedial, transmedial processes – comprehended as transfer of cognitive import among media products and media types – they are exceedingly common and permeate virtually all human communication. Transmedial processes are also much varied phenomena. I believe that the presence and importance of media differences in them are frequently underestimated or even neglected, often because elements of verbal language are no doubt central in much communication and catch our attention at the expense of other features that are perhaps often in the background of our conscious concern. However, in reality, all communication is mediated. Signification in communication is realized through objects and phenomena – media products – whose qualities, and hence communicative abilities, possibilities and restrictions, differ substantially.

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Bolter, J. D., & Richard G. (1999). Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA & London: MIT Press. Bruhn, J. (2010). Heteromediality. In L. Elleström (Ed.), Media Borders, Multimodality and Intermediality (pp. 225–236). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Bruhn, J. (2013). Dialogizing Adaptation Studies: From One-Way Transport to a Dialogic Two-Way Process. In J. Bruhn, A. Gjelsvik & E. F. Hanssen (Eds.), Adaptation Studies: New Challenges, New Directions (pp. 69–88). London: Bloomsbury. Bruhn, J., Anne G., & Henriette T. (2011). Parallel Worlds of Possible Meetings in Let the Right One In. Word and Image, 27, 2–14. Clüver, Claus. (1989). On Intersemiotic Transposition. Poetics Today, 10, 55–90. Elleström, L. (2010). The Modalities of Media: A Model for Understanding Intermedial Relations. In L. Elleström (Ed.), Media Borders, Multimodality and Intermediality (pp. 11–48). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Elleström, L. (2014). Media Transformation: The Transfer of Media Characteristics Among Media. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Elleström, L. (2018). A Medium-centered Model of Communication. Semiotica, 224, 269–293. Elleström, L. (2020). The Modalities of Media II: An Expanded Model for Understanding Intermedial Relations. In L. Elleström (Ed.), Beyond Media Borders: Intermedial Relations among Multimodal Media (vol. 1, pp. 3–91). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Elliott, K. (2003). Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Elliott, K. (2020). Theorizing Adaptation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gorlée, D. L. (1994). Semiotics and the Problem of Translation: With Special Reference to the Semiotics of Charles S. Peirce. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Gorlée, D. L. (2015). From Translation to Transduction: The Glassy Essence of Intersemiosis. Tartu: The University of Tartu Press. Gottlieb, H. (2018). Semiotics and Translation. In K. Malmkjær (Ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Translation Studies and Linguistics (pp. 45–63). Oxon & New York: Routledge. Groensteen, T. (1998). Le Processus Adaptatif (Tentative de récapitulation raisonnée). In A. Gaudreault & T. Groensteen (Eds.), La Transécriture: Pour une Théorie De L’adaptation (pp. 273–277). Québec: Nota bene. Iedema, R. (2003). Multimodality, Resemiotization: Extending the Analysis of Discourse as a ­Multisemiotic Practice. Visual Communication, 2, 29–57. Jakobson, R. (1971 (1959)). On Linguistic Aspects of Translation. In Selected Writings, Volume 2, Word and Language (pp. 260–266). The Hague: Mouton. Jakobson, R. (1971 (1964)).Visual and Auditory Signs. In Selected Writings, Volume 2, Word and Language (pp. 334–337). The Hague and Paris: Mouton. Jakobson, R. (1971 (1967)). On the Relation Between Visual and Auditory Signs. In Selected Writings, Volume 2, Word and Language (pp. 338–344). The Hague and Paris: Mouton. Jakobson, R. (1971 (1968)). Language in Relation to Other Communication Systems. In Selected Writings, Volume 2, Word and Language (pp. 697–708). The Hague and Paris: Mouton. Jia, H. (2018). Reclassification of Signs: A Translation Semiotics Perspective. Chinese Semiotic Studies, 14(3), 261–273. Jia, H. (2019). Semiospheric Translation Types Reconsidered from the Translation Semiotics Perspective. Semiotica, 231, 121–145. Johnson, M. (1987). The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Kress, G. (1997). Before Writing: Rethinking the Paths to Literacy. London and New York: Routledge. Kress, G. (2019). Transposing Meaning: Translation in a Multimodal Semiotic Landscape. In M. Boria et al. (Eds.), Translation and Multimodality: Beyond Words (pp. 24–48). London and New York: Routledge. Marais, K. (2019). A (Bio)Semiotic Theory of Translation: The Emergence of Social-Cultural Reality. London & New York: Routledge. McLuhan, M. (1994 (1964)). Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Cambridge, MA & London: MIT Press. Mendelssohn, M. (1997 (1757)). On the Main Principles of the Fine Arts and Sciences (Daniel O. Dahlstrom, Trans.). In Daniel O. Dahlstrom (Ed.), Philosophical Writings (pp. 161–169). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 408

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Mitchell, W. J. T. (1987). Going Too Far with the Sister Arts. In James A. W. Heffernan (Ed.), Space, Time, Image, Sign: Essays on Literature and the Visual Arts (pp. 1–10). New York: Peter Lang. Mitchell, W. J. T. (1994). Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. Chicago, IL & London: University of Chicago Press. Munro, T. (1969). The Arts and Their Interrelations, Revised and enlarged edition. Cleveland, OH & London: Press of Case Western Reserve University. Müller, J. E. (1996). Intermedialität. Formen Moderner Kultureller Kommunikation. Münster: Nodus Publikationen. Peirce, C. S. (1932). Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce [CP], Volume II. In C. Hartshorne & P. Weiss (Eds.), Elements of Logic. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Purchase, H. C. (1999). A Semiotic Definition of Multimedia Communication. Semiotica, 123, 247–259. Rajewsky, I. (2002). Intermedialität. Tübingen & Basel: A. Francke. Rajewsky, I. (2005). Intermediality, Intertextuality, and Remediation: A Literary Perspective on ­Intermediality. Intermédialités, 6, 43–64. Rajewsky, I. (2010). Border Talks: The Problematic Status of Media Borders in the Current Debate about Intermediality. In L. Elleström (Ed.), Media Borders, Multimodality and Intermediality (pp. 51–68). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Rice, R. E. (2017). Intermediality and the Diffusion of Innovations. Human Communication Research, 43, 531–544. Rozik, E. (2010). On the Alleged Problem of Intermedial Relations in Theatre. In J. Limon & A. Żukowska (Eds.), Theatrical Blends: Art in the Theatre, Theatre in the Arts (pp. 19–28). Gdańsk: Theatrum Gedanense Foundation. Schober, R. (2010). Translating Sounds: Intermedial Exchanges in Amy Lowell’s “Stravinsky’s Three Pieces ‘Grotesques’ for String Quartet”’. In L. Elleström (Ed.), Media Borders, Multimodality and ­Intermediality (pp. 163–174). Basingstoke & New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Schober, R. (2011). Unexpected Chords: Musico-Poetic Intermediality in Amy Lowell’s Poetry and Poetics. Heidelberg: Winter. Siegel, M. (1995). More than Words: The Generative Power of Transmediation for Learning. Canadian Journal of Education, 20, 455–475. Suhor, C. (1984). Towards a Semiotics-Based Curriculum. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 16, 247–57. Veltruský, J. (1981). Comparative Semiotics of Art. In W. Steiner (Ed.), Image and Code (pp. 109–132). Ann Arbor: Michigan Studies in the Humanities. Yacobi, T. (1995). Pictorial Models and Narrative Ekphrasis. Poetics Today 16, 599–649. Yacobi, T. (1998). The Ekphrastic Model: Forms and Functions. In V. Robillard & E. Jongeneel (Eds.), Pictures into Words: Theoretical and Descriptive Approaches to Ekphrasis (pp. 21–34). Amsterdam: VU University Press.

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Part V

Interpretant translation

21 Hermeneutic approaches Douglas Robinson

Feeling-based hermeneutics Herder and Schleiermacher One well-established history of hermeneutics sets its origin story in the insistence of a 30-year-old Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) that understanding requires ‘feeling yourself into everything’: The whole nature of the soul, which rules through everything, which models all other inclinations and forces of the soul in accordance with itself, and in addition colors even the most indifferent actions—in order to share in feeling this, do not answer on the basis of the word but go into the age, into the clime, the whole history, feel yourself into everything—only now are you on the way towards understanding the word. (1774/2002, p. 292) In order ‘to share in feeling’ the whole nature of an author’s soul, you need to ‘feel yourself into everything.’ That sounds very touchy-feely, certainly; and as we’ll see in Section “Empathic narration as a Heteroglot De-/re-stabilization of language”, a century after Herder, in 1873, Robert Vischer (1847–1933) renamed and reframed das Sich-Hineinfühlen ‘the feeling oneself into’ as die Einfühlung ‘empathy’ – an embodied phenomenology that is also often dismissed as prescientific. Through the mediation of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882), this German Romantic feeling-based hermeneutic influenced Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) and William James (1842–1910) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and both Peirce and James retheorized feeling for the new century, Peirce notably as the Firstness of the emotional interpretant and James as a mental mapping of emotion and other body states. In Section ‘Material and multimodal hermeneutics’ we will see the influence Peircean thought about affect wielded on later sociosemiotic and biosemiotic thought, and the Jamesian and neo-Jamesian tradition in philosophy of mind ultimately shaped an influential strain of affective neuroscience from Antonio Damasio to Joseph LeDoux, notably the ‘hard’ empirical branch of brain science

DOI: 10.4324/9781003161448-26

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called the social neuroscience of empathy. Those neuropsychologists and neurophysiologists do find empirical evidence of empathic response. But, you may object, the social neuroscience of empathy is the empirical study of responses to facial expressions, gestures, and other body languages – empathy in face-toface encounters – and hermeneutics begins as the empathic study of texts. And as Herderian textual hermeneutics is reformulated by Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834), it does begin again to sound rather mystical: In interpretation it is essential that one step out of one’s own frame of mind into that of the author. (1959/1977, p. 42, #8) The interpreter must try to become the immediate reader of a text in order to understand its allusions, its atmosphere, and its special field of images. (p. 43, #12) A hermeneutical approach to a text does not just involve feeling one’s way into it; it involves becoming the author, inhabiting the author’s mind (note #8), or, more moderately, inhabiting the mind of the ‘immediate reader’ (note #12). Given that all mediated distance between the author and the reader has now disappeared, of course one then understands the text: the connection between reader and author has become immediate. An important corrective to that ‘mystical’ misperception is that for Herder and Schleiermacher, ‘feeling one’s way into’ a textual meaning always had to be supported by extensive linguistic, literary, and historical research – and again, research-based understanding of an author’s meaning was only possible because the researcher’s reading of inert facts on the page was and is guided by the community, through collectivized feeling. The relationship between verbal/analytical/logical/propositional understanding and embodied/situated/felt/affective understanding is a hermeneutic circle in which feeling in the researcher fills in the gaps left by words in the world (text) and research into words in the world fills in the gaps left by feeling in the researcher – and that hermeneutic circle is guided socially, culturally, by the collective forces stabilizing both language and affect. The issue is whether we can ever know, cognitively, what another person is trying to say – and both research and feeling will fall short of a reliable report on that. That is, each individually. But if research guides feeling and feeling guides research (so the Herderian thinking goes), a reasonably reliable approximation of authorial intention becomes possible. Just how that ‘communal’ or collective feeling is to be understood is not often explicitly addressed. Hermeneutical theorists often allude to it without explanation, presumably on the assumption that we have all experienced it and so do not need to be walked through it; or perhaps because it is such a nebulous preconscious social ecology that theorists find it difficult to trace its contours and trajectories. As a result, Hans-Georg Gadamer (1960/1989, pp. 184–195) famously critiqued Schleiermacherian hermeneutics on the grounds that Schleiermacher had apparently shifted midway through his decades-long process of theorization from a language-based (‘grammatical’) hermeneutics to a psychological hermeneutics, and ‘psychological’ hermeneutics is mystical mumbo-jumbo. As Louis Roy (1997, pp. 217–220) points out, the ‘purely subjective connotations of the word’ Gefühl/feeling led Paul Tillich (1967, p. 96) too to argue that using that particular term was a tactical mistake on Schleiermacher’s part. But in fact, there is no evidence that Schleiermacher made any such leap; or that those are the only two possible channels for hermeneutical understanding; or that a non-linguistic 414

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hermeneutic must by definition lack an evidentiary grounding. That is all in fact bad theory, based on well-established ‘intuitions’ – hegemonically organized ‘common sense’ – about human interaction. This chapter seeks to correct that bad theory through a series of steps: feeling-based hermeneutics in Sections ‘Herder and Schleiermacher,’ ‘Dilthey and Benjamin on der Zusammenhang des Lebens,’ ‘Narratoriality as an emergent property of translating’ and ‘Empathic narration as a Heteroglot De-/re-stabilization of language,’ material hermeneutics in Section ‘Material hermeneutics and biosemiotics,’ multimodal hermeneutics in Section ‘Multimodal hermeneutics’ and haptic hermeneutics in the Conclusion (Section ‘Conclusion’). Roy’s intervention is important in that it finds the origins of William James’s psychology of feeling as the mental mapping of emotional body states in the self and in others – ‘awareness of the world’ – in Schleiermacher: Throughout his major writings, Schleiermacher consistently uses the word Gefühl, “feeling,” to characterize prereflective consciousness. For him, Gefühl has a meaning different from ordinary feelings such as sensations, emotions, sentiments, or unconscious states, which are often subjectivistic. … In the inner life of the human self, this stable feeling is by no means merely subjective, since it has to do as much with the general (allgemeine) as with the individual self-consciousness. By “general,” Schleiermacher means that the experience (Erfahrung) is “expected of everyone” ( jedem … zugemutet, sec. 3.2). In Henrik Steffens’s definition, borrowed by Schleiermacher, feeling is “the immediate presence of the whole, undivided personal experience” (sec. 3.2n). Far from being subjectivistic, this sense of personal existence is always intimately bound up with the awareness of the world and the awareness of God (secs. 30.1, 32.3). (pp. 217–218) This is what I have long called ‘the somatics of translation’:1 translators feel words, and feel the rightness and wrongness of words. As long as the somatics of translation remains at this general level, however, it still seems touchy-feely and perhaps even like a kind of ‘biological mysticism’ or ‘biologism’ (Venuti ,1992, p. 323, in his review of Robinson, 1991). Since the early 1990s the affective neuroscience of Damasio (1994, 1999), LeDoux (1998), and others has shown that what the Damasio team calls ‘somatic markers’ can be tracked empirically through skin-conductance tests, demonstrating not only that they exist but that they have specific verifiable guidance effects on human decision-making. In other words, the somatics of translation is not mystical; the fact that it has a biological substrate may leave it open to the charge of ‘biologism’ – i.e., taking the embodied mind’s physiological substrate seriously – but it also suggests the emergent proprioceptive>affective>conative trajectory of phenomenology, and thus also the social neuroscience of hermeneutics (Robinson 2017d, pp. 133–139). The communal corrective that Roy so usefully articulates also calls for explanation. How can a feeling be communalized? Damasio (2003) began to articulate this,2 using the mirror-neuron research: somatic markers in one body are simulated in the other bodies around it so that it becomes next to impossible to tell where a feeling originated. This collective somatic marking informs, organizes, and guides group behavior by inclining members toward compliance with group norms, not only when those group members are physically present to each other, and so displaying the performativity of somatic markers on the stages of their body language, but in memory, imagination, and reading as well. Let us call this normative 415

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communal feeling an ‘icosis,’ from the Greek for ‘plausibilization’: what is circulated through the group as ‘truth’ or ‘reality’ (i.e., normativity) is a somatic plausibilization of opinion.3 In applying this communal feeling-based (icotic) hermeneutics to the different methods of translating, however, we still face a problem, namely, that the translator is tasked with mediating between the (semantic, musical, tonal, etc.) stabilizations of understanding effected by two communities, the source culture and the target culture, and those stabilizations inevitably diverge and conflict. Schleiermacher’s solution to that problem in his Academy address is that the source-cultural icosis that seems to function in and through the target text (TT) is only a Nachahmung/Nachbildung ‘simulation’ (Schleiermacher 1813/2014, p. 230). Target readers should feel as if they were participating in a source-cultural icosis, but they aren’t, and can’t be – at least not through the TT alone. (A source-and-target reader reading stereoscopically can obviously participate in a source-cultural icosis.) They’re participating in a target- cultural icosis that simulates a source-cultural icosis. The two ‘ethical’ translation strategies that Antoine Berman (1984/1992) and Lawrence Venuti (1995) have borrowed from Schleiermacher and popularized over the last few decades, foreignization and domestication, are in fact conflicting icotic simulations. A foreignizing translation is one kind of simulation, with a simulated Gefühl des Fremden/Feeling of the Foreign mixed in as the hermeneutical norm; a domesticating translation is another kind of simulation, with an overwhelmingly local flavor that is equally simulated and equally normativized, though in the opposite direction. Schleiermacher’s idea is that what the foreignizing translator simulates for (and ideally in) the target reader is the experience one has of reading the source text with only a mediocre command of the source language (p. 231): to that sort of reader, the source text always feels foreign, and so the simulated reproduction of that text in the target language should feel foreign as well. What the domesticating translator simulates, by contrast – though Schleiermacher condemns this latter simulation in extreme and even hysterical ways (see Robinson, 2013b, Chapter 2) – is the experience the polyglot has in reading the same source text: to that sort of reader, the source text always feels comfortably familiar, and so the simulated reproduction of that text should feel comfortably familiar as well. This is a greatly simplified account of the intellectual foundation of translational hermeneutics as it applies to engagement with verbal (and especially religious, philosophical, and literary) texts. Many later theorists have of course built extensively on that foundation, notably perhaps Hans-Georg Gadamer (1960/1989) and Paul Ricoeur (2004/2007), and, magisterially consolidating that tradition, George Steiner in After Babel (1975/1998), where the three ‘epochs’ of Novalis, Goethe, and others become four ‘moves’ in a ‘hermeneutic motion’ (see Robinson, 2021). Another wing built on the Herderian/Schleiermacherian foundation was developed by Fritz Paepke (1916–1990) and has been promulgated and expanded in a series of publications and conferences in Germany by Paepke’s student Radegundis Stolze (see esp. 2018) and her colleagues.4 The fact that the specifically affective bias of the Herderian/Schleiermacherian foundation as I have described it has tended to be slighted by later translational hermeneuts, however, is significant. From their point of view das Gefühl/feeling has the inevitable effect of distracting our attention from an exclusive focus on the text, and generally on language; as we’ve seen, Hans-Georg Gadamer infamously attacked Schleiermacher’s ‘psychological’ (feeling-based) hermeneutic as mysticism. Because how else can meaning be transferred from mind to mind except through verbal language? (A certain ‘autistic’ nescience of affective communication has long been normative in the philosophy of language.) Once we follow that affective performativity into socioaffective ecologies, too, a whole new range of hermeneutic phenomena heaves into view, including (Section ‘Dilthey and 416

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Benjamin on der Zusammenhang des Lebens’) the hermeneutic intertwining of life, (Section ‘Narratoriality as an emergent property of translating’) narratoriality, (Section ‘Empathic narration as a Heteroglot De-/re-stabilization of language’) empathic narrativity, (Section ‘Material hermeneutics and biosemiotics’) material hermeneutics, (Section ‘Multimodal hermeneutics’) multimodal hermeneutics, and (Section ‘Conclusion’) haptic hermeneutics: the total hermeneutics of translation as an emergent dissipative system that is continually on the verge of tipping into newness.

Dilthey and Benjamin on der Zusammenhang des Lebens The nineteenth century’s premier advocate of Schleiermacherian hermeneutics was Schleiermacher’s first biographer and editor of his letters, Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911), holder of Hegel’s chair in philosophy at the University of Berlin; some even regard him as the founder of modern hermeneutics, since by the 1860s Schleiermacher was largely forgotten and Dilthey recovered and revived his work. Dilthey’s overriding hermeneutical project, to which he devoted his entire academic career, was a complex all-fronts theorization of the philosophy of the humanities, based on the living experiential subjectivity of historically embedded and embodied interpreters: In lived experience we grasp the self neither in the form of its full course nor in the depths of what it encompasses. For the scope of conscious life rises like a small island from inaccessible depths. But an expression can tap those depths. It is creative. Thus in understanding, life itself can become accessible through the re-creation of creation. (Makkreel & Oman, 2002, p. 241) The noun that Dilthey uses for ‘the re-creation of creation’ there at the end is one of the two Schleiermacher uses for the affectively charged simulation of the source reader’s reading experience in and for the target reader: das Nachbilden. The verb nachbilden implies the creation of an accurate after-image: creating an after-image of life makes life accessible to humanity, and thus to the humanities. That for Dilthey is the hermeneutical intertwining of life: the ‘autobiographical’ phenomenology of one’s entire life as experienced historically, not just one moment at a time but one hermeneutical interpretation of life at a time, intertwined directionally: What is fixed in this way is an ideal bodying forth of a process, of a musical or poetic nexus of lived experience. And what do we observe here? Parts of a whole that develop and move forward in time. In each part there is operative what we call a tendency. Tone follows upon tone and aligns itself with it according to the laws of our tonal system. This system leaves open infinite possibilities, but in the direction of one of these possibilities, tones proceed in such a way that earlier ones are conditioned by subsequent ones. (p. 241; translation modified slightly) Each moment is directionalized – “operative” with “what we call a tendency” – because it’s not an ontological moment but a hermeneutical one, a phenomenological one, an active part of ‘an intertwining of experience’ that organizes experience in meaningful ways: But there is a wider sense in which music too is the expression of lived experience. Here “lived experience” designates every kind of linking of specific experiences in the 417

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present and in memory; analogously, “expression” designates an imaginative process in which lived experience illuminates the historically evolved world of tones, in which all the ways of being expressive have been connected in the historical continuity of the tradition. (p. 242) Dilthey famously calls that expression of lived experience ein Zusammenhang des Lebens ‘an intertwining of life,’ and that phrase is picked up in 1923 by Walter Benjamin in his prologue to his translation of Baudelaire, ‘The Task of the Translator,’ and in 1927 by Martin Heidegger in the fifth Chapter of Sein und Zeit/Being and Time (§77). For our purposes as translation scholars of course Benjamin’s (unattributed) borrowing from Dilthey is the more pertinent one: Indeed the two are the more closely intertwined precisely because that intertwining no longer means anything for the source text. That intertwining can be called natural; more precisely it is an intertwining of life [ein Zusammenhang des Lebens]. For in the same way as expressions of life are intimately intertwined with living beings, without having any significance for those beings, so does a translation emanate from the original—not from its life so much as from its “superlife.” (translation from Robinson, 2023, pp. 35–36) The spin Benjamin puts on Dilthey there comes in the third sentence: for Dilthey too ‘expressions of life are intimately intertwined with living beings,’ but as Benjamin rereads him, ‘without having any significance for those beings.’ In Dilthey in fact the phenomenological intertwining of expressions of life does have every possible significance for the living beings who form them, but Benjamin has his theoretical sights set on the transcendent: so too, he says, filling out the translation-theoretical target of the hermeneutical analogy, ‘does a translation emanate from the original – not from its life so much as from its “superlife.”’ That last word in German is Überleben, morphologically ‘overlife’: the translation emanates not from the original’s ‘afterlife,’ as Harry Zohn and Steven Rendall have it, as if the original had died, but from its supercharged life, in the era of its ‘fame.’ We should think of the famous source text as emanating the translation out of its superpowers. In Benjamin’s Diltheyan analogy, the source text is the ‘living being,’ and the translation is the ‘expression of life’ that has no significance for the source text. But what does it mean for the source text to be alive? Benjamin tells us that we are to understand that ‘life’ or aliveness of a text ‘in fully unmetaphorical objectivity’ (p. 36); but in what way can a text be objectively and unmetaphorically alive? The mystical symbolism that Benjamin takes from the thirteenth-century Lurianic Kabbalah would suggest that texts are low-level emanations of the divine, or at least of the ideal Forms from Plato’s Realm of Ideas/Forms, as mobilized by the demiurgic Logos of Philo Judaeus; they are given fully unmetaphorical life by the spark of the divine, but because they come in contact with human beings, that spark is concealed by a shell that Kabbalists call Kelipot. In Benjamin’s mystical hermeneutic the task of the translator is to translate not just literally but etymologically, following Hölderlin’s example, finding the point of maximum friction between the source and target languages, so as to rub the shells up against each other until ultimately, some time in the utopian future, they crumble away and reveal the divine light of pure language. As Benjamin takes over Dilthey’s phenomenology of lived experience, then, the translator is caught up willy-nilly in a grand cosmic drama – and that drama is made possible by 418

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the ‘hanging-together’ or intertwining of source and target languages, and of STs and TTs. The intertwining of life is now a hanging together not of prehermeneutic life with human hermeneusis, as it was for Dilthey, or of nonsemiotic life with human semiosis, as it will be for John Deely (2009) in the Conclusion, but of human life with transcendent life, lower emanations with higher, protective shells with sparks of the divine, translations with source texts, and ordinary source texts in the era of their creation with supercharged source texts in the era of their fame. In emergentist terms, in fact, the intertwining of life is a dissipative system that is continually on the verge of tipping and spinning into transformative chaos, so that something new emerges out of the churning. Ultimately, at the highest level as Benjamin imagines it, what emerges is ‘pure language’; but by stirring the radical emergentism of Benjamin’s mystical vision back into the proto-phenomenological hermeneutic of Wilhelm Dilthey’s ‘intertwinings’ we might also imagine a series of less transcendental emergings, of ‘Narratoriality as an emergent property of translating’ and ‘Empathic narration as a heteroglot de-/re-stabilization of language’.

Narratoriality as an emergent property of translating I recently attended a Zoom conference organized by Swansea University on Computer-Aided Literary Translation. In one talk, Kenny and Winters (2021) presented research in which they had asked a prominent German translator of English-language novels, Hans-Christian Oeser, to post-edit the DeepL English-to-German output of around 600 words from an American novel that he had translated two-plus decades before, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and the Damned; his post-edited text was then compared not only with the same passage in his earlier translation but with a strange artifact called ‘the translator’s style.’ What Kenny and Winters had done was to create a corpus of Oeser’s German translations and aggregate out of them a single textual signature, an expressive footprint that supposedly summed up this one translator’s textual identity as The Human Translator. Ultimately what they sought to compare was not two translations but two Oeser-identities, two Oeser-narratorialities, as it were: that of The Human Translator and that of The Machine-Translation (MT) Post-Editor. This methodology is obviously modeled on corpus-based translator-as-narrator research, in which one compares a corpus of a translator’s output with a corpus of texts written originally in the translator’s target language. Any aggregated stylistic features in the former that deviate statistically (even minimally) from the latter are then taken to be indicators of The Translator’s Style. The assumption is that every human being has a single stable verbal style, and since a translator is a human being, every translator too will have a single stable verbal style when s/he translates. As Wilhelm Dilthey noted in his theorization of the humanities, while humanists seek to understand ‘intertwinings of life’ as fully and complexly as possible, through embodied immersion in their phenomenological hermeneutics, scientists abstract away from them. The lesson to be learned from that, perhaps, is that if one is going to study translation scientifically, as an operation performed by The Translator on The Source Text in The Source Language that produces an optimally equivalent text in The Target Language called The Translation, one is going to need to immobilize each of those capitalized entities so that it consists of exactly one dead object. This is in fact how Walter Benjamin characterizes what he calls ‘that dead theory of translation’ (p. 67): it involves methodologically petrifying or otherwise ‘killing’ everything that was once alive, thus facilitating post-mortem analysis. What Kenny and Winters did with Hans-Christian Oeser was to stabilize not only his Human Translation 419

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of that Fitzgerald novel from two decades before but himself as The Human Translator. As a methodological artifact generated at the outset of the study, his identity was not that of a living, growing being who had engaged with nearly a hundred source texts and the respective voices of their authors and narrators and characters in a fractally and incrementally infinite number of ways, but The Human Translator, with a single stabilized style. One channel of hermeneutical opposition to that stabilizing (‘deadening’) metric is mobilized by Brian Massumi in Parables for the Virtual (2002), where he gathers up the emergent impulses of process philosophers from Charles Sanders Peirce, Henri Bergson, Alfred North Whitehead, and Gilbert Simondon to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari and blends them with William James’s ‘radical empiricism.’ James’s insistence in the 1904–1905 essays that were posthumously published in James (1912/1976) is that we have direct experience not only of physical objects but of relations, relationalities – roughly what Wilhelm Dilthey called Zusammenhänge ‘intertwinings,’ and we will see John Deely (2009) rethinking them in the Conclusion – and that our direct experience of those relationalities gives shape to the meanings, values, intentionalities and other representations that we construct for them. (The ‘nonradical’ or ‘normal’ empiricism of natural science in James’s day was still reductivistically focused exclusively on the physicality of static objects.) James launched his empiricism by postulating the impracticality of allowing for ‘transempirical’ or supernatural entities – Benjamin’s mysticism, for example – but it’s clear that process philosophy brings Massumi’s vision into close contact with Benjamin’s emergentist hermeneutic and through William James with Dilthey’s phenomenological hermeneutic as well; and that in his intense concern with affect and other forms of embodiment Massumi is also densely immersed in the somaticity of Herder’s and Schleiermacher’s feeling-based hermeneutic. Massumi characterizes what he calls the scientizing ‘extrinsic approach’ (p. 2) to subjectivity in terms of ‘positionality,’ or ‘positioning on a grid,’ which he reads specifically as static binary coding. In the example from identity politics that he provides this would mean intersectionalizing identities in terms of male vs. female, black vs. white, straight vs. gay, and so on; in Translation Studies that coding would obviously entail categories like originality vs. derivativity, fidelity vs. infidelity and word-for-word vs. sense-for-sense. Corpus-based studies of ‘translator style’ and ‘narratoriality,’ of course, code translator identities with revisionary binaries that are historically progressive: where earlier The Original Writer had One Style and The Translator was only faithful to that Style without developing one of his or her or their own, now it’s possible to assign One Style to The Translator as well – as long as it is derived quantitatively by aggregating inert three-word colligations in a corpus. The Translator’s Style can be countenanced so long as it is coded. It may even be reassuring because it is static and singular and algorithmically depersonalized. ‘The idea of positionality,’ Massumi says, ‘begins by subtracting movement from the picture’ (p. 3). In corpus studies, The Translator’s Style does not move. It does not change or even twitch. It is a rock. ‘This catches the body in a cultural freeze-frame,’ Massumi writes. ‘The very notion of movement as qualitative transformation is lacking. There is “displacement,” but no transformation; it is as if the body simply leaps from one definition to the next’ (p. 3). Kenny and Winters in fact did track one such leap, from The Style of The Human Translator of Fitzgerald’s novel back in the late 1990s to The Style of The MT Post-Editor in around 2020. They were intensely interested in that leap – it was in a sense the answer to their core research question – but there wasn’t much they could say about it, because all they had were the two points, what Massumi calls the two ‘punctualities’ of The Human Translator and The MT Post-Editor. The leap was the non-movement of Zeno’s arrow between the imaginary points 420

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to which he speculatively reduced the arrow’s flight. Just as Zeno’s arrow was incapable of hitting the target, because the movement had been subtracted between the points, so too were Kenny and Winters incapable of hitting their target – the impact of MT on literary translation – because they too had methodologically subtracted movement from between the human translation (HT) and machine-translation post-editing (MTPE) points. In Massumi’s pithy summary, ‘the space of the crossing,’ which is to say ‘the gaps between positions on the grid, falls into a theoretical no-body’s land’ (p. 4). By contrast, Massumi observes, in the Bergsonian revolution ‘position no longer comes first, with movement a problematic second.’ Rather, position ‘is secondary movement and derived from it. It is retro movement, movement residue’ (p. 7). Viewed through that lens, stasis becomes difficult to explain. How can it even exist? ‘Another way of putting it,’ Massumi adds, ‘is that positionality is an emergent quality of movement’ (p. 8). Indeed in this view emergence is all: ‘It is not enough for process concepts of this kind to be ontological. They must be ontogenetic: they must be equal to emergence’ (p. 8). If the translator-as-movement is made methodologically primary, the translator-as-style becomes an emergent property of translating – but then translating too becomes an emergent property of expressing-and-interpreting, of hermeneusis, and hermeneusis is an emergent property of embodied living, of experiencing things in the body. In Dilthey’s terms, in each moment of hermeneusis ‘there is operative what we call a tendency,’ and those tendencies are retroductive: ‘earlier ones are conditioned by subsequent ones.’ So in my ‘transcreation’ of Volter Kilpi’s unfinished posthumous novel as Gulliver’s Voyage to Phantomimia (Robinson, 2020), is ‘transcreator’ a stable positionality? Absolutely not. I am not only a translator-becoming-creator; I am a creator-becoming-translator. The work I do in creating that book also shapes the narratoriality of my becoming-translatoriality. My emergence as a crypto-Nabokovian novelist double-voiced as a fictionalized paranoid editor retroduces my ‘traditional’ translational work on Kilpi’s Finnish. If I construe my task as translating Kilpi’s Finnish as he wrote it, I translate in one way – estrangingly, certainly, because his Finnish is always strange to native Finns, but not necessarily archaizingly. If on the other hand I follow Kilpi’s own invocation of the ‘found manuscript’ meme – supposedly the original eighteenth-century manuscript in English appeared on his desk at the University of Turku Library and he translated it into Finnish – and so construe that task as making my translation serve the playful illusion that I have stumbled upon the same English manuscript that Kilpi claimed he had found, supposedly written by Lemuel Gulliver himself, or perhaps by Jonathan Swift, and am simply editing that English novel as I found it, I translate in quite another way, into a playful Swiftian idiom and orthography. And if I then conceive the Nabokovian project of turning the book into a Pale Fire-type ‘critical edition’ containing many different texts and styles, some translated, others invented, then not only do I annotate what I have translated along the paranoid lines of Nabokov’s Kinbote, but I go back in and retranslate and even mistranslate specific passages to serve those needs (and have the various voices in the book argue over those mistranslations). What then is The Style of that book? And how does it relate to The Style of its Transcreator? Massumi makes it clear that those are not stupid or useless questions; freeze-framing can be a productive way of dealing with the relentless fluidity of time and temporal experience. But to the extent that Wilhelm Dilthey is right that humanistic hermeneutics delves into the full experiential complexity of the intertwining of life, they are not the primary hermeneutical questions. And in the case of that particular book, such questions would be massively difficult to answer. 421

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Empathic narration as a heteroglot de-/re-stabilization of language As we saw in Section ‘Feeling-based hermeneutics’, Johann Gottfried Herder’s founding insight that hermeneutics involves “feeling yourself into everything” was reformulated almost exactly a century later by Robert Vischer as die Einfühlung ‘empathy.’ But how does empathy work? And why does it not always work?

Models of empathy Shaun Gallagher (2012) reviews competing simulationist models of empathy from cognitive and social neuroscience, tracing roughly two main camps: in one, defended among others by Gallese (2001, 2009), Decety (2005), Goldman (2006), and Stueber (2006), empathy either is or is very closely connected with ‘what is considered the default form of everyday social cognition’ (Gallagher, 2012, p. 355); in the other, defended by de Vignemont and Singer (2006), de Vignemont and Jacob (2012), and Jacob (2011) among others, empathy ‘has a special status which makes it distinct from everyday social cognition’ (Gallagher, 2012, p. 355). In the former approach, the functioning of the mirror-neuron system is taken to be the basis of all social cognition – all understanding of other people’s actions, often called simply ‘mind-reading’ – and empathy is taken to be either another name for that mirroring (or processes of motor resonance) or its primary affective and behavioral expression. Because our mirror-neuron systems simulate the body states of the people (and animals, and even things, like the ‘cheerful’ burbling of a mountain stream) around us, we empathize with them and understand them. We feel ourselves into them. This model, in other words, is a neuroscientific update of the feeling-based hermeneutic first advanced in 1774 by Johann Gottfried Herder.5 Differences among the theorists in the first group mainly have to do with the relative role they assign to simulation: it is autonomic and therefore involuntary and unconscious for Gallese, preconscious for Decety (based on an emergent awareness of the difference between self and other and attempts to feel across the gap), and mostly conscious and deliberate for Goldman and Stueber, a ‘high-level’ (intellectual for Goldman, re-enactive for Stueber) simulation of the other’s mental states built on the ‘low-level’ (autonomic or basic) simulation generated by the mirror neurons. In the latter approach, by contrast, things are a little more complicated: 1

2

3 4 5

The affectivity condition: there is no empathy unless both the target and the empathizer experience some affective state. The affectivity condition distinguishes both empathetic and sympathetic experiences from standard mindreading. The inter-personal similarity condition: there is no empathy unless the target’s and the empathizer’s affective states stand in a similar relation to each other (i.e., both experience pain or both experience fear). The vicarious state condition: the empathic state involves an ‘as if ’ or vicarious affective state, generated by the empathizer’s imaginative portrayal of another person’s affective state. The ascription condition: there is no empathetic understanding unless the empathizer knowingly ascribes the affective state to the target. The caring condition: the empathizer must be led to care about the target’s affective life because of context. (p. 359)

Gallagher then leads us through a series of interesting and significant complications of these five conditions, such as the difference between empathy and sympathy, and whether the other 422

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person’s specific affective state can really be the determining factor between the two – and suggests that it’s not really your affective state determining the quality of my affective state, but rather that both empathy and sympathy are relational states, experiential intertwinings (he doesn’t use that Diltheyan construct, though he does invoke it in Gallagher, 2004, p. 162), so that yes, you affect me and I affect you. He also asks what kind of ‘similarity’ is required by the similarity condition in (2): if you’re sad because you’ve suffered some setback and I am outraged by what has happened to you, is that similar enough an affective state to count as empathy, or do we both need to be feeling some roughly similar form of sadness? Gallagher suggests that if I feel that your sadness was caused by an injustice done to you my outrage should count as empathy, while a simple mirroring of your sadness might be more rightly described as sympathy. The trajectory of his sifting and vetting of problems and solutions is toward the discovery that empathy depends on narrativization: I think we need to look elsewhere, however. The realization that the similarity condition concerns the intentionality of the affective state points us in a specific direction. It focuses attention on the situation of the other rather than on the phenomenal character of their affective states. Understanding the other’s situation is, I will argue, facilitated more by narrative than by simulation abilities. (p. 369) He defines narrative as ‘about some particular person or group, in some particular situation, acting and interacting in particular ways, across some segment of time’ (369, n 2); I would add that narrative is telling about some particular person, etc. – even if the person one is telling is oneself. Narrative is often structuralized as a series of events, but at base it is a speech act, a rhetoric, a performativity (Robinson 2003). Gallagher goes on: Cultural narratives, made available to the child, or narratives that are generated in interactive contexts by others, and eventually by the child, are, in the first place, stories about actions and interactions. They often include reasons for acting. That is, they tell us about people in specific situations, what they do, how they interact with others, and they sometimes indicate the motives people have for doing what they do (see Hutto 2008). Through such narratives we gain interpretive insights into the actions of others. Narratives, however, give us more than their contents. They give us a form or structure that we can use in understanding others. That is, we learn from narrative how to frame an understanding of others. We start to see others engaged in their actions, not simply in terms of the immediate and occurrent context. We start to see them as engaged in longer-term projects (plots) that add meaning to what they are doing. (p. 371) In other words, as Gallagher (2011) puts it elsewhere, narratives give us a ‘massive hermeneutical background,’ which would arguably be a kind of Zusammenhang des Lebens ‘intertwining of life,’ one that provides us with a practical skillset that helps us anticipate what we might expect from people and to understand what just happened. Now let us step back and consider how the issues in Gallagher’s discussion of empathy, simulation, and narrative link up with what we’ve seen so far in the hermeneutical theorizing of translation. We’ve seen simulation in both Schleiermacher and Dilthey; and while neither explicitly invoked narrativity, it should be clear that both of their hermeneutics depend on 423

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it. The intertwining of life for Dilthey is an autobiographical phenomenology, which is to say a simulatory narrating of one’s own life; and Schleiermacher sets up a multiply layered narrativity for the translator to simulate. The domesticating translator (DT), for example, wants to simulate for and in the target reader the narrativized experiential phenomenology of (a DT) reading a literary work originally written in the target language as if s/he were (bDT) a polyglot who can read the source text fluently in the source language, and (cDT) imagining that experience as being introduced to the source author on his or her (the reader’s) own target-cultural ground, to which the translator has brought the author. The foreignizing translator (FT), by contrast, is to simulate for and in the target reader the opposite narrativized phenomenology of (aFT) reading a foreign work in a difficult TL idiom as if s/he were (bFT) an intermediate learner of the foreign language reading it passably, and (cFT) imagining that experience as being taken abroad by the translator to meet the source author in the source language. In other words, rather than relying on the hermeneutics of textual interpretation, Schleiermacher specifically (though without calling it this) narrativizes translation as a face-to-face encounter between the target reader and the source author, and pushes into opposite corners the imagined narrative simulation that emerges. The target reader comes to the encounter with a (simulated) greater or lesser command of the source language, and that narrativized simulation determines the affective phenomenality of the encounter: whether the target reader is to feel casually competent (identifying with the polyglot to whom the author has been brought) or hesitant and stumbling (identifying with the intermediate learner of the foreign language who has been brought bodily to the author). Again, Schleiermacher does not spell this out, but the idea seems to be that narrativizing the act of translation as a face-to-face encounter guides the translator to translate in this or that way, domesticatingly or foreignizingly. He also does not mention empathy – the term had not yet been invented in 1813 – but he does expressly invoke Herderian affect as the basis for the simulation: the foreignizing translator seeks to simulate das Gefühl des Fremden ‘the Feeling of the Foreign’ experienced by the intermediate foreign language learner in reading the source text, and by extension (though Schleiermacher never spells this out either) the domesticating translator seeks to simulate the feeling of the familiar experienced by the polyglot who reads the source text so fluently that s/he doesn’t even feel the foreignness of the foreign text.

Bakhtinian heteroglossia as a dissipative system But now let us consider a complication. The model as I have been developing it in this section is still quite idealized: understanding happens. But of course, it doesn’t always happen. How do we explain hermeneutical failure, in conversation, in the reading of texts, and in translation? Mikhail Bakhtin (1934–1935/1981) would say that what makes narrative a ‘massive hermeneutical background’ for empathic understanding is first of all language, and specifically the internal dialogism of the word – the fact that we get all of our words and phrases from other people, and that when we learn them, we internalize the dialogues-with-others in which we hear or read them. That means that we are also internalizing attitudinal/affective maps of those other people: every word and every phrase we learn is an intersubjective conduit of attitudinalizing affect between us and others, and thus an empathic link that puts us in others’ bodies and them in ours. This of course would be another Jamesian phenomenological relationality or Diltheyan Zusammenhang des Lebens ‘intertwining of life.’ Language,

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Bakhtin says, is no one’s personal possession; it lives вне себя/vne sebya ‘outside itself,’ between people, and we live empathically in its relationality. (Of course, the mirror-neuron neural resonances in preverbal infants precede that verbal relationality; Gallagher [2007, 2008, 2012] also tracks the neuroscientific theorizations of that physiological substrate.) For Bakhtin (1929/1984) what narrative adds to the internal dialogism of the word is not only a directional temporality but also a layered double-voicing of narrating, and of telling. When you tell me a story, I hear it and understand it in your voice, but your voice is always dialogized with mine – not only because you’re anticipating what I’ll say in reply, but because language lives between us – and as a result I internalize ‘your’ story as ‘our’ story, with my personal attitudinalizing affects superadded to it. In Robinson (2003, pp. 112–113) I offered a reframing of Bakhtin’s (1929/1984, pp. 199) types of double-voicing: First type: overt multiple voicing •

the speaker’s internal dialogue or pandemonium of voices is frankly made public, reflected openly in speech or writing

•

Bakhtin’s active type: the sideward glance at someone else’s hostile word, the word with a loophole, etc.

Second type: overt multiple voicing with a hierarchy imposed •

the speaker gives the impression that s/he is in control of the other voices that striate his or her speech

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Bakhtin’s passive type, both varidirectional (parody and the use of an unreliable narrator) and unidirectional (stylization and the use of a reliable narrator)

Third type: covert multiple voicing with a hierarchy imposed •

the speaker gives the impression that s/he speaks with only a single voice, either his or her own or someone else’s

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Bakhtin’s objectified and direct unmediated types

The idea is that what has traditionally been idealized as the perfect separation and differentiation of voices, indicated there as the third type – you have your voice, I have mine – is actually the most radically displaced concealment of the ‘natural’ state of double-voicing (the first type). In the middle between those two, in the second type, double-voicing is recognized and even displayed, but with the pretense of control. In that type the ‘other’ voice is passive with regard to the speaker: I repeat your words parodically, tonalizing them so as to inflect them with my contempt, or, at best, I stylize your words to intensify the listener’s or reader’s impression of my agreement with and admiration for them.6 My brief in Robinson (2009) was that the translator always double-voices the source text, adds her or his or their voice to the mix; and this second type of double-voicing is the kind indulged by the prototypical translator-as-narrator explored above (Section ‘Dilthey and Benjamin on der Zusammenhang des Lebens’). It typically entails not transforming the source text into the translator’s own creation, but inflecting it slightly with the translator’s attitudes, as when a translator of Dostoevsky tacitly smooths over the source text’s melodramatic clichés, sentimentalities, and bad rhythms (Robinson, 2011, Chapter 5) to make Dostoevsky sound in translation more like a great writer (‘unidirectional’), or when a feminist translator of a sexist text intensifies the sexist phrasings just slightly, to make them more palpable to the reader (‘varidirectional’).

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Bakhtin’s strongest example of his first type, in fact – the ‘active type,’ where the other disrupts the speaker’s retelling of the other – is Dostoevsky’s ‘Notes from Underground,’ in which the narrator activates the reader to undermine his reliability, and it becomes impossible to establish the ‘truth’ behind his story. The undermining and disrupting of that story is the story. My transcreation of Volter Kilpi’s final unfinished novel (Robinson, 2020) was an experience like that: the various voices in that book began to take over, and multiply and recursively to undermine themselves and each other, to the point that nothing can be taken for granted. The truly emergentist contribution Bakhtin can make to this section’s discussion of empathy, simulation, and narrative in translation, however, is his notion of heteroglossia. I would liken heteroglossia to the emergentist concept of another Russian polymath, Ilya Prigogine (1917– 2003), developed to describe thermodynamic systems: language as a dissipative system (1973). As Michael S. Gazzaniga (2011, p. 120) writes, dissipative systems ‘do not exist in a vacuum but are thermodynamically open systems that exist in an environment where they are constantly sharing matter and energy with other systems’ – and while language is not a thermodynamic system (it doesn’t convert heat), heteroglossia does strikingly resemble ‘open systems that exist in an environment where they are constantly sharing … energy with other systems.’ For Bakhtin heteroglossia is the force driving all language change, powered by the difference between individual speakers, the fact that we inhabit different ‘biological skinbag[s]’ (Clark, 2003, p. 4), digest only the food that we personally ingest, see the world from a slightly different angle (cannot see the backs of our own heads, as Bakhtin puts it), and above all ‘accent [everything we say] as an individual utterance’ (Bakhtin, 1934–1935/1981, p. 272). But it is also the force driving all language unification, powered by the social project of imposing group norms on communication. In order to facilitate mutual understanding, those social forces seek to unify language, to impose what Bakhtin calls ‘centripetal’ normativities on the ‘centrifugal’ tendencies that everywhere tend to spin out of normative control. That latter tendency, toward divergent individuation, is sometimes mistaken for heteroglossia; but as Michael Holquist (1990, p. 428) shows, heteroglossia for Bakhtin is actually the whole embodied dissipative system. It is ‘the base condition governing the operation of meaning in any utterance’: It is that which insures the primacy of context over text. At any given time, in any given place, there will be a set of conditions—social, historical, meteorological, physiological—that will insure that a word uttered in that place and at that time will have a meaning different than it would have under any other conditions; all utterances are heteroglot in that they are functions of a matrix of forces practically impossible to recoup, and therefore impossible to resolve. Heteroglossia is as close a conceptualization as possible of that locus where centripetal and centrifugal forces collide; as such, it is that which a systematic linguistics must suppress. Heteroglossia is ‘chaos’ not as disorder, but as the tension between order and disorder: ‘that locus where centripetal and centrifugal forces collide.’ It is the project of ordering, organizing and stabilizing a complexly volatile dynamic – and it is the destabilization that inevitably results from that ongoing project. The way this works in the context of empathy, simulation, and narrative is that we tend to think of those things dyadically – a speaker and a listener, a writer and a reader – but in fact those dyads are continuously being stabilized by ‘culture.’ Heteroglossia is itself culture as a dissipative system, always churning, always in flux, but always also seeking to manage the 426

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flux, and always slightly destabilizing things in and through its very efforts to manage them. What propels Dostoevsky’s Underground Man into the dizzying self-disruptions of the first or ‘active’ type (overt multiple voicing) is not necessarily just some random personalized psychosis but a collective heteroglossia, perhaps a collective psychosis that spreads mental and emotional and verbal derangements through the Russian population (especially the men). There are in every culture, not just the Russian, psychosocial forces passed down from parents to children and from institutions to subjects that block or distort empathy. There are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of types of emergent sociocultural formations that threaten to make empathy impossible and mutual understanding a laughable utopian pipe dream. The simulatory narratives that Shaun Gallagher tracks through the empirically based theorizing of cognitive and social neuroscientists seem to rest on the universalizing assumption that all humans are naturally empathic – and perhaps we are, at birth. But by the time we reach the age of social competence – say, ten or twelve or fifteen – the vast majority of us have been partially derailed from that universality by those social forces of disruption. Because the stabilizing forces of heteroglossia are our only hope of communicating understandably, we cling to them, cherish them and seek to protect them and their idealization as ‘nature’ – but the destabilizing forces of heteroglossia are too strong for us to ignore entirely. The hermeneutics of heteroglot de-/re-stabilization can best be seen at work in translating, perhaps, in what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1980/1987) call majoritarian and minoritarian readings and rewritings of literary texts – or what I have called transmajoritization and transminoritization (Robinson 2017a). Let us take a case that I studied closely in Robinson (2011, Chapter 3): the 1929 English translation of Aleksis Kivi’s (1834–1872) great Finnish novel Seitsemän veljestä (1870/1984) as Seven Brothers by Alex. Matson (1929/1962). It is quite obvious why Matson (1888–1972) sought to transmajoritize Kivi, which is to say why he sought to stabilize Kivi and his reputation in English as Finland’s National Writer: Matson was a patriot, a Finn who loved his country, and loved Kivi’s novel as a shining emblem of his country’s wonderfulness. The interesting question is, why did that transmajoritization fail so miserably? Why did it make Kivi’s novel unreadable in English for nearly a century, except for the cynical purpose of hooting derisively at its sheer unparalleled badness? The easy answer, that Matson was a bad translator, is equally easily disproved by comparing that translation with his others, in both directions: as I showed in that chapter, Matson was a good translator, even of experimental modernist novels by Faulkner and Joyce. His English translation of F. E. Sillanpää, Finland’s only Nobel Laureate for Literature, is good solid professional work – nothing to hoot at. His Seven Brothers is a puzzling exception. Why? Somehow his transmajoritizing/stabilizing impulse destabilized that translation. The apparently counterintuitive conclusion I came to there was that Matson’s translation failed because he was working so hard to transfer the collectivized stabilization of Kivi’s Finnish greatness. As I put it: ‘Sillanpää was just a job; Kivi was Finland’ (2011, p. 110). Matson’s transmajoritization was driven by piety before the greatness not only of this novel but of the country that produced it – and that put him at odds with Kivi’s own minoritarian iconoclasm, which infamously led Kivi’s contemporary detractor, August Ahlqvist (1826–1889), to attack the novel viciously in print, three times, twice in Swedish and once in Finnish, and so, it has often been argued, to drive Kivi into an early grave at the age of 38. Kivi founded Finnish literature by destabilizing the Romantic ideals of Johan Ludwig Runeberg (1807–1877) on which the ‘Fennomane’ Romantic Nationalism of his day was grounded. It took Kivi’s defenders a decade and a half after Ahlqvist’s death to raise him to the status of Finland’s National Writer, through the dissemination of precisely the same pious platitudes that undid Matson’s 1929 translation; as I showed in Robinson (2017a, 427

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pp. 134–146), those majoritizing pieties are still at work in Kivi criticism today, despite the minoritizing (anti-Romantic, anti-patriotic, anti-pietistic) intervention launched against them in the 1950s and 1960s by the Finnish modernists, whose readings I followed in my own transminoritization of the novel in Robinson (2017b). And what role does the affective hermeneutics of empathy play in all that? Deciding how to translate is an intrinsically hermeneutical project, one that does involve ‘feeling yourself into everything.’ Think of Alex. Matson feeling his way into Aleksis Kivi and his great novel: at the very least that meant feeling his way into the novel’s cultural situatedness, not only in newly independent Finland (since 1917) but in the Autonomous Grand Duchy of Russia that Finland was when Kivi wrote, and for nearly a half-century (including the first three decades of Matson’s life) after he died in 1872. In the 1860s, 1870s, and 1880s August Ahlqvist remained powerful enough to discourage readers from ‘finding’ and liking Kivi’s novel; he was not only Finland’s only Professor of Finnish Literature and the Rector of Finland’s only university but also the acknowledged bastard son of Finland’s most powerful man, Baron Johan Mauritz Nordenstam (1802–1882), a kind of de facto prime minister entrusted by the Russian colonial overlords with sniffing out Finnish nationalist resistance to Russian rule. Even in the early decades after Kivi’s death, however, support for his novel began to emerge and grow. Finland’s second great novelist, Volter Kilpi (1874–1939), reported listening to his parents read aloud from it beginning in the late 1870s. And after the deaths of Ahlqvist’s father (1882) and Ahlqvist himself (1889), and especially during the oppressive Russification campaign around the turn of the century, leading to independence and the civil war , the groundswell of patriotic love of Kivi’s novel grew into a tsunami, culminating in Viljo Tarkiainen’s 1915[1950] magisterial monograph proclaiming Kivi Finland’s National Writer. It’s not clear just how much of that history Matson knew, but as a Finn in the newly independent 1920s, he must have imbibed a lot of it in inchoate, osmotic form. In addition, however, he would have needed to feel his way into “the” English- speaking target audience – an audience that in the 1920s was of course not yet nearly as diffuse and diverse as it is today. In fact, for Matson, that target audience was probably limited to England, where he spent the first sixteen or seventeen years of his life, without significant exposure to the literary world. Judging from the style of his Kivi translation, in fact, his feeling for that target audience may have been shaped by attendance at Victorian music hall performances – not a bad background for Kivi’s exuberance in English, perhaps, except that (a) music hall died out in Britain after World War I, when Finland was declaring independence and Matson was turning thirty, (b) Matson hadn’t set foot in England since about 1904, and didn’t know the variety theater that followed the decline of the music hall, and (c) the counterparts in Kivi of the sentimental cliches and stereotypes of the Victorian music hall were the sentimental cliches and stereotypes of pious Romanticism, which Kivi loathed and exuberantly satirized so that a nostalgic feeling for those music hall performances of his childhood could well have led Matson astray. And that would then bring us back to a feeling for Kivi’s novel, which relies almost exclusively on dramatic dialogue to carry the story, with a bare minimum of narratorial comment. The fact that the novel has an ensemble cast of seven brothers and no narrator to tell readers what to think about them – the narrator only provides the occasional montage of transitional events – allows the reader to identify empathically with any or all of them. Matson himself identified with the oldest, Juhani, the dark Byronic hero who was also the dumbest and biggest bully,7 and who was mercilessly mocked by the youngest, Eero, with whom I most strongly identify. 428

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In any case, it is clear that Bakhtinian heteroglossia too is a ‘massive hermeneutical background’ that has been insufficiently studied and mobilized in translational hermeneutics to date.

Material and multimodal hermeneutics In Section ‘Feeling-based hermeneutics’ we have been following the inherited hermeneutical tradition and considering the translation of written texts, aka interlingual translation. The focus on affect in Section ‘Herder and Schleiermacher’ and on expanding sociocultural intertwinings of life in Sections ‘Dilthey and Benjamin on der Zusammenhang des Lebens,’ ‘Narratoriality as an emergent property of translating’ and ‘Empathic narration as a heteroglot de-/re-stabilization of language’ have begun to direct our attention more and more away from the text toward what has come to be called 4EA cognition – understanding that is embodied, embedded, extended, enactive, and affective – but what needed to be understood in that first section were always words. What happens now if we expand our focus further to encompass the material hermeneutics of biosemiotics and the multimodal hermeneutics of audiovisual translation (AVT) and beyond? As it happens, 4EA cognitive science was born out of attentive readings of the last piece Maurice Merleau-Ponty saw in print before he died, ‘Eye and Mind’ (1961/1964), which as the title suggests deals with vision, visuality, the perception of visual art. One of the interesting facts about that intellectual trajectory is that in ‘Eye and Mind’ Merleau-Ponty’s account sounds mystical, but as later cognitive scientists develop it later, it comes to seem like painfully obvious common sense. For example: Everything I see is on principle within my reach, at least within reach of my sight, and is marked upon the map of the ‘I can.’ Each of the two maps is complete. The visible world and the world of my motor projects are each total parts of the same Being. (162) ‘The map of the “I can”’ there is a metaphor for something – but what? Where does that map exist? What is the ‘Being’ of which those two worlds are ‘total parts’? The key term that Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch (1991) assigned the theory in The Embodied Mind was ‘enactivism,’ which they explicitly coined in order to emphasize the growing conviction that cognition is not the representation of a pre-given world by a pre-given mind but is rather the enactment of a world and a mind on the basis of a history of the variety of actions that a being in the world performs. (9) If ‘I can’ see it, ‘I can’ participate in its enactment. As Thompson (2007, p. ix) later develops the theory, it is predicated on the deep continuity of life and mind. Where there is life there is mind, and mind in its most articulated forms belongs to life. Life and mind share a core set of formal or organizational properties, and the formal or organizational properties distinctive of mind are an enriched version of those fundamental to life. More precisely, the selforganizing features of mind are an enriched version of the self-organizing features of life. The self-producing or “autopoietic” organization of biological life already implies cognition, and this incipient mind finds sentient expression in the self-organizing 429

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dynamics of action, perception, and emotion, as well as in the self-moving flow of time-consciousness. From this perspective, mental life is also bodily life and is situated in the world. The roots of mental life lie not simply in the brain, but ramify through the body and environment. Our mental lives involve our body and the world beyond the surface membrane of our organism, and therefore cannot be reduced simply to brain processes inside the head. The chief implication of that enactivist understanding of embodied cognition for the hermeneutical phenomenology of visual and other at least partly nonverbal translation is that our perception of the images and melodies and kinestheses and so on that we are called upon to translate is not objectivistic but participatory. As Merleau-Ponty (1961/1964, p. 17) puts it: This extraordinary overlapping, which we never give enough thought to, forbids us to conceive of vision as an operation of thought that would set up before the mind a picture or a representation of the world, a world of immanence and of ideality. Or as Di Paolo and colleagues (2010, p. 39) paraphrase something like that same enactivist principle: ‘Organisms do not passively receive information from their environments, which they then translate into internal representations. Natural cognitive systems … participate in the generation of meaning ... engaging in transformational and not merely informational interactions: they enact a world.’

Material hermeneutics and biosemiotics Don Ihde (1979, 1990, 1993, 2009) has long been an advocate of ‘material hermeneutics’ as part of what he calls a ‘postphenomenological’ philosophy of science and technology. And while it is true, but slightly misleading, to say that the first two centuries of the hermeneutical tradition have ‘been associated with linguistic phenomena, particularly texts of various types, with hermeneutics thought of as some set of interpretive principles’ (2009, p. 63) – as we’ve seen, the situated embodiment of feeling and the circulation of affect through a group via the mirror neurons, though dismissed by Gadamer as mystical, is in fact quite material – still, it is equally true that the visual, auditory, and haptic methods of science and technology are of an entirely different order of materiality. ‘This hermeneutics,’ Ihde remarks, ‘retains the critical, interpretive work that all hermeneutics requires, but it is more a perceptual than a linguistic interpretation. After all, so much of natural science investigates nonspeaking, nonwriting, nonlinguistic phenomena!’ (p. 64) To take visuals alone – and Ihde (2009, p. 64; see also 1999) insists that ‘the natural sciences are intensely visualist,’ and tend to convert data from the other senses into visuals – the ancients were able to measure the earth’s circumference, tracked the shapes of the earth, the moon, and other planets, attempted to measure the distances between any two heavenly bodies, and so on, and the invention of optics made it possible for Galileo to divide what to the naked eye seemed like the ‘soup’ of the Milky Way into individual stars, to detect the moons of Jupiter, and shift Western science a few steps closer to acceptance of Copernican heliocentrism. This is all manifestly visual hermeneutics, in which ‘the object realms investigated usually do not contain “linguistic” dimensions. There are no texts, no speech, no propositional or rhetorical expressions’ (2009, p. 68). The shift from ‘linguistic’ hermeneutics to ‘material’ hermeneutics might be drawn as in Figure 21.1. 430

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HUMAN

Figure 21.1

feeling-based

WORLD/text interpreta on

HUMAN

perceptual WORLD/ma er interpreta on

The hermeneutic circle, on the left as traditionally imagined from Herder to Gadamer, on the right as reimagined through Ihde’s material hermeneutics.

HUMAN

Figure 21.2

>

TECHNOLOGY

WORLD

The hermeneutic lemniscate (Kudina, 2021, p. 244).

Ihde (1979, 1990, 1993) also pioneered what is known as ‘technological mediation,’ which Olga Kudina (2021, p. 234) describes as ‘an interactionist perspective on technology, acknowledging the role of both people and technologies in the joint production of reality, without either one independently determining its subjects and objects’ – she references Marshall McLuhan’s catchphrase ‘the medium is the message’ (1964/1994, pp. 7–21) and Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Mechanical Reproduction’ (1968/2007, pp. 217–251). She adds on the next page that ‘the non-neutrality of technological design renders technologies as mediators of our relation to others and the world while retaining the active role of people and their sociocultural setting in co-producing these mediations’ (p. 235) – and draws this as what she calls a ‘hermeneutic lemniscate’ (∞), as in Figure 21.2. As Kudina (244) puts it, ‘technologically mediated sense-making, embodied in the hermeneutic lemniscate, indicates how technological appropriation constitutes the world for a person and how against that background, she gets reconstituted as a subject, meaningful in a new way.’

Material metaphors As has often been noted, translation in European languages is typically troped as material crossings: translation is ‘carrying across,’ Übersetzung is ‘setting across,’ traduction is ‘leading across,’ and переводить/perevodit’ is ‘driving across.’ Chinese 翻译 fanyi is literally ‘to turn over,’ as in ‘to flip the page over’ – like the famous line in Don Quixote where the Don likens translating to ‘viewing Flemish tapestries from the wrong side’ (Cervantes 1615/2014, p. 149). These are familiar examples; less familiar is the fact that in German Justa Holz/Mänttäri’s (1984) notion of translatorial action is implicitly – morphologically – haptic: das translatorische Handeln. In modern German the verb handeln is used to mean to act, to do, to behave, to trade, to bargain, to haggle, but its reconstructed Proto-Germanic root is *handlōną ‘to take/ hold in the hand, seize, grip,’ many of its intermediate formations (such as Middle Dutch) have meant ‘to take in the hand,’ and its modern English cognate is obviously ‘to handle.’ Take the source text in hand; handle it; seize it and grip it; if sheer hand strength is not enough to bend and shape it into the target language, take the target language in hand too, twist and turn it as well. (We will see haptic translation again in the Conclusion.) 431

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The material media of verbal texts The groundbreaking work in this area has been done by Karin Littau (2016) and Anne Coldiron (2015). Littau explores the dependence of the translation of meaning on the material thing-world in depth, with attention to the shaping of how and what we communicate by the media in and through which we communicate, including inscription surfaces (from human memory, stone, papyrus, parchment, vellum, paper, wax or celluloid to silicon), inscription instruments (from pens or moveable type to typewriters), and recording machines (from phonographs or cinematographs to computers) as physical-technical conditions of possibility for art, culture and society. (87) She draws on Anne Coldiron’s important work on early modern book history in Printers Without Borders, showing how the materialities of editing, printing, and translating condition the production and dissemination of meanings: Printers, like translators, control the distance between the reader and the prior foreign text. Just as the translator may elide or enhance cultural distance with each lexical and syntactical choice and with register, tone, and style, so too the printer may elide or enhance the work’s foreign elements with choices of mise-en-page, ornaments, initials, and typography. (Coldiron, 2015, p. 173; quoted in Littau, 2016, p. 89) Littau also asks what light a focus on the material and technical substrates of translating could shed on the histories of ideas that we’ve taken for granted for a very long time, such as the debate over word-for-word and sense-for-sense translation. Is it possible, she asks, that Cicero’s rough metaphorical formulation of what Jerome would eventually dub sense-forsense translation as translating Greek orators ‘by weight’ rather than counting them out like coins (Cicero, 46 BCE/2014, p. 9) arose out of mnemotechnics – the need to remember chunks of text for oral delivery? And was Horace’s notion of word-for-word translation (p. 15) conditioned by the emergent use of codices to preserve and disseminate texts? Certainly, the notion of separate words that can (and therefore arguably should) be translated as individual isolated units depends at the very least on the visual processing of written text, but also on the very construction of a language as a collection of isolable words. Marais (2019, p. 38) takes issue with Littau’s article, noting that she ‘still sees translation as equivalent to interlingual translation.’ That is true enough, of course; but perhaps it is unrealistic to expect any one scholar to engineer a radical paradigm shift all at once.

Material media in audiovisual texts The perceptual (sensory) element of processing and interpreting AV texts is of course similar in one sense to that of verbal texts – we process written text with our eyes and spoken texts with our ears – but in connection with AV texts the perceptual element is harder to ignore. One AVT application of the enactivist material hermeneutic might be the observation that when Henrik Gottlieb (1994) calls subtitling ‘diagonal translation,’ he is effectively launching what Merleau-Ponty (1961/1964, p. 17) called ‘an operation of thought that would set up before the mind a picture or a representation of the world, a world of immanence and 432

Hermeneutic approaches Interpre ng ST Sub tling ST (speech)

speech to speech

Interpre ng TT

I nterl i ngual transl ati on S T

wri ng to wri ng

Sub tling TT (wri ng) I nterl i ngual transl ati on TT

Figure 21.3

Gottlieb’s ‘diagonal translation’ (ST = source text; TT = target text).

of ideality,’ as in Figure 21.3. He is spatializing and stabilizing not only spoken and written words but the frames into which spoken and written words are to be slotted, and in so doing objectifying the subtitler’s enactivist participation in what Thompson (2007) calls ‘the deep continuity of life and mind,’ or what Dilthey (1910/2014) calls ‘the intertwining of life.’ We could of course add symmetry to that spatialization by running a diagonal line from bottom left (labeling that corner ‘Sight translation ST (writing)’) to top right (labeling it ‘Sight translation TT (speech)’; but in a sense, Yves Gambier (2003) has already implicitly offered a further expansion of this scientizing project. We can begin to scribble the Gambierian expansion onto Gottlieb’s imagined diagram by expanding his diagonal line to include not only monolingual subtitling (as in Finland, with subtitles only in Finnish) but bilingual subtitling (as in Hong Kong, with subtitles in Chinese and English), intralingual subtitling (for the hearing-impaired), and surtitling (projected above the stage or on seat-backs for opera or other theatrical performances). Two other AVT modes that Gambier enumerates could be sketched along the top ‘speech-to-speech’ line of the diagram, to accompany interpreting: dubbing (TL voice track recorded over the SL voice track with lip synchronization) and voice-over (TL voice track recorded into the audio mix with the SL voice track without lipsynch). And finally, there is an AVT mode in which what a voice ‘translates’ into speech is not a verbal source text but actions on screen or stage for the visually impaired, namely audio description; similar ‘translations’ from material events to a written TT have increasingly been inserted into both interlingual subtitling and closed-captioned intralingual subtitling to describe audible off-screen events like music, laughter, coughing, doors closing, and the like. This sort of scientizing spatialization, like the freeze-framing of translator and textual identities in Section ‘Material hermeneutics and biosemiotics’, has its undeniable uses. Subtitlers have a job to do, and Gottlieb wants not only to help them do it but to help us understand how they do it, so we can train novice subtitlers in the future. But it is also undeniably useful for humanists to consider hermeneutical alternatives to scientizing. The disadvantage of a scientizing approach is not only that it tends to objectify events as outside and separate from the perceiver but that it tends to focus attention exclusively on those eventsas-objects (including spoken and written words) as what Brian Massumi calls ‘punctualities’ from which ‘movement has been subtracted.’

Material situated embodiment in physical environments; the relationality of affordances One of the truly transformative moments in my career as a translation theorist was the moment when, while translating a chainsaw user’s manual from English to Finnish, I paused to remember the Finnish verb for ‘to buck’ and unthinkingly lifted my hands off the keyboard, pretended I was holding a chainsaw in both hands, and hunched my right shoulder – and the word came to me: potkia (‘to kick’). My textbook Becoming a Translator (Robinson, 1997/2020) began to take shape in my imagination at that moment. My most recent return to that moment came in writing Robinson (2022), working with Anthony Chemero’s chapter 433

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on affordance theory in Radical Embodied Cognitive Science (2009): the relationship between the translator and the material environment affords the ability to translate. There was nothing intrinsically in my physical environment in Illinois that afforded me the memory of ‘to buck’ in Finnish – that affordance was certainly not a static property of my third-floor study in that old house – but by pretending to work a chainsaw and hunching my right shoulder I interacted with that environment in such a way that it (and the virtual shadow of the Finnish woods where that hunched shoulder projected me) afforded me that memory. For several years while I was writing the first edition of Becoming a Translator and after it came out, I was invited around the world to give workshops, and in those workshops, I asked a great many audiences to tell me how they set up their workspaces so that those environments afforded them too the best possible readiness to translate. They told me of playing a certain kind of music (instrumental, New Age, Beatles, etc.), or of winding up a mechanical clock, or of sharpening five pencils and laying them out on the desk beside their computer, and dozens of other preparatory moves. And now, remembering those discussions after reading Don Ihde, I think of this: In both pragmatism and phenomenology, one can discern what could be called an interrelational ontology. By this I mean that the human experiencer is to be found ontologically related to an environment or a world, but the interrelation is such that both are transformed within this relationality. (Ihde, 2009, p. 23) We return to that relationality in the Conclusion. Interpreters have an entirely different, and far more transformative, relationship with the environments in which they interpret. Think of consecutive interpreting, where you’re standing on the dais next to the speaker, as a kind of co-speaker. Is this just speech-to-speech translation? Or do embodied proxemics influence the production and uptake of speech in both the source and target languages? What effect do audiences have on interpreting events? Theater actors know the shaping effect that ‘the house’ (the audience on a given night) has on the flow of the performance; surely the same is true of interpreting? Just as a certain kind of body language in the speaker (lethargy, excitability, twitchiness, etc.) will affect the way an interpreter interprets, so too will a certain kind of body language in the audience: whether they are bored, smiling delightedly, on the edge of their seats, or whatever. And what about the auditorium, or other architectural space in which the interpreting takes place? Is there a qualitative difference in the moment-to-moment emergence of a speech-to-speech translation between a large echoey hall and a small intimate space? Between a luxuriously upholstered conference room and a middle-class living room? If as Wilhelm Dilthey says in each moment of an intertwining of life ‘there is operative what we call a tendency,’ and ‘in the direction of one of these possibilities, tones proceed in such a way that earlier ones are conditioned by subsequent ones,’ surely those tonal tendencies are organized emergently in and through and by the whole hermeneutical experience, not just the words? And what about movement? Think of the liaison/escort interpreter, moving through space with the source-text (ST) speaker and the TT audience: does it matter whether there is a single ST speaker or many? Does it matter whether there is a single TT listener or many? If there are many of either, does it matter whether only one ST speaker speaks or many jump in with side explanations and whether the TT audience simply listens or bombards the speaker(s) with questions and challenges? What about the terrain? Does it matter whether the group is walking through an indoor or outdoor construction site, a noisy factor floor, a broad meadow, or an office suite? 434

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Multimodal hermeneutics Look back for a moment at my account of Alex. Matson’s 1929 Kivi translation (p. 428), namely, the suggestion that the cultural environment in which he seemed to be working – translating – was turn-of-the-century British music halls. I referred specifically to ‘the sentimental cliches and stereotypes of the Victorian music hall,’ but of course a music hall was not a printed text full of words: it was, as the name suggests, a hall for music, an architectural space in which music and other things were performed for an audience. The sounds, the sights, the kinesthetics of both of the performers stepping onto the stage to perform and taking their bows before exiting the stage, and of the audience taking their seats and shifting in their seats and talking and eating and drinking during the performance, and perhaps rising to their feet to give a standing ovation – all these multimodalities would have been compelling material elements of the cultural environment that I was arguing must have shaped Matson’s translation. The fact that Matson would have been in his early to mid-teens when he attended those performances, and then returned to Finland and didn’t translate Kivi until a quarter of a century later – those situated embodiments would have shaped his translation as well. Multimodal hermeneutics engages the interpretive activities situated bodily in environments containing or consisting of such expressive modes. Boden and Eatough (2014, p. 160) urge ‘attention to the multisensory, aesthetic aspects of an experience,’ but restrict their focus to ‘three dimensions of sense experience: the felt sense, the aesthetic aspects of language, and visual imagery’ (162) – that last presumably because of the influence of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s late article ‘Eye and Mind’ (1961/1964). A fuller and more nuanced multimodal hermeneutics can be gleaned from Kress (2010) and Marais (2019); Kress (2012, p. 36) also usefully defines multimodal discourse analysis (MMDA): In MMDA the textual ‘threads’ are many and they are materially diverse: gesture, speech, image (still or moving), writing, music (on a website or in a film). These, as well as three-dimensional entities, can be drawn into one textual/semiotic whole. Text, in MMDA, is a multimodal semiotic entity in two, three or four dimensions: as when students in a science classroom make a 3D model of a plant cell, or when they perform a play scripted by them in a literature classroom (Franks, 1995, 1997; Franks and Jewitt, 2001). Texts, of whatever kind, are the result of the semiotic work of design, and of processes of composition and production. They result in ensembles composed of different modes, resting on the agentive semiotic work of the maker of such texts. (See also Kress & van Leeuwen, 2001) Olteanu (2021, p. 784) usefully ties multimodal hermeneutics to biosemiotics, noting that Biosemiotic theory has not been employed, so far, in conjunction with the recent multimodality framework (Kress & van Leeuwen 2001), developed in social semiotics. This is despite the common awareness that many animals model their environments multimodally (Martinelli, 2010, pp. 91–93). Two years before that 2021 publication, Marais (2019) did in fact trenchantly employ biosemiotic theory in conjunction with the multimodality framework; it is perhaps understandable that Olteanu did not have time to access Marais’s book. Olteanu outlines a convergence 435

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between multimodal hermeneutics and biosemiotics that is potentially productive for multimodal Translation Studies: •

•

• •

•

Biosemiotics works through the theorization of the modeling of systems, based on Thomas Sebeok’s account of modeling as ‘the innate ability to produce forms to stand for objects, events, feelings, actions, situations, and ideas perceived to have some meaning, purpose, or useful function’ (Sebeok & Danesi, 2000, p. 1) Biosemiotic meaning-making arises with what Olteanu calls ‘the emergence of subjective environments’ (2021, p. 784); as we’ll see in the Conclusion, Deely (2009) would call those ‘subjective environments’ ‘objective,’ in the idiosyncratic sense of the bodily (‘cœnoscopic’) awareness of objects; Chemero (2009) would link that emergence to the dynamic relationality of affordances Recognition of the multimodal nature of biosemiotic modeling is tied to Sebeok’s (1991) insistence that the primary modeling system is not linguistic ‘Recent empirical biosemiotics research (Lancaster, 2014; Viana, 2017) links multimodality with a notion of symbol as reliant upon iconicity and indexicality, as stemming from Peirce’ (pp. 784–785) For the project of bridging biosemiotics and sociosemiotics a semiotic understanding of embodiment is needed

Embracing biosemiotic modeling as a multimodal hermeneutic as guidance for the translator, or for that matter the translation scholar, requires not only a multimodal or multimedia source text but a stepping back from the text to take in the total act of translation, including the total environment and the relational affordances that emerge from the translator’s working and functioning – not just thinking, remembering, and articulating but typing and moving her/his/their body, not just interpreting but transforming – in that environment.

Conclusion Kobus Marais (2019, p. 148) offers the radical suggestion that ‘translation can also take place by changes to the object, i.e. the other to which the representamen stands in a relationship.’ Relationship has in fact functioned as a kind of scarlet thread running through the entire chapter: we have seen it in connection with the hermeneutic circle (p. 431), Wilhelm ­Dilthey’s Zusammenhang des Lebens ‘intertwining of life’ (p. 418), William James on ‘radical empiricism’ (p. 420), the ‘inter-personal similarity condition’ of empathy (p. 422), Bakhtin’s notion that the word lives вне себя/vne sebya ‘outside itself,’ between people, and that we live empathically in its relationality (p. 424), technological mediation (p. 420), and affordances (pp. 434-435). Marais’s first example of ‘object translation’ is borrowed from Umberto Eco (1997), who notes that the platypus first ‘was’ (i.e., was thought to be) a mammal, then became a bird, then a reptile, and finally was transformed ‘into a new category as full understanding dawned.’ This happens all the time, he writes: ‘Scientific and technological advances continuously bring us new objects, like quarks, Boson-Hicks particles, and strings, which we need to translate into a relationship with a representamen in order to come to some kind of understanding (interpretant) of it.’ In Peircean semiotics, of course, a representamen is a First (abstract potential) attached to an object as a Second (something in the real world) by the synthetic Thirdness of an interpretant (a mental agent that interprets): the interpretant imposes semiotic order on the world by bringing objects and representamens into a relationship; and 436

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because the contexts in which those semiotic relationships are created may shift across time or space, the ‘objects themselves’ (seem to) change. The sun as a god in 1500 BCE is the same thing as the sun as a yellow dwarf star in the twenty-first century, but not the same object. This distinction between ‘thing’ and ‘object’ is one that Marais borrows from John Deely (2009; see Marais, 2019, pp. 149–153): a thing is whatever exists independent of perception by the mind (in ancient and medieval terminology, a ‘subject’ or a ‘substance’ is something that exists ‘in itself,’ in the morphological sense of being ‘brought under’ existence) and an object is something of which we are mentally aware (from ob ‘in the way of ’ + jacere ‘to throw’). Modern usage makes things and objects synonyms, but Deely launches a detailed philosophical assault on that ‘error,’ noting that things can become objects if we become aware of them by seeing or touching them, but a thing of which we never become aware remains a thing in the ‘subjective’ world of individual items that have not yet been processed into semiotic relationship with a representamen by an interpretant. Gayatri Spivak (2007, p. 263) comes very close to Deely’s semiotic philosophy when she posits what she calls haptic translation: ‘The human infant grabs on to some one thing and then things. This grabbing (begreifen) of an outside indistinguishable from an inside constitutes an inside, going back and forth and coding everything into a sign system by the thing(s) grasped. One can call this crude coding a “translation.”’ Note that for the infant this haptic act or moment of translating is the beginning of semiosis: the infant’s emergent interpretants bring the ‘subjective’ (pre-awareness) world into ‘objective’ (named, analyzed, becomingscientific) reality by grabbing it, grasping it. The infant ‘codes’ or ‘translates’ meaningless things into meaningful objects, including environments like ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ and affordances like ‘mine’ and ‘not-mine,’ ‘edible’ and ‘not-edible,’ ‘safe’ and ‘not-safe,’ and so on. Deely’s go-to verb for this transformative/translational act is also to grasp: Thus animals can and do use and perceptually grasp the meaning of “arbitrary” signs. It is not that they cannot use and even invent such signs; it is that they cannot know that the sign-vehicles in question are arbitrary, because they cannot distinguish relations from related things and deal with the relations directly in their objective being as able to be detached from subjectivity. Moreover, they could not care less whether the signs are “arbitrary” or not, as long as they work within the Umwelt. (2009, pp. 106–107; emphasis added) What Spivak’s hypothetical infant grasps and ‘brute animals’ cannot, in other words, is that related things are related, and can be dealt with directly in their objective being. That is the beginning of human semiosis, and thus the beginning of human language, human culture, human knowledge, human science. But starting here, at the haptic ‘translational’ moment of grasping something with the hand and studying it, is also a reminder that the human semiotic animal is an animal. We are not disembodied minds, untethered from the world of graspable objects. ‘There are advantages in being an animal,’ Deely reminds us, ‘and the human animal loses sight of or neglects that fact to the peril of its own health as a semiotic animal’ (p. 107). ‘There may well be nothing for which the postmodern culture owes thanks to semiotics more,’ he adds, ‘than for restoring to the res cogitans its animality in the properly human form of semiotic animal’ (p. 107). The implication is that translational hermeneutics assumes its fullest form when it is not a propositional abstraction conceived as narrowly linguistic, but includes the full semiotic animality of situated human embodiment, developing felt material and multimodal affordances 437

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in an objective environment. I’ll close on a longish quotation from Deely’s Intentionality and Semiotics (2007, pp. 202–203): Only in that biologically underdetermined awareness species-specifically human which we now know to be language in its root is being grasped in its multi-modality, reducible neither to objects nor to things. That grasp in turn gives rise through exaptation to linguistic communication as the species-specifically human modality of exchange and objective modification which, over time, and through the grasp precisely of being, has led to the realization that reality within experience is constantly changing because there is no fixed line between what is and what is not, no boundary given once and for all. There is always only a frontier constantly shifting and changing, within the boundary of which hardcore realities independent of us and our dreams have their place and role, but even that place and role has its aspects of malleability and change which obtain both in the physical realm itself but also in relation precisely to our dreams and hopes and, above all, to our understanding as the root means at our disposal to guide actions for making those dreams — the dream in particular of a humane world wherein injustice is not tolerated and the path of inquiry is never blocked — an actual part of the universe at large. So what do material hermeneutics and technological mediation have to do with translation? Rather a lot, in fact.

Notes 1 See Robinson (1991, 1996, 2003, 2008, 2011, 2013a, and 2015). 2 See also Carpenter (1874), Friedman (1979), Friedman and Riggio (1981), and Hatfield et al. (1994) for the pre-mirror-neuron back-story, and Adolphs (2002) for the first technical account of what I call somatic mimesis in a neuroscience journal. 3 The development of icotic theory out of a more focused effort to theorize the cultural conditioning of somatic response began in early drafts (from about 2009) of what eventually became Robinson (2016b); see also Robinson (2013b, 2016a, 2016b, 2016c, 2017c, 2017d, and 2019). 4 See e.g. Cercel (2013), Stolze et al. (2015), Agnetta and Cercel (2020), Agnetta et al. (2021), and Stanley et al. (2021). 5 It is also the model I have adopted under the rubric of ‘somatic mimesis’; see note 1 for sources. 6 See also the ‘sociology of translation’ in Callon and Latour (1981, p. 279), in which translation becomes ‘all the negotiations, intrigues, calculations, acts of persuasion and violence, thanks to which an actor or a force takes, or causes to be conferred on itself, authority to speak or act on behalf of another actor or force.’ 7 See Matson (1934, pp. 8–9), and, for an English translation, Robinson (2011, p. 102).

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22 Approaches to­ knowledge translation Karen Bennett

‘If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants,’ Isaac Newton is supposed to have written to his colleague and rival Robert Hooke on 5th February 1675 – a phrase which encapsulates the importance of translation to knowledge creation. The implication is that Newton could never have achieved what he did if it were not for the achievements of the many proto-scientists and philosophers that had gone before him, achievements that were passed through the centuries using processes that were eminently translational, in that they were repackaged and reworked in accordance with new cultural and ideological configurations. In the Middle Ages, the translational nature of knowledge creation was understood much better than it is today. In fact, the Latin term translatio studii, current since the twelfth century, referred precisely to the transfer through time and space of the knowledge of the ancients, undertaken as a systematic project over the course of many hundreds of years. This was the way medieval scholars found of paying homage to their illustrious forebears, but it was also a pragmatic exercise – not constrained by notions of semantic equivalence, but a way of appropriating the knowledge of the past to serve the needs of the present. As such, it implied transformation and change. What is more, it was not restricted to the horizontal interlingual form of textual transfer that we understand by the term ‘translation’ today but was also vertical and involved mechanisms that were also intralingual, intersemiotic and even inter-epistemic. But this was not the only period when systematic translation programs were developed in order to incorporate into the culture of the day the wisdom of peoples of other times and places. In fact, as Scott Montgomery points out in the Introduction of his book Science in Translation (2000), such programs were often associated with the transfer of power, serving not only as displays of wealth and prestige but also as the first stage in a process of assimilation that would ultimately end in the replacement of the empire that had gone before. Such was the process by means of which the Romans systematically absorbed the knowledge of the Greeks; but it is not the only example. The Library and Museion of Alexandria represented an attempt on the part of the Ptolemies to translate and store the knowledge of the existing world, and this then served as a model for similar enterprises that came later, such as the Academy at Jundishapur, and the House of Wisdom in Baghdad. The national museums and libraries of the nineteenth and twentieth century colonial powers also served an analogous appropriative function. DOI: 10.4324/9781003161448-27

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Translational processes are essential not just to the spread of knowledge but also to our conceptualization of what knowledge actually is. Today the episteme known as ‘Western Science’ has something of a monopoly on what is considered to be ‘knowledge’ in the global system, but this has not always been the case. In the European Renaissance, for example, the Humanities curriculum held center stage, while before that, in the medieval period, it was Scholasticism, a system of philosophical inquiry filtered through the Christian worldview. If we go back even further to Antiquity, we find that there were two paradigms of knowledge jostling for supremacy: philosophy (understood as the quest for truth) and rhetoric (embedded knowledge), or, in another incarnation, logos and mythos. The narrative of how these were passed through the ages, and the relative fortunes of each in different times and places, is a story of translation, and this is, in part, what I propose to explore in this chapter Whether a particular knowledge paradigm takes root in a new linguistic and cultural setting will depend partly upon the grammatical and terminological resources available in the target language, but also (perhaps more importantly) upon the values and ideologies that hold sway in the culture of reception. As we will see across the course of this chapter, certain forms of knowledge may be discouraged or even actively suppressed at particular times, or they may gradually fall out of fashion and be transmuted, through translational processes, into something different to what they were in the source culture. In some cases, there will be periods in which two or more models co-exist, often conflictuously, until the power dynamics underpinning the culture determine which of the two will prevail and how. In all respects, this process is similar to the spread of texts and, especially, literary models, described by the fathers of Descriptive Translation Studies (Lambert & Van Gorp, 1985; Toury, 2012) and thus, is susceptible to analysis using systems models of flows, such as those proposed by Even-Zohar (1978) and more recently Heilbron (2000) and Sapiro (2018). This chapter examines the interface between knowledge and translation, focusing on the processes involved in creating and disseminating knowledge at different times and places. Its structure is circular: it begins in the present, with the episteme that occupies the center of the world system (Western Science), before moving back in time to Antiquity to examine the Platonic roots of this universalist understanding of knowledge. Thereafter it proceeds chronologically, looking at the epistemology that installed itself in the Medieval period when Latin was the lingua franca and knowledge was subsumed within the Christian worldview (Scholasticism), and then the arrival of Humanism and the Scientific Revolution in the Early Modern period. Finally, it returns to the present again to look at Science’s Others: the fortunes of the humanities in a world dominated by technocapitalism, and those even more marginal epistemes, the indigenous knowledges of the Global South. It suggests that we are poised on the brink of a major paradigm shift, impelled by ecological and other pressures, which will not only stimulate a move (back) toward a kind of knowledge that is once again embedded, embodied and performative, but will also see translation foregrounded as the mechanism through which new knowledge is constructed at any given moment. One of the threads running through this account will be the relationship between technical ‘scientific’ knowledge, which purports to be objective, rational and universal, and the various embedded, embodied and subjective forms of knowledge that have manifested themselves in different times and places. These two paradigms have often been antagonistic; but there have also been attempts to mediate between them (a process that Robinson, 2017, has called ‘inter-epistemic translation’). This includes educational and popularization mechanisms, as well as the reworking of specialist knowledge into literature and works of art. Indeed, inter-epistemic translation is just now opening up as a field of research in Translation Studies. 444

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Another theme that will be considered throughout this survey concerns the actual implications for translation theory of the way that knowledge is conceptualized. When knowledge is understood to be rational, objective and universal, translation is relatively unproblematic; the ‘meaning’ of the text is transcendent, detachable from the sign vehicle and transferrable to another linguistic environment with minimal loss. However, when knowledge is culturally embedded, embodied or performative (as in the case of the modern Humanities, and many social sciences, as well as the kind of understanding manifested in mythology, religion or Classical Rhetoric), translation becomes much more challenging. The ‘meaning’ is bound up with the sign vehicle and thus does not remain the same but shifts in accordance with the linguistic and cultural environment. As we shall see, at different times in history, epistemological status has been awarded to and revoked from these paradigms in accordance with power structures and the ruling zeitgeist. Let us begin our survey of knowledge in/and translation at the center of the contemporary world system by looking at Western Science.

Translating Western Science For the purposes of this section, Western Science is defined as an intellectual and practical pursuit that uses empirical methods (observations and experimentation, complemented by mathematical calculation) to inquire into some aspect of the outside (extralingual) world.1 A fundamental premise of those disciplines that present themselves as sciences is that this external reality has an objective existence independent of human culture or language; hence, its truths are understood to be universal, abstract and culturally neutral. The kind of discourse cultivated by the sciences therefore aims to transmit these universal truths as clearly and unequivocally as possible, using a degree-zero style of writing from which all traces of human subjectivity have been removed. It is a highly nominalized discourse, in that the information is conveyed almost exclusively through nouns and noun phrases, with verbs (limited in range to impersonal forms and existentials) serving merely to indicate the relationship between the nouns. This makes it densely technical, carried along by a lexicon of discipline-defining terminology that is largely impenetrable to the non-specialist.2 To some extent, the apparent impenetrability of scientific terminology is offset by the great predictability of its grammar, in that the discourse is formed using logical operations that are mathematical in their precision, and semantically constrained for consistency of usage. This makes it eminently translatable – provided, of course, that the potential exists in the target language for the formation of technical terminology. Where these resources do not yet exist, they may be transported into the language by calquing from a language that does, something that occurs quite spontaneously through translational processes (Bennett, 2011). What makes scientific discourse so abstruse is that it is itself a kind of translation. 3 ­Linguists Halliday and Martin (1993) call it a ‘grammatical metaphorization,’ that is to say, a reconstrual from a process-based subjective mode of experience to one that is heavily nominalized and impersonal. Generated through a series of grammatical transformations4 that render processes static and remove the subjective observer from the picture, this discourse is no one’s mother tongue but rather an artificial language forged to serve a particular pragmatic purpose, as artificial as the various ‘universal languages’ that were proposed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to fill the void left by Latin.5 Thus, the translation of scientific discourse, or ‘SciTech,’ as it is known today (Wright, 2011; Olohan, 2016) is, as a number of scholars have pointed out, overwhelmingly a matter 445

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of reproducing terminology. Today, terminology is a fully fledged discipline of its own, in which linguists and area specialists come together to develop such terms and specify their interrelationships (Wright & Budin, 1997). For historical reasons, English has emerged, since the last decades of the twentieth century, as the language of science par excellence, taking over the role of lingua franca occupied at different times and places by Latin, Russian, Arabic, German and other languages (Gordin, 2015). Most specialist science now circulates in English and is usually produced directly in it by multi-national teams. New concepts that emerge will therefore be named and defined first in English (usually using the Latin or Greek resources of the language) and may take some time to filter through to other languages. 6 This time-lapse means that translators working into other languages from English, like the local scientists engaged in importing new concepts into their own cultures, may struggle to find equivalents, forced to create their own terms ad hoc or to decide between competing forms. In some cases, a lack of grammatical resources in the target language may produce a loss of precision, while in others, the opposite may be true, bringing the need to specify what was left vague in the source text. However, it should be pointed out that the kind of science that is translated into English is not the same as the kind of science translated from it. Sociologists of translation have shown that, while cutting-edge science is done in English, and/or translated into that language for international divulgation, what flows back out from the center to the periphery is ‘old’ or established knowledge, knowledge that is no longer contentious and under negotiation, but which has been absorbed into the repertoire of the discipline as established ‘fact,’ to be transmitted for educational purposes in the form of textbooks and encyclopedias, or as popularizations for the general public (Wright, 2011, Section 17.5). This conversion of expert knowledge into a form that is accessible to a less specialized public is also a translational process that has recently begun to fall under the remit of Translation Studies, as will be explained further below. Let us now move on to look at the origins of the nominalized grammar that lies at the heart of contemporary SciTech discourse, for which we have to go back in time to Antiquity.

Antiquity: the two paradigms One of the greatest translation ventures in the ancient world was undoubtedly connected to the Library of Alexandria, that remarkable center of Hellenistic learning that flourished between the fourth and second centuries BCE. Probably founded by Ptolemy I (Soter), one of Alexander the Great’s generals, and entrusted to Demetrius of Phaleron, former tyrant of Athens, and student of Aristotle, it aimed to gather together all the knowledge of the known world, and by translating it into Greek, thereby bring those peoples into the purview of the Hellenistic world. In such contexts, the translation of knowledge is, therefore, a form of ‘cultural imperialism’ (Macleod, 2004, p. 3), undertaken in the service of power, not just to glorify a powerful ruler but to pragmatically appropriate the knowledge of the subjects in order to better rule over them. In fact, the very claim that the wisdom of such vastly different peoples (and we should not forget that the Hellenistic empire extended from Egypt to the border of India) could be rendered unproblematically in Greek was itself an ideological statement that produced negative reactions amongst some of the communities absorbed into it (Assmann, 1996, pp. 28–31), not unlike the affirmations of untranslatability that have arisen recently in relation to English (Apter, 2013). One of the most famous of the translation ventures undertaken under the auspices of the Library was the project, recounted first in the pseudepigrapha Letter of Aristeas (c. 130 BCE), 446

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to render the wisdom of the Jews into Greek – the project that became the Septuagint. According to Aristeas, seventy-two Jewish elders were invited by Ptolemy II (Philadelphus) to Alexandria in order to undertake the translation of the Jewish bible, which they completed, on the island of Pharos, in a space of seventy-two days. This would have widespread repercussions on the philosophical history of the west. The very act of rendering Jewish thought in Greek helped bring about a philosophical fusion of Judaism with Greek philosophy, which, for some, produced the syncretism that is Christianity (e.g. Fredriksen, 2000).7 But this was not the only kind of knowledge to be stored, and indeed produced in Alexandria. The Library was particularly rich in scientific works (anatomy, physics, medicine, mathematics, astronomy) by figures such as Hippocrates (460–c. 370 BCE), Aristotle (384–322 BC), Euclid (323–283 BCE), Aristarchus (310–230 BCE), Archimedes (c. 287–c. 212 BCE) and Eratosthenes (c. 280–194 BCE); indeed, it was much more than a mere repository as scholars were encouraged to come there from all over the Hellenistic world to develop new knowledge for the glory of the Ptolemies. However, many of these scientific works were lost to the west for centuries, and the story of their disappearance and subsequent recovery is one of the great narratives of translation history. But before delving into the story of that great translation enterprise, let us look more closely at the kinds of knowledge that circulated in Ancient Greece more generally. The distinction is often made in this context between mythos and logos, which I shall consider here as two discourses or ways of processing the world, the first ‘traditional, narrative, anthropocentric,’ the second ‘more progressive, logical, mechanical’ (Most, 1999, p. 25). Until recently, the conventional view of the relationship between these two modes was that mythos was an older, more primitive way of thinking, which gave way to a more rational and sophisticated understanding (logos) over the course of the sixth to the third centuries BCE. This assessment was due in part to the depreciative use of the term mythos by important figures of antiquity, such as Plato, Plutarch, Crates and St Paul, who employed it to distinguish false belief from rational thought (or, in the last case, from truth [alétheia]), as well as, in modern times, to a ‘Whiggish’ view of history wedded to the grand narrative of progress. The consequence of this was that mythos acquired the connotations of irrationality, superstition, and ultimately falsehood. Today, however, the tendency is to see the two modes as complementary ways of looking at the world with mythos understood as representing embedded, embodied knowledge (Buxton, 1999). What is more, they were by no means clearly separate, as pre-Socratic philosophers like Heraclitus or Crato presented complex materialistic arguments in the form of epic poems, while Plato used modes of reasoning that partook of mythos even as he strove to discredit it (Murray, 1999). As for logos, this was an incredibly complex notion with multiple strands of meaning deriving from the various contexts (philosophical, political, religious) in which it was used. However, what interests us here was the sense given to it by Plato in his dialogue Gorgias in which it becomes synonymous with rigorous statement or reasoning (Cassin et al., 2014, p. 584), a quality associated with philosophy, as opposed to rhetoric, which is described as ‘alogon’ (devoid of reason). More specifically, it refers to ‘discourse as argumentation,’ particularly when opposed to mythos which is ‘discourse as narration’ (idem). One of the most significant manifestations of logos in Greek and Hellenistic times was in the form of scientific and mathematical treatises, which were clearly the ancestors of our modern scientific genres. It was in such texts that the first steps were taken in the creation of the abstract technical discourse that we understand today as the discourse of science. Halliday and Martin (1993, p. 12) describe how Greek and Hellenistic scientists, and especially mathematicians, basically exploited the potential in Greek for transforming verbs and adjectives into nouns in order to generate ‘ordered sets of technical terms, abstract entities which had 447

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begun as the names of processes or of properties, like motion, weight, sum, revolution, distance’ and then extended the nominal group with embedded clauses and prepositional phrases in order to generate complex specifications of bodies and figures (e.g. the ‘square on the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle’). These resources were then transported into first Latin, and then the vernaculars, by a process of calquing, undertaken in the act of translation, and form the basis of our technical terminology in English today. However, the process of transmission was by no means as straightforward as Halliday and Martin’s brief account would suggest. By the second century BCE, for reasons that had clearly got to do with the expansion of the state and the need for verbal skills in different civic domains, the education system in the Hellenistic world was dominated by the study and teaching of rhetoric, which gave priority not to the quest for absolute ‘truth’ (that was the domain of philosophy) but to the practical skills needed to function in society. Knowledge was now construed as culturally embedded and variable, with the most important priority being adaptation to the needs and understanding of the target audience. Hence, this period saw an explosion in handbooks, in which scientific knowledge on a variety of subjects was summarized and compiled, 8 as well as the production of what today we might consider to be literary works on scientific themes.9 Under the Roman Republic, this process of the popularization/literarization of science, if anything, intensified. The handbook tradition proliferated,10 while the more literary reworkings were translated and retranslated into Latin with successive losses of technical rigor. Cicero’s translation of Aratus’s Phaenomena, of which only fragments have come down to us, offers an insight into the linguistic processes involved. Montgomery (2000, pp. 38–45) tells us how, in accordance with his famous strategy of ‘translating like an orator’ (i.e. prioritizing elegance and fluency, in order to create the desired effect on the target reader), the Greek abstractions were rendered using everyday Latin words that would be easily understood, often taken from the vocabulary of religion,11 or by new coinages that were eminently poetic in nature;12 and there was no attempt to retain technical specificity by translating the same term in the same way each time. Instead, a proliferation of different words would be used in the interests of stylistic elegance, though producing a loss of precision. 13 In short, the Romans do not seem to have been interested in scientific knowledge for its own sake. Instead, what remained of Hellenistic science was appropriated for practical purposes or entertainment, and in the specific case of astronomy, downgraded to astrology or used as a source of moral philosophy about the origins of the universe (Montgomery, 2000, p. 39).14 However, this was not the only route by means of which Hellenistic science came down to us. Many of the more technical works of the Hellenistic period, such as scientific and mathematical treatises by Eudoxus, Eratosthenes, Hipparchus, Aristarchus and Claudius Ptolemy, not to mention the more scientific works of Aristotle, and medical corpora of Hippocrates and Galen, had a much more convoluted chain of transmission, absorbing all manner of influences on the way, before eventually re-emerging in Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. This story will be recounted in the next section.

The Medieval period: Translatio studii In Medieval Europe, all learning was subsumed into the Christian worldview. According to this, heaven and earth were continuous, with human history echoing or prefiguring the cosmic.15 As for the physical world, this was approached as a text (the ‘Book of Nature’) which could be read in the same way as the ‘Book of Scripture’ (Tanzella-Nitti, 2005), that is to say, as a symbolic code of non-verbal signifiers, to be interpreted by readers skilled in perceiving similitudes. 448

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The project of translatio studii, mentioned in the Introduction, was based on the a ssumption that anything that was worth knowing had been discovered before by the ancients. Framed by the Christian narrative of the approaching end-days (Le Goff, 1988, pp. 165–172; Stierle, 1996), it accompanied the translation of empire from east to west and was a narrative of decline. With God as the source of all knowledge, the implication was that there would be a gradual loss of energy the further away one got in time and in space. Paradoxically to modern ears, in the centuries after the fall of Rome, translatio was a purely intralingual exercise, conducted exclusively in Latin with a view to reinforcing Latinity and protecting it against encroachments (Copeland, 1991, pp. 65–86). It involved primarily exegesis and commentary on the works of the great auctores of antiquity, whether in the form of systematic explanations of texts given by the schoolmasters in the monastic schools, who would introduce intratextual glosses and paraphrases on copies of ancient texts, or the production of textual commentaries/new manuscripts devoted to elucidating and developing the arguments of the ancients. By the eighth and ninth centuries, however, it had become necessary to teach bilingually, and it is at this point that interlingual translation first enters the picture. Study materials from Old English and Germanic monastic schools show the texts of the Classical auctores being glossed and explained in the vernacular (Copeland, 1991, pp. 87–126), and it is this (Copeland suggests) that provides the link between Latin exegesis and fully-fledged vernacular translation Unlike the modern understanding of translation, there was little sense of a semantic invariant or equivalence, that is, the notion that there was some transcendental ‘meaning’ that would somehow remain the same. Instead, the ancient knowledge tended to be adapted to the new environment in a pragmatic fashion, with a selection of what was deemed to be most useful. What is more, most of the actual translational activity that took place in the Medieval period was not conceptualized as ‘translation’ in the modern sense at all, but as either textual exegesis or rhetorical inventio (Copeland, 1991); consequently, the authors of such texts did not consider themselves to be bound by constraints of fidelity, but would expand, delete, modify and comment on the content as they saw fit. Despite the great extent and duration of the European project of translatio studii, what was perhaps the most spectacular feat of knowledge translation to occur in the Medieval period – namely the massive transgeographic, transtemporal and translingual operation that led to the recovery of Hellenistic science – had its focus in the Middle East. As we know, there had been a great flowering of science and philosophy in the latter years of the Greek empire, but much of it had been lost, whether through overwriting of manuscripts, the burning of the Library at Alexandria, or, as seems likely, through the systematic destruction of pagan learning by the Early Christians (Nixey, 2017). Certainly, by the sixth century CE, natural philosophy of all kinds had come to be viewed as a threat to Christianity, and when the Byzantine Emperor Justinian ordered the closing of the philosophical schools in CE 529, scholars that wished to continue studying philosophers such as Aristotle had to flee eastward. The main linchpins in this process were the famous House of Wisdom in Baghdad (the great center of learning founded by the Abbasids in the late eighth century to which scholars flocked from all over the Middle East and beyond, and where scientific, philosophical and literary texts from a variety of different sources were translated into Arabic) and the so-called School of Toledo in Spain (which, in two distinct phases in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, rendered the learning of the Arabs into first Latin then Castilian). However, the process was rather more complex than this summary account might suggest. Though the scholars at Baghdad worked directly from some Greek texts, much of the philosophical and scientific learning of the Hellenistic world came to them indirectly in Syriac or Persian, having been 449

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taken to centers such as Edessa and Jundishapur by Nestorian scholars fleeing persecution in Constantinople.16 As for the School of Toledo, this may not have been a single unified establishment, but was rather a loose network of scholars from all over Europe,17 answerable in the first phase to Archbishop Raymond of Toledo and in the second, to the King Afonso X. What is more, it was not the only place on the Mediterranean coast to engage in such activity. Many other places in Spain, southern France and particularly Sicily took advantage of their Arabic-speaking populations to produce Latin, and in some cases, vernacular translations of Arab knowledge (Grant, 1996, pp. 18–32; Pym, 2000). The rediscovery of these lost Hellenistic texts brought profound political and social consequences, providing the impulse for what is known today as the Twelfth Century Renaissance. As European scholars came into contact with Greek, Arab and Judaic thought on mathematics and astronomy, and particularly, Aristotelian metaphysics, a new attitude to scholarship emerged that tried to reconcile these accounts with Christian trinitarian theology. Known as Scholasticism because of its origins in the cathedral schools, this became the basis of university education from the eleventh through to the seventeenth centuries.18 Despite its interest in natural philosophy, Scholasticism nevertheless remained a very language-oriented pursuit: its method of choice was dialectic reasoning (disputatio), grounded in Aristotle’s Categories which were themselves verbal configurations (all the possible things that can be the subject or the predicate of a proposition), and, even Nature was conceptualized as a book to be read and interpreted, as we have seen. Indeed, the emancipation of natural philosophy from the Christian worldview, which took several centuries to complete, arguably began with a dispute about who was best qualified to translate the Book of Nature. Paracelsus (1493–1541), proclaiming the independence of the Book of Nature from the Book of Scripture, argued that it was the natural scientist, rather than the theologian, that had the necessary competence, while for Galileo (1564–1642), it was the mathematician (Tanzella-Nitti, 2005, p. 243). Indeed, Galileo’s famous passage from The Assayer reads today like a manifesto for intersemiotic translation: Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze. But the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and read the letters in which it is composed. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles and other geometric figures without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it; without these, one wanders about in a dark labyrinth. (Galileo, The Assayer, 1623, as cited in Tanzella-Nitti, 2005, p. 243) For modern scientists, brought up on the image of an inert universe that is static, lifeless, and devoid of intentionality, this statement needs to be read metaphorically, or at least understood as a rhetorical concession to the theocentric vision that Galileo was struggling against. Only now, in the context of the emergent paradigm of eco-translation, described by Cronin (2017) and Marais (2019), might we actually begin to take more literally the proposal of actually translating from the natural world (see below).

Early modern period: the emergence of modern science The onset of modernity was defined above all by the opening-up of the European world to new geographical spaces in the wake of the various voyages of discovery that began to be traced from the fifteenth century onwards, first by the Portuguese and Spanish, and later 450

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by the Dutch, English and French, and this produced a flood of new knowledge about the exotic places, foreign peoples and their languages and customs, and of course the natural world. Translation (including indirect translation) played an important role in mediating these encounters (Di Biase, 2006), and compilations19 soon began to appear which filtered and adapted the voyagers’ accounts to suit particular target publics, often (at least in the first phase) with little concern for factual accuracy.20 Translation was also fundamental to the next big epistemological revolution to shake the western world and which would have far-reaching effects on the social and cultural panorama of the day. Renaissance Humanism not only acquired its impetus from the rediscovery and translation of Greek manuscripts that were beginning to be unearthed in libraries across Italy and beyond, it also had a massive effect on the way that translation itself was conceptualized. Amongst other things, there was, during the period, a gradual narrowing of the field covered by the term translatio,21 a shift from a predominantly vertical to a horizontal understanding of translation (Stierle, 1996), and the replacement of the narrative of decline implicit in the translatio studii model with a new narrative of progress,22 effectively launching modernity. Although Renaissance Humanism was also a language-based field of study, which privileged Rhetoric as a vital skill for civic society, its attitude to texts was very different from that of the Scholastics. Above all, there was a shift away from the theocentric approach to knowledge to one that placed humanity firmly at the center.23 Particularly significant was the development of philological techniques for the study of ancient texts, largely to serve the translation process. Philology (understood as the systematic examination of language in context) involved methods that we would today associate with paleography, historical linguistics and literary criticism. It was applied to the various Greek and Latin manuscripts that began to be unearthed, above all, preparing them for translation by attempting to create a trustworthy source text out of the multiple versions that often existed. One of the effects of this philological turn was to de-monumentalize works that medieval scholars had considered sacred by exposing their historicity and the (often complex) conditions of their production and transmission. This was already controversial when applied to the Classical auctores,24 but when Erasmus applied the same humanistic techniques to the Bible, it provoked an upheaval of seismic proportions. By calling into question the monumentality of Jerome’s Vulgate, which had been the Church’s version of the Word of God for a thousand years, it opened the gates to a host of other vernacular translations. This then paved the way for that massive upheaval that was the Protestant Reformation, a revolution with consequences for translation, as well as in the social, cultural, political and economic spheres. I have argued elsewhere (Bennett, 2018; 2019; forthcoming) that the Protestant idea that God should and could be accessed directly by the believer via prayer and scripture, without the mediation of priests, icons or rituals, was also significant for translation theory in that it represented the triumph of what Derrida (1998, pp. 20–24) would call the ‘transcendental signified’ over performative or iconic forms of meaning. Rooted in an extreme form of Platonism (Brett, 1999, pp. 19), it meant that the translation now became utterly equivalent to the source text to the extent that ‘the TL reader should not be aware that he or she is reading a translation: it is the Bible, the Holy Scriptures, God’s Word, not an artificial verbal construct at some remove from the original’ (Robinson, 1991, p. 67). It is no coincidence that the scientists of the Royal Society, who were overwhelmingly Protestant (Merton, 2001), were operating under a very similar imperative. With their motto nullius in verba, they asserted the existence of a physical world prior to and independent of language, which was susceptible to observation and experiment, and could be described using a plain and simple style of discourse that was mathematical in its precision.25 In fact, it was 451

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they that first began to develop the facility of nominalization that forms the basis of English academic discourse today, which not only crystallized processes into things but also removed any trace of the subjective observer (Halliday & Martin, 1993, pp. 57–68). As for the role played by translation in the construction of modern science, this is currently under investigation in a major project being carried out at the Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz, 26 which is studying (amongst other things) the tension between scientific universalism and the ‘nationalization’ of knowledge cultures as represented by the various scientific academies that were springing up at this time. However, in a context where Latin was giving way to the vernaculars, and in which scientists and philosophers from different countries were eager to participate in the long-distance ‘Republic of Letters’ that was such a feature of Enlightenment society, we can be sure that there were a great many translations of scientific works into and between the vernaculars, both for scholarly purposes (i.e. for presentation at the scientific academies or publication in their journals)27 and for more amateur audiences. In both cases, they were often indirect, with French acting as an important pivot language, and involved a surprising number of women,28 who were important mediators of scientific knowledge at this time. The process by means of which Western Science gradually moved to the center of the world system is a narrative of colonization, also implemented through translational mechanisms, and sustained by changes in the prevailing power structures. Between the seventeenth and the twentieth centuries, shifts from predominantly rural to urbanized industrial societies, and the rise of a new privileged class – the bourgeoisie above the old feudal landowning classes – meant that the kind of knowledge that could increase production and wealth would come to be prized over and above more traditional knowledges. In fact, it was most certainly science’s connections with technology, industry and ultimately capitalism which gave it the status it now enjoys. Today, the so-called STEM subjects (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) are prioritized in universities around the western world, privileged in terms of funding and institutional structures, and endowed with superior cognitive status. The research conducted in these fields circulates in English, in fact, is mostly produced directly in that language, limiting the amount of translation that is required.29 Consequently, most of the academic translation that takes place today is in the humanities and humanistic wings of the social sciences (Sapiro, 2018, pp. 59–60), with science translation limited to technical applications (such as reports for manufacturing purposes or guidelines for users), popularizations and educational genres (Wright, 2011: Section 17.5.2).

Contemporaneity: science’s others This final section of my chapter looks at Science’s Others, by which I mean all forms of knowledge that have been sidelined and/or deprived of cognitive authority (Santos, 2016) in the modern era as Western Science gradually rose to the hegemonic status that it has today. They include not only Humanities subjects (which C.P. Snow in 1959 claimed ‘ruled the western world’ but are today very much the poor relations of the academy), but also more peripheral knowledges, such as the indigenous knowledges of the global south, and prescientific knowledges, like astrology and alchemy that were systematically discredited as modern science gradually defined itself across the course of the seventeenth century. Humanistic learning has (as we have seen) a long pedigree. With its roots in Classical rhetoric, it held sway at the center of the Western system for long periods in Antiquity and the Early Modern period and formed the basis of the educational system to which the elites had 452

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access right up until the middle of the twentieth century. Since then, however, humanities subjects have, in most of the developed world, been systematically disadvantaged in terms not only of funding but also of cognitive status, in that they ‘have to worry about whether they are being “scientific,” whether they are entitled to think of their conclusions, no matter how carefully argued, as worthy of the term “true”’ (Rorty, 1991, p. 35). Consequently, it is no surprise that, in the Anglophone world at least, humanities subjects have gradually allowed themselves to be colonized by the empirical methods and objective nominalized discourse of the sciences. Between the last decade of the twentieth century and the second decade of the twenty first, we saw the reification in English of a plain style of humanities writing that embodied positivism in its very structure30 and was a world away from the much more elaborate emotive discourse beloved of the Renaissance humanists and their successors in the contemporary Romance and other cultures. The discursive décalage that this produced meant that such foreign texts could, in some cases, only be rendered successfully in English if the translator made alterations so profound that they effectively destroyed the epistemological infrastructure of the text – a form of epistemicide (Bennett, 2007). Given the status of English as the lingua franca of scholarship and the pressures upon foreign scholars to publish in international peer-reviewed journals, it appeared, by the mid-2010s, that we were heading toward an epistemological monoculture as noxious as the crop monocultures devastating the natural environment (Bennett, 2015). Even high-profile canonical authors were swept into this vortex. Bruno Bettelheim tells of the transformation undergone by Siegmund Freud, whose rich literary language was replaced in English by technical-sounding coinages, making him seem ‘abstract, depersonalized, highly theoretical, erudite and mechanized – in short “scientific”’ (1984, p. 5). Lawrence Venuti, studying Arthur Goldhammer’s translation of Alain Corbin’s Village des Cannibales, also argues that, by recasting Corbin’s writing in a recognizable English academic style, Goldhammer effectively imposes ‘the philosophical code of empiricism’ upon the text (2010, p. 76). Similar transformations have been attested in relation to the English translations of Hegel (Charleston, 2018) and Adorno (Baumgarten, 2018). Not all foreign authors have been domesticated in translation; however, given the general lack of tolerance for alternative discourses in Anglophone culture, the use of a foreignizing strategy may have directly conditioned the way those authors were received. Michel Foucault’s translators, for example, mostly stuck very closely to the structure and cadences of Foucault’s own (long and complex) sentences, making few or no concessions to the target reader’s knowledge and expectations, and as a result, this author comes across as much more transgressive and strange in English than he ever was in his mother tongue. The extent to which this accounts for Foucault’s somewhat polarized reception 31 in the English-speaking world is discussed in my 2014 article ‘Foucault in English.’ However, since the second decade of the twenty-first century, the domination of Anglophone values in the production and transfer of knowledge seems to have attenuated to some extent. The very fact that most of the gatekeepers of international academic culture (the journal editors, peer-reviewers, etc.) are speakers of English as an Additional Language has meant that English Academic Discourse (EAD) has slowly acquired, through translational processes, features that are alien to native speakers; this situation was then formalized with the appearance of ELF (English as a Lingua Franca) – a variety of English dominated by non-native speaker rhetorical patterns (Mauranen, 2012) – and more recently the multior translingual paradigm (Pennycook, 2007; Blommaert, 2010; Canagarajah, 2013), within which ‘translanguaging’ (Garcia & Wei, 2014) has become an acceptable practice. A second 453

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impulse for change has also come from inside the language itself, with some of the biggest names in EAD scholarship calling for an opening up of the discourse to allow for productive forms of experimentation (e.g. Swales, 2017). Today, even the manuals teaching academic writing, particularly in the humanities and qualitative social sciences, are much more tolerant of alternative practices than they were a decade or so ago,32 which of course makes the whole process of translating into that language a lot less fraught than it used to be. Before moving on to look at non-western forms of knowledge, let us briefly consider another form of knowledge translation that has been particularly successful in the contemporary context, namely the ‘potted’ format – that is to say, accounts of scholarly works that are abridged and explained, whether for students or the general public. This is a highly domesticated form of translation, which aims to simplify the philosophers’ arguments and present them in a way that the target public can easily understand, often using a lively personal style that engages directly with the reader. Other forms of popularization, today considered to be ‘inter-epistemic’ translations after Robinson (2017, pp. 200–203), include compilations, students’ notes, literary works on philosophical or scientific themes, articles in general interest magazines or websites, picturebooks and television documentaries and films, now themselves the object of study by translation scholars. Finally, let us return to the term ‘epistemicide’, used above in relation to the translation of humanities texts in the global context, but which was coined originally by Portuguese sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos to describe a much more drastic form of epistemological occlusion, namely the fate suffered by the indigenous knowledges of the global South, which are so eclipsed and marginalized that they are barely accorded the status of ‘knowledge’ at all. Developed most fully in his 2016 work Epistemologies of the South: Justice against Epistemicide (2016, pp. 212–236), Santos proposes combatting the epistemicide caused by the hegemony of western science through a strategy of ‘intercultural translation,’ which works toward the ‘ecologies of knowledge’ necessary to achieve ‘cognitive justice’ (2016, pp. 188–211). With his team, Santos has already attempted to put this ethical mission into practice with projects such as Reinventing Social Emancipation: Voices of the World (2008)33 and ALICE – Strange Mirrors, Unsuspected Lessons: Leading Europe to a New Way of Sharing the World Experiences (2011–2016),34 multi-phase translational projects that have sought, amongst other things, to bring the knowledge of indigenous peoples to the attention of the west. Of course, social anthropologists have also been concerned for a long time with translating epistemologies, and have developed notions such as ‘cultural translation’ (Asad, 1986), ‘thick translation’ (Appiah, 1993) and ‘perspectivist translation’ (Viveiros de Castro, 2004) to describe processes that go beyond the mere linguistic to include the entire network of symbolic relations giving meaning to a group’s interactions and practices. In recent years, their debate has developed emancipatory contours not unlike those promoted by Santos, with attempts to not only translate ‘the “native’s” practical and discursive concepts into the terms of anthropology’s conceptual apparatus’ (Viveiros de Castro, 2004, pp. 4–5) but to also make visible the differences between them ‘since we and they are never talking about the same things’ (Idem, p. 7). It is significant that both Santos (2016, p. 216) and Viveiros de Castro (2004, p. 5) invoke Walter Benjamin’s ‘Task of the translator’ (1923) in their discussion of what constitutes an effective translation. For Benjamin, translatability is ‘the acknowledgment of a difference and the motivation to deal with it’ (Santos, 2016, p. 216); 35 consequently, a good translation ‘is one that allows the alien concepts to deform and subvert the translator’s conceptual toolbox so that the intentio of the original language can be expressed within the new one’ (Viveiros de Castro, 2004, p. 5). Thus, for both of these authors, translation is above all a device for 454

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raising awareness of the fact that no one form of knowledge is complete in itself but exists in a complementary relationship to all others. Recently, Translation Studies itself has awoken to the absolute centrality of translational processes in the creation and transfer of knowledge with a series of publications heralding the onset of a new paradigm in our field. The first of these, Piotr Blumczynski’s Ubiquitous Translation (2017), pointed out the fundamental role played by translation in philosophy, theology, linguistics and anthropology, while Douglas Robinson’s Translationality (2017) focused on translational medicine and the medical humanities. Other important works announcing the expansion of TS into other domains include Gentzler’s Translation and Rewriting in the Age of Post-Translation Studies (2017), Bassnett and Johnston’s (2019) Outward Turn, and Marais’ Translation Beyond Translation Studies (2022). Even more radical are Michael Cronin’s proposal for a ‘post-humanist ecology of translation’ (Eco-Translation, 2017) and Kobus Marais’ (2019) (Bio)semiotic Theory of Translation, both of which extend translational practice far beyond the anthropocentric concerns that have dominated the field up till now to potentially include “all translation systems on the planet, all the ways in which information circulates between living and non-living organisms and is translated into a language or a code that can be processed or understood by the receiving entity” (Cronin, 2017, p. 71). Finally, we should not neglect the diachronic aspect – the process by means of which premodern knowledges (‘ensouled’ knowledges, for the most part [Krause, 2018]) were transformed and demoted with the rise of modern science. Postmodern historians such as Hayden White, Michel de Certeau, Alun Munslow and Dominick La Capra have long talked of historiography in translational terms, on the understanding that history is not an objective account of facts occurring in the ‘real’ world, but rather a construct reflecting the values and viewpoints of the historian or the people in power – effectively a ‘translation’ of experienced reality into narrative form. This understanding has recently been systematized by translation scholar M. Carmen África Vidal Claramonte (2018) in her book La traducción y la(s) historia(s) and it will be taken forward in an ongoing book project to be published soon by Bloomsbury (History as a Translation of the Past, edited by Luigi Alonzi). In short, translation is no longer a merely interlinguistic process, limited to the quest for verbal equivalents across geographies and cultures. Instead, it has become once again a dynamic concept with the potential to explain how things change through the modeling of the new upon the old. This is the process that Douglas Robinson calls ‘translationality,’ defined as ‘transformationality: the constant emergingness of everything through embodied, situated, performative interactions’ (2017, p. x). A transdisciplinary concept, it has tremendous potential for straddling the epistemological divides that have produced such cognitive inequalities in our world.

Conclusion Throughout history, the translation of knowledge has taken many forms, depending for the most part on the way that knowledge itself is conceptualized. Scientific and technical knowledge, grounded in mathematics, presumes universals and objectivity, and has attempted to achieve full translatability through the creation of technical grammar and terminology that sustain equivalence through artificial means. Embedded knowledge, on the other hand, whether in the form of Classical mythos or rhetoric, indigenous knowledges or modern humanities scholarship, is much more difficult to transpose since it cannot be easily extracted from the network of signification that gives it sense. The way in which knowledge passes 455

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between each of these two modes is likely to become a major field of interest in Translation Studies in the coming years, along with all the other translational processes that we have identified in this chapter. A word should also be said about how the knowledge developed within our own field of Translation Studies has been influenced by these epistemological debates. The struggle between paradigms has affected the way TS construes itself as a discipline, and the tools, concepts, methods and discourse that it uses in research. At different times, this has been expressed as a conflict between the ‘linguistics’ and ‘cultural studies’ paradigms (Baker, 1996); between ‘essentialist’ and ‘non-essentialist’ approaches (Arrojo, 1998); between ‘instrumental’ and ‘hermeneutic’ theories of language (Venuti, 2000, after Kelly 1979), between ‘empiricism’ and ‘postmodernism’ (Delabastita, 2003) or between the ‘empirical science paradigm’ and the ‘liberal arts paradigm’ (Gile, 2005). Which of these will emerge triumphant in the forthcoming years is still up for debate. Translator training programs, which are concerned primarily with preparing technical and specialized translators for the professional marketplace, remain largely faithful to the scientific paradigm, in that they continue to construe translation narrowly as an interlingual art that aims at some form of equivalence. However, the more academic branch of the discipline has moved on a long way from here, and the projected paradigm shift heralded by Blumcyznksi (2017), Gentzler (2017), Marais (2019, 2022), Cronin (2017) and Bassnett and Johnson (2019), mentioned above, looks set to redefine the field completely, opening it up to new conceptions that not only embrace all forms of communication far beyond the merely linguistic but also understand transformation as an inherent part of the process. To end, I would like to return to the famous quote from Isaac Newton that I cited at the very beginning of this article about standing on the shoulders of giants. We have already discussed at length the extent to which all knowledge is indeed indebted to knowledges that have come before, forms of understanding the world which are bequeathed to us through translational processes. Now I would like to focus on the first part of the statement – the specifically visual aspect (‘If I have seen further…’). It is my contention that translation, broadly understood, offers a lens through which the scientist/philosopher/scholar is enabled to see beyond the current state-of-the-art and envisage potential new terrains waiting just beyond the horizon. The very act of trying to apply what is already known to a new situation or context (which is effectively what translation is about) focuses the attention on what is possible and what isn’t under those new constraints and urges the generation of creative solutions to overcome them. We have seen this happen over and over again throughout history: the Romans and Arabs rewrote Greek knowledge for their own purposes and contexts, and in doing so, took it onto a whole different level; the Scholastics tried to reconcile it with Christianity and created a new investigative method that is still used today in some domains; the Renaissance humanists, more concerned with Greek rhetoric and poetics than with their science, developed philological techniques that helped propel Europe out of the theocentric paradigm into the modern age; and today, our need to grapple with the ecological problems bequeathed by centuries of objectivist thinking is enabling us to envision a whole new form of knowledge that is not predicated on human exceptionalism but takes account of all the other communication systems that exist in the natural world and beyond. As such, it becomes clear that translation is not so much a reproductive act as a generative one; or rather, it is the act of reproducing what is already known in a fresh context that creates the conditions for new knowledge to be constructed. When the rest of the world understands this, it will propel our discipline to a whole new level of relevance and visibility. 456

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Translation Studies, as I have encountered its articulation in China, for example, is often discussed in the context of national brand communication under the broad themes of glocalization, transculturality and cultural hybridity. It is also applied to studies of intercultural communication between different languages in terms of encoding procedures (see, e.g. Ko & Chen, 2015). The Chinese trajectory, however, largely lacks the decoding couplet as that breaks with centralized and linear communication assumptions that require one-to-one sender-receiver correspondences. Much like Translation Studies anywhere, alternative readings or interpretations tend to be unrecognized. This occurs because the paradigm hails the ‘implied reader’ with a directly inferred interpretation as determined by the scholar. In assuming the idealized construct of the ‘implied reader,’ Translation Studies lack the audience/reader/interpreter decoding dimension, that is, how ordinary people interpret – or translate – messages (written, verbal, visual and aural) in terms of their own ontological frameworks and discursive contexts (linguistic, cultural, social, political, religious, etc.). In shifting emphasis from textual encoding as translation between different spoken and written languages, my approach to the topic is to additionally examine translation between different sign systems, what in semiotics is called decoding (interpretation). That is, I have tried in this chapter to maneuver through the discipline of Translation Studies by discussing types of actual reception and associated interpretation that is not implied, projected or assumed by the scholar to be common, or argued should be generic in every interpretation. In other words, how do actual receivers (interpreters, ordinary people) – rather than translators – translate (interpret) what they are reading, viewing and experiencing. An automatic equivalence between different interpretive communities does not always exist. In cross- cultural relations, therefore, translation as a form of cultural mediation plays a significant role in shaping meaning, whether between languages, or between languages and ordinary people who are the target audiences, or in terms of branding a nation (see e.g., Cao et al., 2020). The word mediation points to the role of translators and cultural actors in the transmission of texts and ideas, and to the complex circulation of the latter within receiving communities of interpreters. Mediation involves power struggles between individuals and institutions (Hsiao-yen & Robut, 2014, p. 1). Let me try to illustrate this with reference to a particular event. DOI: 10.4324/9781003161448-28

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In preparing this chapter, I entered the term ‘reception analysis, into my computer’s search function. It popped loose a letter I had written to my dean of humanities dated 22 December 1996. I had forgotten about the skepticism that thesis proposals on reception analysis had once engendered in the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) Humanities Faculty Higher Degree and Research Committee (HDRC). The HDRC encapsulated the locus of institutional intellectual power, dominated as it was by literary, language and translation scholars whose hermeneutic emphasis remained largely concerned with the textual form of a message, novel, or poem. They had questioned studies that would examine TV audience interpretations, in this case, of the exclusively white American soap opera, The Bold and the Beautiful, then the most watched program by black South Africans. In expressing my frustration at the committee’s skepticism when Michele Tager wanted to now elaborate on her Master of Arts (MA) reception analysis in her PhD, my letter highlighted the high value of reception analysis for everyone but some of our UKZN colleagues. Both national and local newspapers had picked up a very short item on her MA study in Sub-Text,1 our occasional student-produced research magazine. These stories led to her being interviewed on public radio, and the Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA) requested a copy of her MA thesis. My letter to the HDRC concluded that: These responses, from popular media, state regulatory bodies, and professionals from prestigious academic fora, suggest that interest in reception analysis of popular TV programmes by ordinary people, broadcasters and regulatory bodies should definitely be on the academic agenda. It was thus not that long ago when reception analysis of soap operas was simply seen to be a populist fad that had no real place in the serious academy. The academy had ring-fenced high culture and textual analysis – the best that is thought and done – primarily for analysis. The indeterminacy of translation that was occurring between three different interpretive communities about the value of the object under the proposed study involved: (a) the student’s supervisor, (b) the HDRC, and (c) the news and regulatory agencies whose remit included popular media. In mediating between the student and the committee I addressed who had the power to determine what is of academic value and what is not. The HDRC did subsequently approve Tager’s proposal, opening new lenses on what was considered worthy of scholarly analysis. This chapter, then, will explain when and how this kind of popular cultural mediation, specifically with regard to media studies, had freed itself from sender-receiver, stimulusresponse models of communication that had prevailed since the 1940s. Reception analysis also marks the moment when cultural studies, the analysis of power relations and the Text-Context relationship, obtained its own identity as the study of how social meaning is made or translated (decoded) by audiences, arising from the regulatory, institutional and structural economic arrangements out of which texts like soap operas arise. Translation Studies is an interdiscipline of multilingual culture mediation that mixes and matches a variety of disciplines. Intersemiotic translation involves the act of translating from one language to another that entails a culturally embedded process, which here includes translation between different representational systems (e.g., linguistic, imaging and sound) and then between those forms of representation and receivers, and further, what meaning those individuals make of these texts. Having been asked to write about reception, these definitions are argued here to be somewhat limiting. I hope to shift away from the current emphasis on the encoding technicalities of translation as well as the transmission component of interpretation. To reiterate, reception analysis as developed within cultural studies rather 464

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focuses on how actual interpreters (individuals, communities, constituencies), themselves interpret messages from within the interpretive frames provided them by their cultural, class, educational, language, ethnic, religious and other dimensions (see, e.g., Morley, 1986). In looking for equivalence between cultural studies and linguistics, I found this early quote that helpfully discusses Translation Studies in this way: One of the cornerstones of the cultural approach in Translation Studies* is criticism of the linguistic approach (see Linguistics and translation**) and of the notion of equivalence as the starting point for a theorization of translation. For Bassnett & Lefevere, translation is primarily contextual. It is a fact of history and a product of the target culture, and as such it cannot be explained through the mapping of linguistic correspondence between languages, or judged with respect to universal standards of quality and accuracy (1990, p. 3). By shifting the focus from language to culture, it was possible to draw on important theoretical developments, such as the Foucauldian notions of ‘power’ and ‘discourse’, and use them to redefine the contexts and conditions of translation. (Marinetti, 2011 p. 26)2 If we are now talking about cultures and contexts, then we need to shift the discussion to how people make sense, the discursive grids through which hey filter and process information. Allied to this are the ways in which they intentionally or unintentionally evade the boundaries of equivalence and direct correspondence. For example, Jacques Derrida (2020), a deconstructionist, questions the inherent sign stability assumed by Ferdinand de Saussure (1959), who was a structural linguist. The instability of a sign occurs when denotation is superseded by associated connotative meanings that may have little to do with the item signified. The form of semiosis occurs when one sign gives rise to another sign, destabilizing the meanings that the sign attracts to itself. Meaning settles when semiosis is terminated. Decoding takes us beyond the cultural turn mentioned by Marinetti in Translation Studies. The encoding/decoding model to be discussed below thus jettisons dyadic Saussurean semiology, to be here replaced with Peircean triadic semiotics. Peirce includes the interpreter and thus the triangular relationship in which meaning is made by individuals and interpretive communities. Multiple kinds and levels of translation exist, not always mediated by a translator, occurring during such transactions of meaning-making and associated sense-making. Semiotics is the method that cultural studies recruited to enable the practice of audience research, whether or not this includes technical translation mechanisms such as captioning, dubbing, or other narratological translation mechanisms used by scriptwriters. The breakthrough article in media studies that enabled the shift from the study of encoding (texts) to audience interpretation of those texts was the seminal encoding-decoding model introduced by Stuart Hall in 1981. This model offered three generic ways in which interpreters make sense of (or interpret, translate) messages: (a) transparent, and intended by the message maker; (b) negotiated, arguing difference; and (c) rejection of the message. This chapter will elaborate on these three categories of interpretation in the context of wider Translation Studies, and then extend them to account for additional dimensions of interpretation and discursive translation.

What is reception research? Amongst the three founding reception theorists are Hans Robert Jauss, Wolfgang Iser and Hans-George Gadamer. Jauss’s aesthetic of reception plays on the prior knowledge and experience of the reader. He argues that ‘the aesthetic implication lies in the fact that the first 465

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reception of a work by the reader includes a test of its aesthetic value in comparison with works already read’ ( Jauss, 1982, p. 20). Iser (1972) distinguishes between the interpretations of the ‘actual’ reader and the ‘implied’ reader. The philosophy of interpretation, generally known as hermeneutics, treats interpretation itself as its de facto subject matter and not necessarily as an auxiliary to the study of something else, like context. Translation Studies retains a strong hermeneutic strand but this is not systematically played through to reception studies. This chapter addresses this conceptual narrowness. Hermeneutics concerns the meaning of interpretation – its basic nature, scope and validity, as well as its place within and implications for human existence, in the context of being and knowing, language and history, art and aesthetic experience. Texts come to life – they are activated – when read and must therefore be studied through the eyes of the reader. This was Richard Hoggart’s starting point in creating British cultural studies in the mid-1950s. He studied popular magazines read by ordinary people, in distinction to the inherited literary canon that studied the best there is. Communities of readers or viewers are not included in this essentially dyadic hermeneutic approach (1957). Hoggart nevertheless faced the same initial skepticism as did Tager regarding the value of such an emphasis on what ordinary people read and watch. Since reception analysis arose out of the study of TV viewers, they were conceived as ‘distant audiences’ (Moores, 2000, p. 27). British audiences were presented with dramatizations of what the world was like, why it had come to be as it was and what should be done about it. Hall argued that viewers, readers and listeners recognized ideologies in the play, and could either accept, negotiate with, or reject what they were viewing. For David Morley (1980), British Broadcasting Corporation’s (BBC’s) Nationwide (1970s), was representative of the Corporation’s tendency to promote middle-class values as national ones, irrespective of its viewers’ different social backgrounds. Testing this assumption among focus groups gathered from a variety of social classes and occupations, Morley encountered varied reactions. Despite these differences, television succeeded in building a national conversation around the middle-class values depicted on screens. Andy Ruddock (2018) thus concludes that the media enjoy the power of accretion. Audiences could reject ideas and messages, but they could during the pre-streaming era do little about the fact that they were presented with the same recurrent representation of the middle class. Audience-research was historically led by the deterministic question, ‘what do the media do to people?’ The period from 1970 onwards however reset the question and delved into issues of interpretation of programs by actual audiences within their everyday lived contexts (Tager & Van de Merwe, 2018, p. 230). Since reception analysis starts from the perspective of the receiver of a message, known in semiotics as the interpreter, it should not be confused with the practice of translator studies, which focus attention on the interpreting mind, the implied reader, between text and listener (see Chesterman, 2009). In media, such a translator would be invisibly inscribed in translating, dubbing and/or captioning texts prior to delivery to the receiver, the experiencing viewer (see, e.g., Jin, 2022). Where the Hall encoding-decoding model admits a variety of interpretants (transparent, negotiated, rejection), 1950s mass society theories, conventional structural-functionalist sociology and Pavlovian-based communication science on which transmission communication models drew for social science legitimacy during the first part of the twentieth century could not account for interpretations that contested or negotiated the dominant ideology. The transmission model’s emphasis on message exchange excludes context or an understanding of the complex relationship between the encoding and decoding ends of the communication chain (Hall, 1980, p. 57). By locating the unit of communication in the message, 466

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these conceptual forays are grounded in part within that very realm of language where representation cannot reside (i.e., electrical signals). In different terms, the text (meaning) of the message is both the subject and the object of the con-text within which representation is knowledge, and within which Science and Literature are incommensurable. Where the seminal Shannon model accounts for electrical signal conveyance, early reception studies focused, not on the signal being transmitted via the technical medium but on how quotidian audiences interpreted and made sense of the content of television programs (Livingstone, 2003, p. 343; Schrøder et al., 2003, p. 148). The initial phase of such audience research alerted scholars to the existence of varying interpretative strategies characteristic of diverse audiences ( Jensen, 1991, p. 137; Livingstone, 2003, p. 343). Another question was, ‘How do socially differentiated readers produce readings of a text within a cultural context?’ (Bertrand & Hughes, 2005, p. 41). Reception studies thus add a new layer to the classic Jacobson linguistic schema of: (a) intralingual translation, or ‘rewording’ – ‘an interpretation of verbal signs by means of other signs of the same language; (b) interlingual translation, or ‘translation proper’ – an interpretation of verbal signs by means of some other system of representation like the visual; and (c) intersemiotic translation, or ‘transmutation’ – ‘an interpretation of verbal signs by means of signs of non-verbal sign systems’ ( Jakobson, 1959, p. 127). For this chapter the intersemiotic is effected via the application of phaneroscopy, the study of everything that is present to the mind or that appears to it, extended to how individuals and sign communities respond physically, emotively and intellectually in terms of class, race, gender and other social categories. These are the provinces of cultural studies that try to understand how people make sense of their conditions, environments and the media (including social media) which, in the postmodern world, are the prime channels that shape social meaning-making. In doing reception studies, to repeat, the emphasis is not on the encoding of signs in a text, the inter- and intralingual, but on how interpreters (i.e., ordinary people) decode texts and re-make them within their cultural frames of reference. Audience research drawing on reception analysis (interpretation within sign or interpretive communities) examines the nature of the encounter between readers/interpreters and messages. There is a translation (in my much broader terms than the field usually delimits) going on depending on the context of reception and interpretation – for example, the noisy living room when watching TV, the individualist spectator in the cinema, the crowd at a cricket match or browsers switching between hand-held screen devices even while simultaneously involved in all of the above and more. Mental texts are being made and remade all the time as a result of these switching activities. Overlaid on these respective receiver experiences are the meta discourses of race, ethnicity, class and ideology, religion, gender, education and so on. In order to escape absolute relativism, the cultural studies exponent has to recognize that this posit of Being (within the communicative encounter) is always there (i.e., present) for a community of discourse. It follows that this thereness is in a world, and that this world involves commonality-in-the-encounter for all who are-there in the encounter. The multiplicity of experiences in the encounter and the consequent potential for intelligibility about it varies in accordance, so to speak, with the cultural community of those who are-there. Where the Quinean ethnographic encounter occurs, radical translation and its indeterminacy are a function or consequence of the different experiences that constitute the subjectivities of, for example, the ‘native’ and the ‘ethnographer.’ My chapter is thus located in that indeterminate space where translation ends, and reception starts. If receivers are also translators (i.e., decoders) of texts, even if informally so, then my argument hopefully holds. 467

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In any such radical cross-cultural encounter, the subject who is strange to the thereness of the community for whom the already-there is every day, will be at an interpretative disadvantage. This is why conceptual innovators like audience researchers initially met with peer skepticism. These scholars were shifting the ground, the object of the analysis, from the produced text (the encoded content) to the interpreter (who responds to received texts), translated into the mental interpretants of interpreted texts. The previous conceptual power brokers for whom translation was simply a matter of linguistics, were now challenged by a new mediation that relocates meaning-making with individual receivers who generated their own mental texts from what they were reading or viewing. The cultural turn in Translation Studies thereby bypassed the scholar/interpreter/researcher as the sole authenticated arbiter of encoded meaning. To get a handle on this shift, first, we need to understand Peirce’s concept of phaneroscopy, the formal analysis of appearance, that is, of how things appear to interpreters, whether or not they are verifiably real. My example will be President Donald Trump. The question to be analyzed: Was the insurrection at Capitol Hill, Washington DC, on January 6, 2021, real, or was it a constructed figment of the Democratic Party’s and CNN’s fertile imaginations, irrespective of the visually demonstrable, aural and court evidence imaged in newscasts?

Phaneroscopy (the wide angle, depth of field, lens) Phaneroscopy was Peirce’s approach to phenomenology, important for understanding realism. Humans tend to accept that all that can be known of phenomena is that which appears to us. In the rationalist tradition of nominalism this entails an epistemological interpretation – or translation – on the basis that what appears is only understandable in terms of the categories of an experiencing mind. For Peirce, experience occurs for some signifying agent as a relation between that agent and the realities of the environs within which the experience occurs. Thus, there is a reality proper to dreams in the environment of the dreaming of them, and this makes that kind of experience as real as any other. What constitutes experience for Peirce is not the appearance, that which is experience-for-us, but the appearing that the environment offers to us. The possibility of correspondence with anything that may not be real is not a mere tip of the hat to dreams, apparitions, or hallucinations. Phaneroscopy entails a serious attempt to account for the different modes of being or ontologies that are operative in the universe. It makes room for distinguishing that which is present to the mind in a public forum (the social), from that which is present to the individual (scholar) only, and in the meaning projected by the scholar on the implied reader. The framework of phaneroscopy accounts, in other words, for the distinction between the consequences of that which Peirce classed as ‘fixation of belief by tenacity’ at one extreme, and ‘fixation of belief by learning from experience’ at the other (Peirce in Hartshorne & Weiss, 1931, para. 377). The skopein of phaneroscopy is thus an invitation to examine what is present to anybody there, as distinct from an assertion of the presence of something that is not (or, more correctly, may not be) immediately accessible to other minds. Translation becomes the mediating link between different minds. Phaneroscopy anchors Peirce’s ensuing analysis of ‘indirect knowledge’ of reality, that is, encounters within which people make sense of their worlds. Encounters entail several possible experiences or translations between an interpreter and an event or situation, hence the Democratic-led Congress set up an investigation following Joe Biden’s election as President in 2021. The investigation aimed to find out what actually happened, how it came about and who was responsible. It was, however, unable to elicit support from most Congressional 468

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Republicans who denied the illegitimacy of such mob actions, and who refused to cooperate with the investigation. The phaneron pre-exists the sign. Phaneron (plural, Phanera) denotes any object that any person is immediately aware of, where I take object in the most general sense to denote anything that can receive a name, and meaning by ‘immediately’ in this connexion that he does not infer or suspect it because of his being aware of something else, but just is aware of it, without any ‘because’ at all... (Peirce in Hartshorne & Weiss, 1931–1935, pp. 18–19) For example, the Republican central idea is that big government is ‘bad,’ and Republican discourse generates signs, the linguistic vehicles through which that general experience of suspicion and victimhood becomes intelligible. The phaneron involves the interpretations of both producers (conceived texts, the encoding function) and viewers/reader (perceived texts, the realm of decoding, ideological framing) into a total framework of meaning. The associated preexistent social texts assumed ‘The Big Steal’ by Joe Biden of the election.3 These variegated structural processes of sense-making imply both the demythologization and radicalization of knowledge, transcending, thereby the limits and limitations of metaphysical, linear, uni-focal modeling. Accepting nonsense as valid in spite of the provable facts has become known as the post-Truth condition. The post-truth regime that was heralded by the rise of Trump in 2016 involves a set of aberrant discourses within which some key categories of modernity have been jettisoned by anti-science, anti-truth and counter-ideological constituencies that cohered around Trump’s classification of the world into those who support him as the bearers of (his) Truth. Opposing him were the courts, the Democratic Party and the news media like CNN, which checked facts, figures and evidence before reporting them, while critically engaging and explaining the aberrant interpretations. For Trump, the latter constituencies were demonized as engaging in ‘fake’ news, and he excommunicated them as social deviants. What has thus been lost from the logical argument is that of truth as correspondence, truth as verification and truth as sincerity. The truth of legitimation has replaced these prior three truths (Lorusso, 2020). However, as always, the focus must include the study of power, who has the power to determine meaning, and how that meaning is authorized. Yet, the claim to open-endedness, flexibility, and multi-dimensionality in researching and interpreting remains necessary. Americans in particular since Trump have fractured into starkly opposing sign communities, each with its own sets of ‘facts’ and discourses of legitimation. For the scientifically inclined interpretive social community, facts, evidence and verifiability remain valid, while for the other, unvalidated assertions and wild claims that take on the discursive force of myth (connotations that have become dominant) are conferred veracity only if they issue from the utterer (Trump) who has authorized himself to make these bizarre claims and who himself authorizes Republican candidates who repeat them as self-evidently transparent. Semiotics differs fundamentally from the study of communication. Where communication theory discusses the transmission of messages (as in telephone signals), semiotics examines how meaning is made by both encoders and decoders. And this is where, historically, analytical problems first occurred, as transmission, content, meaning-making, reception and effects, became jumbled, resulting in assumptions about viewers as simply being couch potatoes (or implied readers) unable to behave as active audiences in negotiating meaningmaking. One should not mix categories from one end of the chain to the other for an analysis of a transmission chain to be consistent: if the medium is technological, then for completeness both Communicator and Receiver need to be of the same technological order. 469

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My argument is that the conflation of technical transmission with content and interpretation constitutes a theory inside a mistake. This is why we need to examine this mistake in more detail below.

Communication studies (the transmission model) Communication studies textbooks usually source communication theory from Claude Shannon’s (1948) mathematical model that explained how signals are transmitted through telephone lines. The many models that were subsequently derived by social scientists from the original Shannon model are modifications of the establishing 1948 concept. This transmission model assumes a direct encoding-decoding relation, a translation of semantic equivalence, where the intention of the message maker is (transparently) interpreted exactly by the interpreting individual. In Shannon’s (1948, p. 3) own words, the fundamental problem of communication ‘is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point... the significant aspect is that the actual message is one selected from a set of possible messages.’ How reception analysis came to question this adapted signal model will be explained below. The section that follows will focus on the decoding aspect as enabled by CS Peirce’s theory of interpretants, and how these have informed reception and audience research. The Shannon encoding-led transmission model (in whichever guise) was implicitly dominant in hermeneutics during the 1990s (see Lategan, 1992), which tended to be text-based, lacking the dimension of interpreters other than the scholar himself who was assumed to be the authenticating interpreter. The shift from hermeneutic reception studies, through the conceptual prism of translation, partially opened the door to new approaches in cultural and media studies that could now include what Peirce termed sign (or interpretive) communities. Shannon-derived transmission definitions of communication, however, remain dominant in, for example, strategic and organizational communication, which derive from marketing and organizational psychology. The transmission model continues to underpin various positivist trajectories of communication studies, propaganda techniques and marketing, advertising and management (see Tomaselli, 2018, Chapter 14). Many phenomena do include a translational dimension that can be better understood when receiver contexts (gender, class, culture, language, religion, etc.) are taken into account. Where early communication models often confused signal (transmission) with a message (content), they could not account for the interpretive dimension (reception), though much emphasis has been focused on the mechanism of translation. The missing link was the study of how meaning is made by message receivers. Building on Peirce, translation is the semiotic process of creating relationships between something (representamen/sign vehicle) and standing for something else (object) in relation to someone (the interpretant) in some respect. Triadic Peircean semiotics that includes the interpreter differs from dyadic Saussurean semiology that excludes the interpreter (other than the implied scholar). Signs are not merely meaningful as (logical) differences in a system. Being pragmatically intertwined with living organisms, signs are therefore related to the environment of the sign user. It is within such a living environment that reception is best studied, which is not possible in the dualistic Saussurean approach that is restricted to the formal work of language and narrative as was British Screen Theory during the mid-to-late twentieth century. Uniquely authorized and promoted by the journal, Screen within a purely text-based structuralist paradigm, Screen Theory could not get beyond the implied – imagined – reader. For Peirce, however, the sign operates in a triadic relationship between representamen, object and interpretant, the idea to 470

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which a sign gives rise. The sign is therefore never the representamen or sign-vehicle only, as in the Saussurean language-based approach that dominated Screen, to the exclusion of other film theories, during the 1970s. Hall (1981) was critical of the textual structuralist determinism of Screen Theory, and his encoding/decoding model, like the cultural approach to translation, shifted attention away from texts as dyadically studied within a hermeneutic literary framework with regard to its formal signifier-signified elements to include contexts that identify communities of interpreters. What scholars identified in the text via the application of semiology, which claimed to ‘position’ via the narrative and visual codes the cinema or TV viewer into a predetermined (implied reader) response, was however very often contradicted by ordinary viewers. Such interpreters negotiated, evaded and questioned meanings (the received texts), depending on their own, differing, cultural frames of reference. In other words, most films, news programs and social media generate internal logics and styles that propose their own specific forms of interpretation, or what media scholars call ‘readings,’ and what Screen Theory claims is the only valid reading. Different audiences, and even individuals from the same class, ethnic, cultural, language and national groups, nevertheless bring their own idiosyncratic readings (i.e., interpretations) to bear on the same media content that may even contradict each other.

Early media history The basic diagram of a control circuit mimics how a message transmits through a printed communication circuit. Many critics of this model, however, found a more nuanced resonance in linguistics. Still, linguists retain circuitry terms like ‘code-switching’ that presuppose a transmitter-like or receiver-like positioning of the speaker who switches from one code (language) to another when speaking. Reading is a special case of perceptual judgment involving interpretation. For example, reading the news is a circumstance within which an interpretation might conceivably influence the reader’s conduct apart from the conduct of reading. If an interpretation of an ordered system of signs results in some influence on conduct, then that system of signs has acted logically. If a sign elicits an influence on conduct within a community (no matter how imagined), then that sign has communicated to the extent that any demonstrable influence on conduct falls within the conceivably valid conclusions of the inferences possible from the indefinitely many possible perceptual judgments that constitute the indefinitely many interpretations readers may make. If this occurs when a reader is scrutinizing a newspaper, for example, then the act of paying attention under these circumstances is an occurrence of communication. As Peirce notes: Symbols grow. They come into being by developing out of other signs, particularly from icons, or from mixed signs partaking of the nature of icons and symbols. We think only in signs. These mental signs are of mixed nature; the symbol-parts of them are called concepts. If a man makes a new symbol, it is by thoughts involving concepts. ( for a collection of his works, see Hartshorne & Weiss, 1931–1935, para. 302) Having established, if briefly, the effect on societies of media transmission systems, and drawn attention to effects on receiver conduct, this chapter now examines the encoding-decoding basics of communication theory and how interpretation took on greater emphasis. John Fiske’s poststructuralist cultural and media studies critiques the transmission conundrum, especially as it manifested in Screen Theory. These are, first, the level of the technical 471

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problem where the matter in hand is ‘… how accurately can the symbols of communication be transmitted’ Second, is the level of semantic problems, where the issue is the precision with which the ‘desired meaning is conveyed. Finally, is the ‘level of effectiveness,’ where the question is directed at the effect on the conduct of the recipient of the transmission (Fiske, 1982, p. 7). Each level is relevant to a specific link in the communication chain: the first level applies to the ‘C’ or communicator element; the second to the ‘M’ or medium link; and the third level refers to the ‘R1’ or receiver end of the chain which results in some kind of response ‘R 2.’ The original Shannon thesis did not include a ‘medium,’ but the ‘channel’ along which the message was directed in electrical signal form. The former term entered into use with later work in an attempt to subsume the wider range of contexts inherent in the difference between transmission and communication (Fiske, 1982, p. 17). Fiske revealed that the background of modern communication theory is actually located within the field of transmission and not in the field of reception. His cultural studies approach includes something other than just an encoded command. Here the technology is clearly that which can be associated with cryptography, and the terminology used in the original approach is an indication of this: redundancy, entropy and code are important features of the theory.

Interpreting interpretation Redundancy indicates the level of predictability of a message. The concept was initially mathematical, in that it described not so much what was contained in a message as it described the way in which the information contained in the message was organized: if the organization of the information permits one and only one reading, as with Fox TV’s monological reporting of Trump’s endlessly repeated clichés, then the redundancy is high (Fiske, 1982, pp. 13–14). When interpretation is required, then the model embraces the term entropy, by which is meant the ‘number of choices of signal that can be made and the randomness of those choices’ (Fiske, 1982, p. 13). This implies that the options lie solely at the discretion of the signal’s originator, like Fox TV’s failure to report factually on all sides of the Trump story. However, if the effectiveness of the signal’s transmission is to be understood by the degree to which the desired effect is achieved in the recipient, then the range of interpretive choices available to the recipient should be assumed as largely overlapping that available to the originator. One calls to mind the image of the colonist who minimizes entropy by yelling at the ‘natives’: the louder one shouts the smaller is the entropy. In this case, the assumption is that voice loudness is inversely proportional to the redundancy of the information in the message (or order, request, command, or demand) and that therefore the meaning must become more obvious the louder one speaks. A similar process is assumed to occur in the case of Trump’s repetitions where trust emerges out of chants, slogans and restatements. Where the message has certain concomitant factors that contextualize the content of the message ensuring that its meaning is clear only to a limited group of recipients, then it is a code that applies to (or has been applied to) the message. A code Is a system of meaning common to members of a culture or subculture. It consists of both signs (i.e., physical signals that stand for something other than themselves) and rules or conventions that determine how and in what contexts these signs are used and how they can be combined to form messages. (Fiske, 1982, p. 20) 472

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Transmission theory is overwhelming when making a code a function or index of culture(s). The code is a function of the technology of military cryptography: the message becomes en-coded at the beginning of the chain of transmission and is de-coded via the receiving Enigma machine. In other words, work done since the problem was upgraded, from the realm of transmission to that of communication, has incorporated the application of the idea of a code from the category of the technical, the electrical impulse, to those of the social and cultural. In light of this complexity, an alternative grounding of knowledge and discourse, derived from Michel Foucault’s (1970) critique of theories of understanding follows, drawing on the indeterminacy of radical translation (Kant & Meiklejohn, 1999). Semiotics and its emphasis on interpretation is here offered as a solution.

Decoding the category mistake While it is easy to criticize with hindsight Descartes’ (2006) attempts in trying to integrate the possibilities opened up for humanity by Galileo’s then-new theory of mechanics, Gilbert Ryle’s (1963) work was analogous to that with which Descartes was engaged: both identified routes out of an intractable contradiction by proposing approaches that incorporated certain antithetical concepts by virtue of some form of complementarity between them and something else. Thus, where Descartes argued that minds were ‘just bits of not-clockwork’ as they relate to certain knowledge of a clockwork reality, Ryle proposed the idea that ‘mind’ and ‘body’ apply to different logical categories within which it is possible to talk about human nature without contradiction, provided that one does not mix these categories within a single argument as did Descartes. What Ryle finds from dualist thinking is the category mistake. A category mistake occurs when an interpreter assumes that something is of a different type of thing than that which the thing actually is. If, therefore, the problem is not that the mistake is in the theory, it might be possible to start as he does by considering the theory to be inside a mistake. In other words, when the context of a specific problem becomes capable of being generalized into a universe of discourse applicable across a wide variety of contexts, the possibility arises of theories being inside mistakes rather than mistakes occurring in the theories. Because of the shift that is seen to have taken place in European modes of knowing during the period between the Renaissance and the end of the eighteenth century, the vehicle of knowledge was no longer found in the relationship of language to the world, between word and object, but in the analysis of meaning and signification (Foucault, 1970, p. 43). The consequence was that the primacy of the written word fell into abeyance, and the uniform layer, in which the seen and the read, the visible and the expressible, were endlessly interwoven, also vanished. Things and words were separated from one another. The eye was thenceforth destined to see and only to see, the ear to hear and only to hear. Discourse was still to have the task of speaking that which is, but it was no longer to be anything more than what it said. (ibid.) The crucial move was the earlier recasting of the question of language from what it was within the age-old ternary system of the significant, the signified, and the conjuncture. This system uses three as a base, for the series of binary forms that ensured stability and which limited language to the area of the ‘general organisation of representative signs’ (Foucault, 1970, p. 42). Such a system tied the relation of language to the psychological effect of a representation 473

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within the mind (1970, p. 67). Semantic aspects of language were reduced to the discursive realm of the Sciences. The link between signifier and signified became the cause/stimulus and effect/response dyad of psychology rooted inside a nineteenth and twentieth-century culture, the lineage of which reaches back to Descartes, Kepler and Galileo, and which found mobility in transmission models derived from Shannon’s telecommunications modeling. A collateral consequence of this valorization of the representational knowledge resulted: the printed word’s domain was not declared empty but became the seat of Literature. Thus, where Foucault (1970, p. 158–159) shows the sciences to be the preserve of ‘well-formed’ languages, literature lays claim to that component of language that bears the traces of what had been the root of knowledge prior to the advent of what became Science, to the ‘“field of rhetoric” that surrounds the designation of a sign to an object and which contains all the other signs that attach to the ever deferred meaning of that original designation’ (1970, p. 43). The end of this process has been the evolution of an order of identity and difference which defines the method of knowledge, where the act of representation has become quite transparent to the agent (Evernden, 1985, p. 58), and which has replaced the Wissenschaft (the ‘craft of thinking or knowing’) of natural magic (Foucault, 1970, p, 54–56; see also Pepper, 1984, p, 52–54). The mathesis of the order of identity and difference, of same and Other, forms the a priori possibility of truth and knowledge, and the multitude of similitudes, of analogs and comparisons, that determine the ‘natural’ discourse of the langue, constitute the basis for the possibility of a semantic understanding. This doubly-circular epistemological organ – the reduction of knowledge to representation, or how representation is translated between different discursive systems, was the authenticating assumption that guided the HDRC’s initial evaluation of Tager’s PhD proposal. If community and communication have a root in common (Williams, 1983, pp. 72–73), the point is that the social totality of a language of a human group with a history – that is to say, a community – has to act in some understandable way for meaning to be generated, circulated and understood. The Committee, as a community of like-minded largely language scholars, had to be persuaded that formal representations encoded in media content might generate other kinds of mental representations – or interpretants – during the process of media reception. A certain irony thus appears in the way that successor theories to that of Shannon and Weaver (1949) have become modeled into representation: the simple military linearity of the original representation has become tortured into complicated feedback loops that resemble incomprehensible spider’s webs. Within every and any interface between the subjects of communication, whether singular or collective, the problem of how to illustrate the relationships that arise between the social, the linguistic, and the technical was simply taken for granted. Phenomenologically speaking, however, the semiotic process always starts with a first, then moves to a second and then to a third. These categories, introduced by the editors in the Introduction to this Volume, will be elaborated below with regard to reception.

Connecting Stuart Hall with Charles Sanders Peirce Three basic interpretive categories opened media studies to the inclusion of audiences, where previously the study of texts (sans communities of interpreters) had prevailed, and where ‘channel’ had been replaced with ‘medium.’ The relation (other than involving the scholar him/herself ) between sign and object had been till then largely dyadic, text- and language-based and Saussurean in emphasis. Or it was of a hermeneutic nature where the interpreter was assumed to be that of the scholar-(implied) reader, whose own interpretation was considered to be the most, and possibly only valid one, linking message-maker and receiver 474

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into the transmission model that confuses technical form (medium) with understanding (interpretant). Hall’s breakthrough, deriving from Umberto Eco (1972), ceded three basic ways of making sense to the receiver of the message, constituted by mass media as audiences (no matter the formal textual signification). These were:

This non-reflexive (or ultimate logical) interpretant makes sense in terms of ideology (thirdness). In other words, as elaborated above in the discussion of transmission models, the first (and the only position of which communication science [and to some extent, Translation Studies] is aware) is one of transparent decoding where the reader interprets the message in terms of the reference code in which it was encoded (i.e., in terms of the intentions of the writer) (Hall, 1981, p. 136). What is already ‘known’ takes on the force of discursive law (final interpretant, argument, no habit-change), as disinformation repeats assertions until they become timeless self-evident truths (myth, secondness, ideology and thirdness).



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mistakenly assumed to be the reality. This short-circuiting signification results in the Trump ‘fake news’ effect. During his presidency and following his electoral defeat in late 2020, Trump immersed himself in extreme right-wing media, and his endlessly repetitive popularization of fake news discourse was stronger than ever. This term is now part of the global English lexicon, which is why the example has increased in its illustrative power of radical translation, in the Quinan sense (Quine, 1969). This effect is linked to: v Conspiracy, popularized and endlessly recirculated now via digital social media and conservative propagandistic news channels like Fox News. This interpretant is an illogical but socially convincing reaction to the legacy media, the transparency of objective (or at least, of evidence-based, ultimate logical interpretant) reporting. This category of negotiated and rejected decoding results from a growing dissociation between the bottom of society (i.e., the less educated majority, identified by political commentators as Trump’s ‘base’) and the ruling educated and urban-based middle class and their Democratic Party representatives in Congress (identified and demonized in Trumpist discourse as paedophiles, liars, usurpers and the corrupt). Conspiracy theories thus are conduits of populist frustration percolating from below, from the (mainly white) under-classes abandoned by capital (i.e., the right to employment, to racial purity and the bearing of arms, to minimal government and regulation). This Trumpian base requires seamless and easy answers in a bewilderingly complex world experiencing continual semiosis. Conspiracy is fanned by narrow social media to which the Trump electoral base subscribes and to TV news sign communities like Fox, Newsmax and Breitbart. Trump’s base – a sign community fixated in belief in Peirce’s sense – locks into his fixed meaning, semantically driven by his endlessly repeated clichés, which are high in entropy and semantic redundancy that eliminate dialogue. Most of the rest embrace dynamism and change, synergy and semiosis, and the ability to critically weigh different messages and come to different conclusions about social, cultural, economic and political conditions. vi Aberrant decoding, where a message is interpreted completely differently from that intended by its utterer. For Eco, aberrant decoding is ‘the unexpected exception, if not the rule’ (1972, p. 105). The message maker is not always aware of such aberrant possibilities. However, this changed with the Trump discourse of fake news which provided the discursive mechanism to recover the stimulus-response model of communication that confuses medium with content. However, what cannot work analytically (because it is a theory inside a mistake) can work discursively and politically in the social realm. Hence, Trump’s supporters read as a command (in terms of the transmission model) a set of utterances at a public rally, translating them into physical action via the energetic interpretant, laying siege to the nearby Capital on 6 January 2021. This mob somehow reversed the transmission model and as receivers filled in the implication that a march on the Capital was the order-from-above by treating imprecise clichéd rhetoric as an instruction. vii Confusion is not to be associated with aberrant decoding, as some messages are just semiotically incomprehensible, no matter the ideological position or interpretive framework of the reader. Such messages, however, might nevertheless generate coherent, if idiosyncratic, interpretants on the part of readers and audiences. One such study in this regard analyzed a Supreme Court case interpretation by the South African Minister of Defence and his legal team where they proposed a stimulus-response transmission model of communication to explain the potential effect of anti-conscription posters on domestic terrorist recruitment, even though the posters were semiotically incomprehensible (Tomaselli, 2015). 476

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What theories of representation, encoding, decoding, and reception are to be applied, to whom, in what circumstances and under what viewing or reception conditions? To distill an operational approach that incorporates the cultural turn to translation, various strategies can be applied: • • • •

textual analysis – the study of language form (semiology, dyadic) reception analysis – how viewers or readers make sense (semiotics, triadic) and thus an analysis can be done of the likely interpretations (transparent, negotiated, rejection, totemistic, aberrant, conspiratorial or confused). Translation comes into play at the intersections of these interpreter responses, as the post-truth condition supersedes realist and normal science that fixes truth within verifiable and negotiated final immediate interpretants. These arise out of the application of scientific methods by communities of scholars whose identification of truth is being replaced by an anti-science discourse that inverts or translates measurable truth as fake. Trump’s base will claim the absolute truth of a stolen election even in the face of no evidence and court dismissals by Republicans who just know (firstness) that the election was stolen.

Hall’s encoding/decoding model is now elaborated below in terms of CS Peirce’s triadic theory of the interpreter and interpretant. Hall and his colleagues, in fact, considerably elaborated on the model in the circuit of culture approach that fits interpretation within a much wider matrix. The circuit of culture model (Du Gay et al., 1997) mimics Karl Marx’s circle of capitalist production, regulation, distribution and exchange, but adds reception, consumption and now, with a semiotic overlay provided here, interpretation. The circuit implicitly incorporated an earlier-enunciated encoding-decoding relationship that broke with transmission theories. Peirce’s (Hartshorne & Weiss, 1931–1935) idea of the ‘interpretant’ – the idea to which the sign gives rise – was a crucial, if unmentioned, progenitor of Hall’s original model. Hall never explicitly linked his model to Peirce’s theory of interpretants. As such, Hall prescribed its semiotic limitations, but my argument is that the model can be reinvigorated by elaborating it with phaneroscopy, which is my objective in the next section. Semiotics underpins the cultural turn in both cultural studies and one trajectory of translation, which is now elaborated on with reference to the Trumpian example.

Outline and division of interpretants: the cultural connection The interpretant is the idea to which the sign gives rise in the mind of the interpreter: Every sign is an interpretant. Every interpretant is related to its object through the sign it interprets. Peirce divides interpretants into three kinds – the immediate, the dynamical and the final. The immediate interpretant is the logical potential or possibility of a sign to be interpreted. It constitutes the uninformed, initial, central idea that first comes to mind when making sense. In Trumpian discourse, the central idea, mobilized by the persistence of historical campaign discourse by presidential hopefuls, has been the ’failure’ of America and the urgent and recurrent need to make it ‘great’ again, popularly referred to as ‘MAGA.’ The dynamical interpretant is ‘the direct effect actually produced by a sign upon an interpreter of it’ (para. 536). This interpretant is divided according to the different kinds of responses within the interpreter of which Peirce identifies three: the emotional, the energetic and the logical. The emotional is the feeling in the interpreter invoked by the sign. It may 477

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be one of recognition (the Democrats are demonic). The energetic interpretant involves an effort which may be either physical or mental (such as raging at CNN crews and/or storming the Capital, or just approvingly milling about in the crowd). The logical interpretant is the meaning of a concept. It subdivides into the logical and ultimate logical interpretants (para, 476). The ultimate logical interpretant is a ‘living definition,’ an interpretant which itself has no further interpretant (cf. c. 1906: 5.491). The logical interpretant generated by Trump centered on the phrase, ‘The Big Steal,’ which was informed by emotional and energetic interpretants. That news media other than Fox and Newsmax contested this interpretant that cut no ice with Trump’s base as this sign community simply rejected any alternative explanation. The logical interpretant resides in the category of thirdness, abstraction, ideology and symbol, which are triadically produced effects of a sign. This accounts for intellectual concepts which may, however, produce a mental sign. The ultimate logical interpretant is necessary to break the cycle of interpretants producing signs. In the Trump claim of The Big Steal, a fixation on belief, while its utterers continued to make such claims for many years after losing the election that they claimed without evidence was illegitimate. In other words, in terms of the encoding/decoding model, belief trumped evidence to the contrary. Their farcical claims continued even when their unlimited semiosis was interrupted (but not fully stilled) by the courts, election officials and defamation suits brought by voting machine firms against Fox TV that popularized these propagandistic claims. The fixation of belief demonstrates a sequential relationship that offers an initially adequate basis for both a) accounting for how it is possible that similar people may display different responses in responding to a choice situation. It also provides a methodological basis for inquiry into the development of particular forms of instinctive response as a result of habits (desired Interpretants) encouraged along a sequence of generations in distinct social or economic groupings. Peirce argues that the only instance of ultimate logical interpretants, which would need to have a general application, is that of a habit-change: ‘... meaning... a modification of a person’s tendencies toward action, resulting from previous experiences or from previous exertions of his will or acts, or from a complexus of both kinds of causes’ (Peirce in Hartshorne & Weiss, 1931–1935, para. 476). A few of those charged for the Capitol Hill insurrection did dissociate themselves from their actions, and possibly their prior beliefs also, acknowledging that they had now endistanced themselves from the Trumpian discourse. Since only intellectual concepts have logical interpretants, the future tense of the interpretant is in the conditional would-be category (Peirce in Hartshorne & Weiss, 1931–1935, para. 482). The ultimate logical interpretant is similar to Hall’s notion of ideological closure, where messages are designed to limit interpretant production. However, in the post-truth age, an unfettered semiosis of the Steal and the Lie continued both amongst Trump’s base and with most of the Republican Party in Congress itself notwithstanding the Vice President breaking discursive ranks and proceeding with the hand-over to the victorious Democratic Party candidate. This implies action (political or otherwise) in terms of the status quo. The natural termination of a sign (semiotic closure) occurs when it serves a particular purpose or a vested interest. Dominant sign systems tend to stabilize themselves. Had Trump won the election, interpretants generating the discourse of the Steal could have dissipated as no habit-change would be required on the part of most Republicans. Or the claim may have been reversed with Democrats now uttering it. Peirce’s concept of habit may be similar to Antonio Gramsci’s (1971) ideological level of common sense, the taken-for-granted way of doing things which involve no change of practice of habit or perception of alternatives. Habit (or common sense) can be identified with the ultimate logical interpretant. Some signs 478

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capable of producing an ultimate logical interpretant do not do so because the interpreter is not prepared to carry the semiotic process far enough to establish or change a habit. Not everyone at the Capital assaulted the police, or even entered the building. Habits are general and thirds – they incline individuals to act or react in prescribed ways under certain conditions. While Peirce conducted his discussion of logical interpretants in the context of scientific inquiry, his theory of interpretants can be extended to apply to everyday practices where individuals think they are arguing or thinking or reacting, and acting rationally. Because habits are thirds, they are abstract and invisible. Trump’s subjects, when interviewed on TV, never questioned their own interpretants or habits – they uttered absolute certainty justified by the Trump narrative (thirds, the conspiracy code) taken as gospel truth (totemistic). Habits confer the rules within which individuals, groups, classes and class fractions behave, think and to which they respond. Ideological practices are reacted to in terms of something other than ‘what is to be explained’ (Fitzgerald, 1966, p. 153); that is, second-order myth and third-order ideology obscure understanding of particular concepts (like evidence) and foreclose unlimited semiosis (coming to consciousness) to within the limits set by the mode of relations – ideology (the framing pregiven semantic grid) – that it endorses habit. Habits are not signs because the effect produced by the habit is an action, though it may be triadically produced. Signs must make a connection with the material world at the level of thirdness. In other words, reality itself is a set of relations where everything has a semiotic value. The values might contest each other but they are rooted within particular receiver sign communities. The insurgents on Capitol Hill who have questioned and apologized for their behavior on January 6th, may have changed their habits, for the court at least. The final interpretant is ‘that which would finally be decided to be the true interpretant if consideration of the matter were carried so far that an ultimate opinion were reached’ (para. 184). By this Peirce means the interpretation of the sign which would be made by the community of scientists if they understood completely the laws which regulate the effects of the sign. This was the terrain of struggle between the Covid-19 denialists that embraced many of the so-called Red States (i.e., Republican-supporting) that elected Trump and rejected analyses offered by the Centre for Disease Control medical advisors, including Dr. Anthony Fauci. The effect was to result in mid-2021 in a pandemic of the unvaccinated, partially killing off sections of Trump’s political support base. The immediate interpretant is the concept of the sign itself and so is an analog of firstness. The dynamical interpretant is the effect produced on the interpreter and is therefore mediated through the triadic process. It is the triadic nature of the dynamical interpretant which allows Peirce to equate it with the sign itself. This makes the dynamical interpretant an analog of secondness. The final interpretant is that which would be if one understands the laws of connection which structure the posited phaneron or sign. Of the three interpretants, the immediate, the dynamical and the final, only the dynamical is an interpretant in the narrow sense, since Peirce defines the interpretant as the effect that the sign has on the interpreter, and it is only the dynamical which completes this triadic process. The immediate interpretant is not an interpretant in the narrow sense since it only establishes the interpretability of a sign. The final interpretant is also only a quasiinterpretant since it is an ideal. Peirce did not exclude the possibility that interpretants might determine more than one interpretant sign. Suppose a person running down the road says to two strangers ‘The green house at the top of the hill is on fire!’ If, say, one stranger is a news reporter and the other an insurance evaluator, their respective interpretant signs on hearing this announcement could 479

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well be, on the one hand, ‘What kind of story is in this?’; and, on the other, ‘Better get in fast to establish if it’s arson, so we can limit the payments!’ Each interpretant (or translation of what appears to each) determines distinct further semiosis, one in the gathering of eyewitness and victim accounts for writing up a public news article, the other for pursuing effectively the same line of action, but in order privately to limit any financial loss on the part of the evaluator’s employers. It can be readily seen that the presence of two distinct possible interpretants is a basic building block for the semeiotic definition of a situation of choice, where it may be necessary to introduce a preference ordering between II and III in order to decide the priority to be afforded in acting further. These further possibilities accommodate the presence of more than one option, say I I i and II j, being available to a single individual, so as to account for different ways of reasoning about the choices on offer in a situation.

Semiotising audience reception research The interpretant, implied in Hall’s model, though he does not mention the term, is key to understanding how interpreters make sense of, and respond to, signs, in relation to the discursive contexts from which they are generated. Eco had connected the dots thus: ‘… a system of signs is not only a system of sign vehicles, but also a system of meanings’ (1972, p. 103). Where Peirce emphasized the ways in which signs work, Hall and subsequent media reception scholars developed ways of understanding how communities of interpreters make sense of messages (see e.g., Morley, 1992). Hall’s model actively animated what Peirce explicitly and in much more detail called the second trichotomy of signs in the act of reception/ decoding, rather than focusing just on encoding on the one hand or decoding on the other. Peirce’s second trichotomy fractured the coterminous dyadic De Saussurean structuralist semiology by deliberately locating the viewer/spectator/interpreter/decoder (and not the scholar) as the meaning-making organism, in a triadic rather than a dyadic (structuralist, semiological) relationship. That is to say, semiotics as a triadic framework of reception includes an active interpreter within the sign-signifier relationship. If Cultural studies examines: a) culture as structure; and b) culture as a response to structure, then the encoding/ decoding model was a natural early development addressing these interlinked relationships. A mixture of semiotics and semiology, first popularized by John Fiske and John Hartley (1978), opened the door to the study of text-context-interpreter relations. Peirce’s overarching frame or supersign of the phaneron (in contrast to Kant’s more restricted notion of the phenomenon) offers a sophisticated framework via which to approach both how meaning is made by an encoder and interpreted by a decoder, and further, offers a means of explaining stark differences in the ways in which different sign communities (interpreters) make different sense of the same messages. In calling on the cultural turn in Translation Studies, my argument is that a semiotic translation process is at work with reception amongst interpreters who are not scholarly authenticators. To summarize, phenomenology studies the appearance of things, as they appear in our experience. The phaneron accounts for the additional semiosis that encodes all and anything that is present to the mind in the act of interpretation, including fiction, the imaginary and the supernatural ‘regardless of whether it corresponds to any real thing or not’ (Peirce in Hartshorne & Weiss, 1931–1935, para. 284). The rhetorical genre of fake news resides at this level, whereas conventional news hails what can be measured, substantiated and made visible via evidence. 480

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The model tested: communication or propaganda Few conventional studies of communication admit that lies and lying, double-talk, deception, disinformation, psychological warfare and the struggle for signs and meaning are part of communication practices (see Eco, 1985). The concept conventionally assumes a benevolent sharing of information. Benevolence is very rarely the case, however, as interpersonal, inter-class, inter-cultural and ethnic power relations always circumscribe the nature of the interaction. This realization has never been more evident in contemporary times than in Trumpian discourse, in the tens of thousands of lies that he uttered during his four-year Presidency (2016–2020), and as many thereafter, as measured by US fact checkers employed by media adhering to tried and tested evidentiary reporting such as CNN, amongst many others. Lying was normalized as acceptable and rewarded behavior; the lie was taken as the Truth by Trump’s disciples, who worked solely in terms of transparent decoding. Let us now consolidate my analysis by linking semiotics to translation via the Hall encoding/decoding model. The first interpretant position occurs when receivers interpret the encoder’s intentions without being made aware that the message is a construct created within the codes and rules of meaning structuring. At work within Trumpism (or in any disinformation campaign) is fiction (myth, secondness) that may have little or no correspondence to empirical evidence or how readers of messages interpret them. Trump’s supporters transparently assumed that his interpretation should be naturally everybody’s interpretation (transmission model and firstness). The energetic interpretants of those mechanistically persuaded by Trump to engage in storming the Capital, ironically, did include his own negotiated response (secondness) that saw his insistence that he be taken to the site of the physical conflict. That he was prevented from joining the mob by the Secret Service even as he is alleged to have assaulted his driver, indicates that these officers were conducting themselves in terms of a different discourse (or set of interpretants) as encoded in safety protocols, procedural rules and the law. The Authority for the Trumpian discourse is contained within the code, contrary evidence notwithstanding, while the code was continuously reinforced with unceasing repetition of the same phrases, within sentences, within successive sentences, circulated and recirculated between Fox commentators, Twitter, right-wing radio jocks, social media, the White House staff and the President himself, chanted ad nauseum during the siege of the Capital building. So, while promoting fake news they were able to claim via the fixation of the belief that the real fact-based news was the fake discourse. The second position is through negotiating the code. What was a priori known by Trump’s base takes on the force of discursive law (final interpretant, argument, no habit change), as disinformation repeats assertions until they become self-evident truths (myth, secondness, legitimation). Habit-change occurred, as far as a few house Republicans like Liz Cheney and Adam Kritzinger were concerned, as they contradicted Trump and the myth of The Big Lie that they claimed legitimated for Biden supporters The Big Steal, in attempting to negotiate a new final interpretant that acknowledged the legitimacy of Biden’s election. However, the Republican base in her home state broke with her in August 2022 because she had transgressed the transparent decoding and had both negotiated and then rejected Trump’s fixations of belief by participating in the Congressional investigation committee and opposing his worldview (phaneron). The third response is when the interpreter understands both the literal and connotative inflections given a message but decodes it in a totally different way. The right-wing US media like Fox legitimized its allegations by citing the ‘experts’ (whose fictions and fixations of belief, by definition, are uncontestable). These experts included Trump himself, his White House staff, compliant Republican leaders, radio commentators and mythmakers like Fox’s Tucker Carlson, down 481

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to street levels. But the opacity of his discourse started unraveling during the investigations conducted by the Congress committee in 2022 as many of his own staff broke ranks and testified against his claims and his conduct, thereby rejecting his interpretants.

The final interpretant: conclusion Peirce developed his semiotic to address the scientific ‘that which would be’ – the final interpretant when consensus is reached – the kinds of interpretations that arise from research practice. Phaneroscopy anchors Peirce’s ensuing analysis of ‘indirect knowledge’ of reality, that is, encounters within which people make sense of their worlds. All significant activity has elements of Encounter (Peirce’s Firstness), Experience (Secondness), and Intelligibility (Thirdness). Encounters entail several possible experiences between an interpreter and an event or situation. If the phaneron pre-exists the sign, signs, then, are the vehicles through which experience becomes intelligible. The latter-day individual in industrial society encounters a world of production and communication formulated around an unreflected universalization of the labor theory of value. This will be the case whether the individual is found in capitalist or socialist surroundings. In either case, the experience of the individual subject will take place in at least three phases: a b c

the growing phase, in which experience of the world is received from older generations; the working phase, in which experience of the world is predominantly empirical engagement with the world in terms of meanings and practices received during the first stage; and the recollective phase, in which some form of judgment elaborated against the reflected memory of the previous phases is passed on to the succeeding generation.

All three phases are present in making intelligible experiences to others in one’s social context. At the same time, all three are occurring simultaneously, because no one generation can be routinely isolated completely from the others contemporary with it. The kind of intelligibility (or translation) that results will differ between ideological positions as was experienced by the US Congress. Context, in this interpretational field, is not simply the totality of present signs ascribed to the phaneron in previous work. In terms of culture, the I-ness is not necessarily an individuality. If the ethnographic reality is to be given some kind of credibility in non-functionalist terms, then this subjective being-there will take on the constraints of consciousness presented by the way in which the discourse of the Ethnos posits Being. In order to escape absolute relativism, the cultural studies audience researcher has to recognize that this posit of Being is always there for a community of discourse. It follows that this thereness is in a world, and that this world has commonality-in-the-encounter for all who are-there in the encounter. The multiplicity of experiences in the encounter and the consequent potential for intelligibility about it varies in accordance, so to speak, with the cultural community of those who are-there. Where the Quinean encounter occurs, radical translation and its indeterminacy are a function or consequence of the different experiences that constitute the subjectivities of the ‘native’ and the ‘ethnography.’ The phaneron involves the interpretations of both producers (conceived texts, encoding) and viewers (perceived texts and interpretants) into a total framework of meaning (social and public texts (The Big Steal) which may have little to do with the court-endorsed evidentiary-based reality that dismissed Trumpian reality, counterpointed by his detractors as The Big Lie – this is the terrain of semiotic struggle between specific sets of encoders and decoders. 482

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Acknowledgement To my late colleague, Arnold Shepperson, on whose unpublished notes I have drawn. My thanks also to Doreen Wu and Michelle Tager.

Notes 1 See p. 2 https://ccms.ukzn.ac.za/Files/articles/Publications/sub%20text%20no.%206,%201996.pdf. See also Tager (1997) 2 https://war wick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/currentstudents/postgraduate/masters/modules/ translationstud/marinetti_cultural_approach.pdf 3 See Corder (2021) for just one startling example of the illogic (i.e., fixation of belief ) that drives the discourse of Trump’s true believers.

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484

Index

Note: Italic page numbers refer to figures and page numbers followed by “n” denote endnotes. Abdallah, K. 216 aberrant decoding 476 absolute relativism 467 academic space 244 accelerative culture 276 acculturation 247 Ackoff, Russell 336 activism 2, 63, 94, 267, 269–274, 276–277, 279; and audio-visual translation 271; and culture 271; and identity 271; technology-facilitated 271 activist approaches 263–278; copyist 263–264; linguistic relativity 264–267; political correctness 264–267; representation 267–269; resistance 267–269; translation chains 272–276; Translation Studies (TS) research 269–272 activist translators 269, 273 actor-network theory (ANT) 3, 38, 60, 103, 106, 107, 137, 215, 216, 236, 241, 321; and social sciences 315–316; and social translation 315–316 actual reader 466 Adami, E. 382 adaptable layout 379 adaptation 157–158 aesthetic genres 288 affordances 378–379; relationality of 433–434 After Babel (Steiner) 53, 416 agnosticism 218 Aischines 170 Akrich, Madeleine 98 Aksoy, Nuzhet Berrin 117 Alexander the Great 446 Algeria: depeasantization 246; enforced re-settlement 249, 250; photography and ethnographic research 251–256, 254–256; restructuring of society 246; rural population 242; scorched-earth tactics used in 248; War of Independence 241

ALICE – Strange Mirrors, Unsuspected Lessons: Leading Europe to a New Way of Sharing the World Experiences (Santo) 454 American Association of Anthropologists 233 American Council for Teachers of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) 228 American New Left 266 analytical philosophy 133, 136 Ancient Greeks 28, 38, 48n1 Andrew, Dudley 406 Anglophone academia 266 Anthology of Chinese Discourse on Translation (Cheung) 53 Anthropocene 47, 114, 116, 118, 119, 122, 142 anthropocentric: approach to translation studies 349; argument 143; biases 7, 110; definition 8; reasoning 284; temptations 343; view of reality 45 anthropocentrism 142, 216 anthropolatry 143 anthropological approaches 283–302; linguistic anthropology 298–301; overview 283–285; semiotic anthropology 287–294; semiotics 285–287; social and cultural anthropology 294–298; and Translation Studies 285–287 anthropological research 66 anthropologist 106, 247; cultural 231–232 anthropology 4, 95, 101, 190, 285–287; cultural 294–298; semiotic and translation 287–294; social 294–298 antiquity 446–448 Anzaldua, Gloria 235 Appadurai, A. 64, 297 Appiah, Kwame Anthony 225, 227, 232 Aquinas, Thomas 30 ‘arche-writing’ 135 Archimedes 447 “archtranslation” 148 Aristarchus 447 Aristotle 1, 31–32, 34, 40, 41, 47, 134, 448

485

Index

Arnold, Mathew 225, 226, 227 art: as extension of perception 258–259; and signification 259 artifacts 259 artificial intelligence (AI) 86, 116 artificial neural network 334 The Art of Crossing Cultures (Storti) 224 Asad, Talal 233, 303n20 The Assayer (Galileo) 450 assembler, translators 328 assembly language 328 assumed translation 191–192 “as-what” 133–134 Ata, Pedro 341, 344 auctores 451 audience: distant 466; research and reception analysis 467; semiotising audience reception research 480; target 377 audio description (AD) 346–347, 433 audiovisual texts, and material media 432–433 audio-visual translation 271 Auslegung 133–134 Austin, C. P. 330–332 automation anxiety 275 autotranslation 86 Au voleur! Anarchisme et philosophie (Malabou) 117 Babels 271–272, 274 Bachelard, Gaston 95, 102, 252 Bachmann-Medick, D. 234, 309, 311, 320, 321n2 Back, Les 251 Baer, Brian 2, 51, 54 Baker, M. 55, 63, 64, 161, 200, 267–268, 273 Bakhtin, Mikhail 37, 47, 231, 353, 360, 361, 424–426 Bakhtinian heteroglossia 424–429 Balandier, George 247 Bally, Charles 155 Barad, Karen 45 Barthes, Roland 259, 374 Bartleby, the Scrivener (Melville) 263 Basalamah, S. 147–148 basic media types 395 Bassnett, S. 231, 455, 456 Bastin, G. L. 178 Battle of Algiers 243 The Beautiful and the Damned (Fitzgerald) 419 ‘bedside’ concept of translational medicine 319 Before Tomorrow: Epigenesis and Rationality (Malabou) 122 being 38–40, 482 Being and Time (Heidegger) 38, 133 Being Ecological (Morton) 114 Belloc, H. 163 Bellos, David 273 ‘benchside’ concept of translational medicine 319 486

Benjamin, Walter 52, 115, 135–136, 140, 141, 231, 417–419, 454 Bennett, Karen 3 Berardi, Franco 277 Bergson, Henri 43, 420 Berkobien, Meg 120 Berlin, Isaiah 19 Berman, Antoine 14, 54, 60, 140–141, 416 Berman, Isabelle 140 Bertacco, Simona 233 Bettelheim, Bruno 453 Between Languages and Cultures: Translation and Cross-Cultural Texts 235 Beyond the Mother Tongue (Yildiz) 236 Bhabha, Homi 233, 309, 310 Bhagavad Gita 180 bias: anthropocentric 7, 110; linguicentric 7; linguistic 1, 191 Bible 36, 170, 173, 175, 180, 216, 227 Bielsa, Esperanca 242 bifurcation point 220 Bildung 131, 134, 147 bilingualism 106, 364 bilingual subtitling 433 Bill C-16 266–267 binarism/binary 1, 2–3, 8, 14, 16–17, 32, 46, 99, 135, 142, 144, 203, 212 biological mysticism 415 biologism 415 biomimetics/biomimicry 285, 308, 320, 326, 353, 363, 430–431; meaning-making 436; modeling 436 biosemiosis 350, 352 biosemiotics 3, 90, 94, 119, 143, 220; communication 81; corollaries and examples 84–87; earlier work on 87–89; enfolded semiosis 79; habit 79; interpretation 79–80; lower threshold of semiotic translation 81–83; mechanic translation 80; overview 77–78; semiosis 78; semiotic translation 80–81; sequential semiosis 78–79; some concepts with definitions 78–81; translation 80; umwelt 79; upper threshold of semiotic translation 81–83 A (Bio)Semiotic Theory of Translation (Marais) 115, 143, 455 biotranslation 88, 90n4 ‘Biotranslation: Translation between Umwelten’ (Kull and Torop) 121 Blum, P. 297 Blumczynski, Piotr 455, 456 Boas, Franz 230 Boase-Beier, Jean 158 Boden, Z. 435 Boeri, J. 62 The Bold and the Beautiful 464 Bolter, Jay 404 Bottone, Angelo 131

Index

Bourdieu, Pierre 2, 60, 94, 202, 211, 214, 215, 221, 226; acculturation 247; Bearn research 254–256, 260n4; ethnographic work in Algeria 243–260; habitus, use of term 246–251; notion of practice 295; photographic archive 241, 243, 251–256, 258; reflexive sociology 257; reflexivity 244; social theory 241 Bourdieusian conceptions of the social 98 Braidotti, Rosi 115, 119, 143 ‘The Brain in History, or, The Mentality of the Anthropocene’ (Malabou) 121 Brandt, Per Aage 82 Brems, E. 190 Brexit 374 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) 466 Brogger, Matilde Nisbeth 180 Brookshear, G. 329 Brown, H. 61 Brownlie, S. 203 Bruhn, Jorgen 397 Bryant, Levi 45, 46, 47 Brylow, D. 329 Buden, B. 312 Budick, Sanford 234 Buffery, H. 65 Buhler, Karl 171, 174, 176 Burawoy, Michael 297 Buzelin, H. 60, 218 Calhoun, Craig 252 Callon, M. 8, 94, 95, 98, 100, 101, 103, 104, 107, 137, 215, 218, 241, 314, 315 Calvo Encinas, Elisa 180 Camera Lucida (Barthes) 259 Campbell, Norah 114 Canadian Human Rights Act 266–267 Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) Act 331–332 capital ‘c’ culture 225 Capra, Dominick La 455 Capturing Translation Processes Project (Ehrensberger-Dow) 60 Carlile, P. 317–318 Casanova, Pascale 236 Castro, Viveiros de 454 Categories (Aristotle) 40 categories/categorization 31–34 ‘Categories of the theory of grammar’ (Halliday) 159 category mistake 473–474 Catford, J. C. 14, 51, 54, 155, 158–161 central processing unit 328 ‘centripetal’ normativities 426 Certeau, Michel de 455 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 114–115, 121, 233 Chang, H. 22–23

change 35–38 chart waters 32 Chesterman, Andrew 60, 61, 185, 195, 199, 200, 201, 205n2 Cheung, A. 180 Chomsky, N. 99, 162, 170 Cicero 170 Ciorogar, Alex 118 Cities on the Move exhibition 312 citizen translation 147 Claramonte, M. Carmen Africa Vidal 455 Clifford, James 232–234 ‘The Climate of History: Four Theses’ (Chakrabarty) 114 “cluster concept” 146 Cluver, Claus 404 CNRS (Centre national de la recherche scientifique) 313 Cobley, P. 156 code: defined 371, 472; vs. mode 371–372 cognition 391 cognitive act 87, 393 cognitive import 390–391, 406 Cognitive Translation and Interpreting Studies (CTIS) 19, 23 Cognitive Translation Studies (CTS) 16 cognitive translatology 16 coherence 22–23, 103, 146 Coldiron, Anne 432 Cold War 51 collectivized feeling 414 colonialism: and Algerian farmers 246; European 226; sociology of 247; and translation 270 The Colonial Situation (Balandier) 247 commensuration 300–301 common semiosis 358 common speech hypothesis 358 communal feeling-based (icotic) hermeneutics 416 communication 81, 481–482; biosemiotics 81; conceptualization of 293; cross-linguistic 54; guerrilla communications tactics 278; human 390–393; as interpretation 374; languagebased 15; mechanic 81; science 332; semiotic 81; studies 470–471 Comparative Stylistics of French and English, a Methodology for Translation (Vinay and Darbelnet) 156 compiler, translators 328 ‘Complexity and Interdisciplinarity: Two Key Concepts in Translation Studies’ (Kaindl) 189 complexity epistemologies 13, 16–19 complexity theory 6, 17, 46 computation 2–3, 57, 60 computational sciences approaches: computerassisted translation (CAT) 326, 332–337; computer programming (see computer programming); overview 326 487

Index

computer-assisted translation (CAT) 326, 332–337; and data processing 335–337; intersemiotic aspects of data-driven approaches to 335 computer programmer 327, 331 computer programming: intersemiotic aspects of translation within 329–330; knowledge translation and conceptual approaches 330–332; language in 327–332; translational medicine and conceptual approaches 330–332; translation in 327–332; translators 328 Comte, Auguste 102 ‘The Concept of Cultural Translation in British Social Anthropology’ (Asad) 233, 303n20 conceptualization: changes in 268; of communication 293; and habitual behavior 264; Latourian, of translation 258 confusion 476 Connelly, H. 53 consecutive umwelt 79 conspiracy 476 constitutive ecologies 114–115 context of culture 295–296 context of situation 295–296, 297, 300 context-oriented research 63–65 Contra-instrumentalism: A Translation Polemic (Venuti) 120 the copy effect in translation 338n3 copyist 263–264 Corbin, Alain 453 Cordingley, A. 62 Cornelio, Dawn M. 120 corporeal habitus 242 corpus linguistics 15, 55, 57, 66, 200 (E)co-Translation: Toward a Collective Task (Berkobien) 120 Cours de linguistique générale (Saussure) 155, 385n3 Course of Recognition (Ricoeur) 131 critical discourse analysis 4, 30, 57, 63 Cronin, Michael 3, 52, 89, 110, 113, 114, 115, 117, 118, 120, 123n1, 139, 142, 236, 237, 455, 456 cross-linguistic communication 54 Crutzen, Paul 114 cultural anthropology 294–298 cultural approaches: culture and translation outside Translation Studies 232–235; defining culture 224–228; new directions 236–237; translation and culture in Translation Studies 228–232 cultural change 220 cultural imperialism 446 cultural norms: and language patterns 264; and linguistic norms 269 Cultural Politics of Translation (Mazrui) 235

488

cultural studies 4, 55, 63–64, 190, 203, 225–226, 228, 237; translational turn 309; translation concept in 308–309 cultural transfers 308, 312–313 cultural translation 147, 283, 291, 302n1, 308–309, 310, 454; in humanities 312–314; and migration 309; see also translation cultural turn 317 Cultural Turns (Bachmann-Medick) 309 cultural values 264, 348 culture 267–268, 308, 312–313; accelerative 276; and activism 271; capital ‘c’ 225; classificatory schemes of 244–245; defining 224–228; digital 276; high 225–226, 228; jamming 278; local 224; mimetic in nature 277; outside Translation Studies 232–235; small ‘c’ 225; in Translation Studies 228–232 ‘Culture and Anarchy’ (Arnold) 225 culturemes 172 Cunnison, John 158 Czarniawska, B. 316 Damasio, A. R. 144, 413, 415 Damrosch, D. 64 Darbelnet, Jean 51, 155–156, 158, 230 data: defined 336; interpretation 337 data-information-knowledge-wisdom (DIKW) hierarchy 338n4 data processing: and computer-assisted translation 335–337; and machine translation 335–337 Davidson, Donald 52, 133, 164, 165, 166 dawning of Utopia 121–123 Deacon, T. 77, 79, 220 Dean, Jodi 277 Death of the Author (Barthes) 374 Decety, J. 422 decision-making 197 deconstructive philosophy 144 deductive conceptualization 143 Deely, John 18, 23, 155, 221, 419, 420, 437–438 deep ecology 143 deep history 143 De Kooning, Willem 258 Delabastita, Dirk 185, 228 “De la cultural translation a la philosophie de la traduction” (Basalamah) 147 Delanda, M. 95–101, 107 Deleuze, G. 52, 95, 98–100, 104–107, 137, 139, 148, 228, 420, 427 Delisle, Jean 62 The Democracy of Objects (Bryant) 45 Demosthenes 170 denotation 300–301 depeasantization 246 Derrida, J. 310, 465

Index

Derrida, Jacques 37, 39, 48n6, 52, 121, 135–136, 137, 141, 144 De Saussure, F. 135 Desblache, Lucile 119 Descartes, R. 42, 473 descriptive approaches 186–187; assumed translation 191–192; criticized 202–204; data for study of translational norms 198–199; decision-making 197; descriptive 186–187; empirical studies 190–191; equivalence and untranslatability 194; first and second-order objects 198; genealogy of translational norm 194–195; indirect translation 192–193; instability of translational norms 197–198; ‘interdisciplinary’ approach 189–190; main coordinates 186–191; multiplicity of translational norms 197–198; nature of translational norms 199; normative content 196; normative force and subjectivity 196–197; overview 185–186; pseudotranslation 192–193; semiotic transfer 193; studies 188; target-oriented 188–189; translation 187–188; translational norms 194–196, 198; translational regularities vs. norms 198; translation law 200–201; translation regularities, norms and laws 198, 201–202; variability of translational norms 197–198; see also Descriptive Translation Studies (DTS) Descriptive Translation Studies (DTS) 15, 55, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 195, 198, 202, 204, 205, 311; see also descriptive approaches Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond (Toury) 185 ‘Des tours de Babel’ (Derrida) 135 ‘destruction’ 135 deterritorialization 102 détournement 278 deverbalization 14 de Vignemont, F. 422 D’hulst, L. 51, 97 diagonal translation 432, 433 Dialectics (Schleiermacher) 130 dialogical relation 355 dialogism 353–354, 357 diamesic endolingual translation 364 diaphasic endolingual translation 364 diasemiotic translation 344 dichotomous epistemologies 13–16 die Einfühlung ‘empathy’ 422 différance 121, 135 diffusion 316 Di Giminiani, P. 121 diglossic endolingual translation 364 Dilthey, Wilhelm 131, 417–419, 423–424, 436 Dingwaney, Anuradha 235 Discourse Networks 1800/1900 (Kittler) 236

discourses 381–383 dispositional knowledge 313 dissipative system: Bakhtinian heteroglossia as 424–429; defined 426 distant audiences 466 domains 379–380 domesticating translator (DT) 424 double-voicing 425 Downie, J. 180 Dreaming the Collective: (E)co-Translation in the Era of Climate Crisis (Berkobien) 120 dubbing 433 Dupre, J. 20 Dusi, Nicola 343 dynamical interpretant 477–478 Eatough, V. 435 Eco, U. 5–6, 82, 343, 346, 475 eco-consciousness 118 eco-criticism 118 École des Annales concepts 121 ecological addiction 122 ecological approaches: constitutive ecologies 114–115; dawning of Utopia 121–123; ecological plasticity 116–117; ecological vertigo 115–116; ecologies of indifference 121–123; ecology as a theme 117; ecology as metaphor 118–119; ecotranslation as radical practice and criticism 119–121; new libidinal economy 121–123; translators of tradosphere 113–114 ecological plasticity 116–117 ecological vertigo 115–116 ecology(ies): constitutive 114–115; of indifference 121–123; as metaphor 118–119; as a theme 117 ‘The Ecology of Translation, or The Translator as World Author’ (Ciorogar) 118 “ecosophy” 143 eco-texts 118 ecotranslation 94, 119, 120; as radical practice and criticism 119–121 ‘Eco-Translation: Responding to the Work of Michael Cronin’ (conference) 123n1 Eco-Translation: Translation and Ecology in the Age of the Anthropocene (Cronin) 113, 115, 121, 143 Ehrensberger-Dow, M. 59, 60 Einstein, Albert 44 ekphrasis 346 Ellestrom, L. 397 Elliott, Kamilla 405 The Embodied Mind (Varela, Thompson and Rosch) 429 emergence 2–3, 33, 96, 142, 421; of an emon 85; of life worlds 101; of modern science 450– 452; principle of 100; process of 83; of the

489

Index

quality of error 83; of semiotic anthropology 287; social-cultural 101; of transfer studies 232; of translation sociology 98 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 413 Emmeche, Claus 88 empathic narration 422 empathy, models of 422–424 empirical studies 190–191 empiricism 1, 14, 144, 203–204, 456; normal 420; radical 420, 436 enactivism 429 encoding/decoding model 465–466, 477 endolingual translation 345, 364; diamesic 364; diaphasic 364; diglossic 364 endosemiosic translation 343 endotranslation 84 enfolded semiosis 79 English Academic Discourse (EAD) 453–454 ‘enlarging translation’ 142 Enlightenment 62, 145 enrolment stage 315 entanglement 45–46, 313 epistemic pluralism 20 epistemological analysis 95 epistemological commitment 379 Epistemologies of the South: Justice against Epistemicide (Santo) 454 epistemology/ies 102; complexity 13, 16–19; defined 13; dichotomous epistemologies 13–16; intersemiotic translation 19–23; overview 13; scientific pluralism 19–23 equivalence 157–158, 194 Eratosthenes 447 Eriksen, Thomas Hyland 294 ethical translational thinking 144 Ethics (Schleiermacher) 130 ethnographic theory of language 297 ethnography 64–65, 257, 283, 293–295, 298–299, 302n1 Euclid 447 European Renaissance 444 European Society for Translational Medicine 319 Even-Zohar, I. 37, 54, 55, 96, 185, 194, 201, 210, 232, 308, 444 example-based machine translation (EBMT) 333 exegetical meaning 288–289 exegetic meaning 288–289 Experiences in Translation (Eco) 346 external technical media of display 392 extrinsic approach 420 Facebook 62, 381, 383 ‘fake news’ effect 476 false consciousness, ideology 361 Fedorov, Andrei 230

490

feeling-based hermeneutics 413–429; Bakhtinian heteroglossia 424–429; empathic narration 422; models of empathy 422–424; narratoriality 419–421 feelings/emotions 85 Fernandez, E. 79 field theory 94, 246–251 first-order objects 198 Firth, John Rupert 156, 159 Firthian traditions 56 Fish, Stanley 231 Fiske, John 471–472, 480 Fitzgerald, F. Scott 419 flat ontology 45–47; see also onticology fleeting images 253, 255 Flynn, Peter 3–4 ‘Focus on the Translator’ 60 Fodor, J. 162 foliated pluralism 22 Footitt, H. 61, 63 Forcada, M. L. 334 4EA cognition 429 foreignizing translator (FT) 424 Forster, Leonard 229 Foucault, Michel 52, 137, 453, 473, 474 Fragmented Narrative (Sadler) 48n2 Frege, Gottlob 132 French National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies (INSEE) 249 Frigau Manning, C. 62 fringed oligopoly 274 frontal images 255 functionalism 2, 54, 169, 171, 173–176, 178–181 functionalist approaches: functionalism 173–176; historical overview 170–171; intersemiotic aspects 176–179; overview 169; research perspectives 179–180; skopos theory 171–173 ‘The function of general laws in history’ (Hempel) 55 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 39, 131, 139, 144, 231, 414, 416, 465 Gaia 354 Gal, Susan 299–301 Galileo 450 Gallagher, Shaun 422, 427 Gallese, V. 422 Gambier, Yves 433 Gamow, Georgij 87 Garcia Martin, Alvaro 1 Garroni, Emilio 363 Gazzaniga, Michael S. 426 Geertz, Clifford 232, 235, 284, 287 gender: diversity 266; grammatical 230, 268; natural 268; studies and translation 269–270 Genealogies of Knowledge project 52, 55–56

Index

General Cultural History of Mankind (Allgemeine Kulturgeschichte des Menschheit) (Klemm) 225 generalized translation 147 ‘General Theory of Translation’ (Vermeer) 169 generic pronouns 268 genetic code 84 genetic criticism 58 Genette, Gerard 343 genotype-phenotype relationship 84 genres 289, 302n4, 379–380; aesthetic 288; CV as 379–380; defined 379; and domains 380 Gentzler, E. 185, 189, 190, 456 The Geography of Thought (Nisbett) 226 German Romanticism 14 German Romantic philosophy 141 German Romantics 134 Giammarresi, S. 326, 329 ‘gift economy’ 131 Gile, Daniel 195 Gilligan, Carol 120 Glick, D. 286 Global Ethnography (Burawoy) 297 globalization 376 Global North 233 global semiotics 350–365 Global South 444 Go, Julian 247 Goldhammer, Arthur 453 Goldman, A. 422 Goldstone, A. 56 Gonne, Maud 3, 8 Goodwin, C. 292 Gopferich, Susanne 179, 313–314 Gorlee, Dinda L. 5, 90n3, 286, 389, 404 Gottlieb, Henrik 340–341, 344, 404, 432–433, 433 Gouanvic, J. 214 Graeber, David 264 Gramling, David 236 grammatical gender 230, 268 grammatical metaphorization 445 Gramsci, Antonio 478 Granovetter, Mark 102 Great Divide 98 Greimas, Algirdas 343 Grice, H. P. 158, 165 Grundlegung einer allgemeinen Translationstheorie (Reiss and Vermeer) 173 Grusin, Richard 404 Grutman, Ranier 228 The Guardian 274 Guattari, Felix 95, 98, 99, 100, 104, 105, 106, 107, 228, 420, 427 guerrilla communications tactics 278 Guerrilla Translation 273 Gulliver’s Voyage to Phantomimia (Robinson) 421

Habermas, Jurgen 31, 145 habit 79–80 habituation 243 habitus 246–251; corporeal 242 haiku 7 Haines, S. 121 Hall, Edward 232 Hall, Stuart 309, 471, 474–477, 480 hall for music 435 Halliday, Michael 156, 160, 161, 235, 370–371, 373, 445, 447–448; concept of ‘mode’ 370 Hamel, M.-J. 156 haptic translation 437 Harding, S.-A. 57 Hartley, John 480 Hartley, R. 336 Hegel, Georg 38, 417, 453 Heidegger, Martin 29, 34, 35, 37, 39, 43, 47, 52, 131, 133, 134, 135, 140, 141, 418 Heilbron, J. 444 Heine, Heinrich 230 Heraclitus 35, 43, 447 Herder, Johann Gottfried 226, 413, 422 heredity 85 Hermans, Theo 52, 55, 60, 185, 194, 195, 197, 204, 211 hermeneutic lemniscate 431, 431 hermeneutics 54, 130, 144, 413–438, 466; communal feeling-based (icotic) 416; feelingbased 413–429; feeling-based hermeneutics 413–429; material 430–431; material and multimodal hermeneutics 429–436; multimodal 435–436; and philosophy of language 130–132; psychological 414, 416; Schleiermacherian 414, 417; visual 430 Hermès, Le Passage du Nord-Ouest (Serres) 60, 61, 102, 139 heteroglossia 303n27; Bakhtinian 424–429; defined 426 heteromediality 397–398 hetero-normative binary 268 high culture 225–226, 228 high-level programming languages 328 Hippocrates 447 histoire croisée approach 313 Hjelmslev, Louis 343 Hodge, Robert 370 Hoffmeyer, Jesper 88 Hoggart, Richard 466 Holmes, James S. 13, 15, 51, 54, 59, 60, 185, 186, 187, 188, 190, 194, 201, 203 Holmes-Toury ‘map’ 32 Holmkvist, S. 53 Holz-Manttari, Justa 177–178, 210, 211 Honig, Hans G. 173 Hooke, Robert 443

491

Index

The House of the Interpreter (Thiong’o) 227 Hu Gengshen 118 human cognitive processes 59 human communication 390–393; cognitive import 390–391; media products 391–392; presemiotic mediation 392–393; semiotic representation 392–393; technical media of display 392 humanity/ies: cultural translation in 312–314; plurality of 131; translation concept in 308–309 human semiosis: languages in 361; signs in 361 Human Translator 419–421 ‘humoral’ theory of medicine 28 Husserl, Edmund 131, 133, 245 Hutchins, W. J. 332 hypermedia 345 Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Morton) 113 hypostasis 41 hypothesis of linguistic relativity 264 iconicity 362; and translation 359–361 ideational metafunction 373 identification interpretant 355 identity 34, 43, 48; collective 275; and translation 271 ideology 361–362; as false consciousness 361; interpreted 361; and signs 362–363 Ihde, Don 430 images: fleeting 253; frontal 255 imagetext 341 image-to-action translation 86 image-to-image translation 85 imitation 85–86 immediate interpretant 477 implied reader 463, 466 In a Different Voice (Gilligan) 120 ‘Increasing Ecological Awareness in Translation Studies: A Voice-based Perspective’ (Taivalkoski-Shilov) 119 ‘indeterminacy of translation’ 132 indeterminacy theory 44 indirect translation 192–193, 338n1 information: defined 336; hierarchy 336 infrasemiotic translation 344 Ingarden, Roman 47 Ingold, Tim 65, 284, 294–295, 298 In Search of a Theory of Translation (Toury) 194 instability of translational norms 197–198 Instagram 381 ‘The Institutions of Interpretation’ project 234 Intentionality and Semiotics (Deely) 438 interdisciplinary approaches 189; criticisms of TS 310–312; cultural translation examples 312–314; intersemiotic translation/ semiotranslation 319–321; overview 307–308; social translation 314–318; translation in 492

medicine and natural sciences 318–319; use of translation concept 308–310 interessement 314 interlingual translation 308, 342 intermedial approaches 389–407; human communication 390–393; media interrelations 396–399; media modalities 393–395; media types 393–395; overview 389–390; transmediality 399–407 intermediality 396–397 internal technical media of display 392 international solidarity networks 271 interpersonal communication 391 interpersonal metafunction 373 interpretants 82; dynamical 477–478; identification 355; immediate 477; logical 478; outline and division of 477–480; responsive understanding 355; translation, in open sign network 355–356 interpretation 79–80, 83; communication as 374; data 337; of genome by an organism 84; and hermeneutics 466; interpreting 472–473; momentary act as a 80; non-translational 83; sequential 80; translational 83 interpreted ideology 361 interpreters 61, 165; modes 60; translators 328 Interpretierung 133–134 Interpretive Theory of Translation (Seleskovitch) 162 “inter-referential translation” 147 intersemiosic translation 343, 347, 352–353 intersemiotic 18, 19–23, 176, 340–365; aspects of functionalist approaches 176–179; definitions 340–350; perspectives 340–350; scientific pluralism and 19–23; taxonomies 340–350; translation 18, 19–23 intersemiotic translation 258, 308, 319–321, 352–353; definitions and taxonomies of 342–345; future perspectives 349–350; and multimodality thinking 347–349; nonverbal to nonverbal 347; nonverbal to verbal 346–347; and semioethics 363–365; types and examples of 345; verbal to nonverbal 346; verbal to verbal 345–346; verbocentric traces 340–341 intersemiotic transposition 404 intertextuality 344 intralingual subtitling 433 intramediality 396–397 intramedial transmediality 398 Introduction to Metaphysics (Heidegger) 29 The Invention of Monolingualism (Gramling) 236 Iser, Wolfgang 231, 234, 465 Jacob, P. 422 Jagose, Annemarie 235 Jakobson, Roman 14, 51, 54, 88, 145, 156, 174, 177, 209, 210, 221, 229, 230, 308, 319, 341, 342–343, 344, 359, 383, 394, 404 James, William 413, 415, 420

Index

Jansen, H. 62 Jantsch, E. 146 Jauss, Hans Robert 465 Jerome (Hieronymus, Sophronius Eusebius) 170 Jervolino, Domenico 131 Jia, Hongwei 404 Jianzhong Xu 118 Joerges, B. 316, 321 Johnston, D. 455, 456 Jones, Francis R. 66, 216 The Journey to the West 218 Judeo-Christian tradition 41 juxtaposition 285–287 Kabbalah, Lurianic 418 Kade, Otto 170 Kaindl, Klaus 180, 189, 190 Kanaev, Ivan 353 Kant, I. 28, 30, 137 Kant and the platypus (Eco) 5 Kapferer, B. 286 Katan, David 229 Katz, J. 162 Kearney, Richard 131 Kenny, D. 53, 419–421 Kernels 162 Kershaw, A. 65 Kilpi, Volter 421, 426, 428 Kiraly, Donald 15, 16 Kittel, Harold 232 Kittler, Friedrich 236 Kivi, Aleksis 427–428 Klein, Thompson 66, 146 Klemm, G.F. 225 knowledge: brokering 332; cultures 130; defined 336; hierarchy 336; integration 332; mobilization 332; pyramid 336, 336; transfer 332; translation and 94–97 knowledge translation: antiquity 446–448; approaches to 443–456; and computer programming 330–332; Medieval period 448–450; in Middle Ages 443; modern science 450–452; Science’s Others 452–455 Koehn, P. 334 Kolbert, Elizabeth 119 Koskinen, K. 63 Kotze, H. 23 Kress, Gunter 349, 370, 372, 377, 404 Kristeva, J. 344 Kudina, Olga 431 Kuhn, Thomas 20, 95, 97, 102, 103, 106, 109 Kull, Kalevi 115, 121 Kussmaul, Paul 173, 179 labelling of knowledge 314 Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts (Woolgar and Latour) 98 Ladmiral, J.-R. 141

La double absence: Des illusions de l’émigré aux soffrances de l’immigre (Sayad) 242 La Fontaine 103, 138 L’Algérie en 1957 (Tillion) 247 Lambert, Jose 185 La mission civilisatrice 226 ‘The Landscape of War’ (Lewin) 248 languaculture 369 language 165–166; assembly 328; in computer programming 327–332; ideological component of 361–363; as modeling 351; nonverbal (see nonverbal language); patterns and cultural norms 264; and social reality 276; as symbolic system 359; verbal (see verbal language) Language as a Social Semiotic: The social interpretation of language and meaning (Halliday) 370 language-based communication 15 Lapalme, G. 326, 329 L’art des Ponts: Homo Pontifex (Serres) 137–138 Lassig, Simone 312, 313 Latour, Bruno 3, 45, 47, 60, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 101, 104, 107, 108, 110, 110n7, 137, 215, 217–218, 236, 241, 314, 315, 316 La traducción y la(s) historia(s) (Claramonte) 455 La traduction et la lettre ou l’auberge du lointain (Berman) 140 Laviosa, S. 66 Law, John 98, 137, 215 Lawrence, Jacob 258 Leahy, A. 62 Lebende Sprachen 169 Le déracinement (Bourdieu and Sayad) 241–242, 247, 250, 257 LeDoux, Joseph 413 Le droit de traduire: une politique culturelle pour la mondialisation [The Right to Translate: A Cultural Politics for Globalization, my translation] (Basalamah) 147 Leeuwen, Theo Van 349, 370 Lefevere, Andre 37, 38, 55, 185, 200, 210, 211, 224, 231 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 138 Leipzig School 14–15, 170, 231 Letter of Aristeas 446 Leuven-Zwart, Kitty van 185 Levi-Strauss, Claude 101 Levy, Jiry 55, 194 Lewin, Kurt 248 lexicogrammatical tendency 264, 269 Lienhardt, G. 310 lingo-centric perspective 289 lingual bias 308 linguicentric biases 7 linguist 169, 171 Linguistica Antverpiensia 228 linguistic anthropology 298–301 493

Index

linguistic approaches: Eugene A. Nida 161–164; J. C. Catford 158–161; language 165–166; overview 155; Saussure’s theory of the sign 155–156; Vinay and Darbelnet 156–158 linguistic bias 1, 191 linguistic ecosystem 118 linguistic hospitality 131 linguistic norms 269 linguistic relativity 264–267, 276, 358; hypothesis of 264; structural level 265; types of 264–265 linguistics 4, 53, 56, 77, 88, 95, 100, 159, 160, 166, 176, 190, 195, 199, 230, 231, 234 linguistic signs 156 linguistic system 159 linguistic theory 161 A Linguistic Theory of Translation: An Essay in Applied Linguistics (Catford) 158–159 linguists 54, 179 Lister, B. 65 Liszt, Franz 212 Littau, Karin 432 living organisms 89 ‘local culture’ 224 The Location of Culture (Bhabha) 233 locus of theorization 292, 294–295, 297 logical interpretant 478 logic of practice 257 logic of theory 257 logos 444, 447 logotranslation 88 Lotman, Juri 5, 47, 115, 219–221, 234, 235, 343 lower threshold of translation 83 low-level programming language 328 Lucy, John A. 264–265 Luhmann, Niklas 52, 210, 211, 212, 213, 214, 215, 217 Luo, Wenyan 2, 216–218 Luther, Martin 170 Machado, Dinis Ramos 193 machine language 2, 328 machine translation (MT) 275, 332–337; and data processing 335–337; intersemiotic aspects of data-driven approaches to 335; tools 326, 332 machine-translation post-editing (MTPE) 421 Machine-Translation (MT) Post-Editor 419–421 Maier, Carol 235 Malabou, Catherine 116–117, 120 Malcolm, Norman 243 Malevich, Kazemir 258 Malinowski, B. 230, 295, 296–297, 298 Mallarme, Stephane 118 Malmkjaer, K. 194, 199, 200 The Manipulation of Literature (Hermans) 185 Manipulation School 55 494

Manning, Frigau 62 mapping 80, 97, 106; the social 106–108 map territories 32 Marais, Kobus 17, 18, 21, 28, 44, 45, 47, 52, 89, 90, 97, 109, 115, 118, 119, 140, 142–143, 191, 236, 272, 319, 341, 377, 383, 389, 399, 432, 436, 455, 456 Maran, Timo 114 Marcus, George E. 233, 283, 289, 298 Marin Garcia, Alvaro 8, 19, 23 Markerese approach 163 Maruyama, M. 53 Marx, Karl 284, 477 Massumi, Brian 420–421 material hermeneutics 430–431 material media: in audiovisual texts 432–433; of verbal texts 432 material metaphors 431 material modality 393–394 material situated embodiment 433–434 Matson, Alex 427–428 matter 264 Maturana, Humberto 353 Mauranen, A. 200 Mauss, Marcel 137 McFarlane, James 55, 187, 189 McIntosh, Angus 159 McLuhan, Marshall 391, 431 McShade, Dennis 193 meaning 272; defined 159, 372; in live communication 356–359; three levels of 373; in verbal/nonverbal language 358 meaning-making 372, 385n2; biosemiotics 436; as hypothesis making 372–373; Social Semiotics 372 The Meaning of Meaning (Ogden and Richards) 295 Meanings (Polanyi) 258 mechanic communication 81 mechanic translation 80, 81, 84, 85 media 378–379; early history 471–472; integration 398–399; products 391–392; see also specific entries media interrelations 396–399; heteromediality 397–398; intermediality 396–397; intramediality 396–397; media integration 398–399; media transformation 398–399; media translation 398–399; transmediality 397–398 medial configuration 391 media modalities 393–395; categories 393–395; material modality 393–394; semiotic modality 393–394; sensorial modality 393–394; spatiotemporal modality 393–394 media representation: defined 400; intermedial 405; and transmediality 400–403; and transmediation 401

Index

mediated communication 391 media transformation 398–399; and transmediality 403–406; types of 406 media translation: media interrelations 398–399; and transmediality 407 media types 393–395; basic 395; qualified 395; types of 395 medical humanities (MH) 145 medicine: translational (see translational medicine); translation in 318–319 Melucci, Alberto 267 Melville, Herman 263 Mendelssohn, Moses 394 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 137, 245, 429, 430, 435 Merrill, James 232 Mersmann, Birgit 312 Mertz, E. 288, 292–293, 294 Meschonnic, Henri 54, 147 metafunction 373; ideational 373; interpersonal 373 metaphor, ecology as 118–119 metaphysics of presence 310 metasemiosis 352, 364; defined 350; modeling in 350–351 “metasociology” 149 methodology 52 Meylaerts, Reine 64, 90, 191 microbes 216 Mignolo, Walter 235 ‘mind-reading’ 422 Mitchell, W. J. T. 341, 394, 397 mobilization 315 mode 370, 378–379; vs. code 371–372; defined 371; as heuristic tool 371–372 modeling: language as 351; in metasemiosis 350–351; in semiosis 350–351 modern science 450–452 ‘Modes of Translation’ (McFarlane) 187 modulation 157 momentary act 80 momentary semiosis 78 momentary umwelt 79 monolingualism 225, 236 monolingualization 225 monolingual subtitling 433 Montgomery, Scott 443, 448 Morley, David 466 Morphing Intelligence (Malabou) 116 Morris, Charles 351, 354 Morrow, E. R. 235 Morton, Timothy 113, 114, 119 “multidimensionality” 146 multimodal discourse analysis (MMDA) 435 multimodal hermeneutics 435–436 multimodality 2, 58–59, 66, 293; in contemporary semiotic landscape 376–378; and social semiotics 370–375; thinking nd intersemiotic translation 347–349

multimodal theory 58 multimodal turn 369 multiplicity of translational norms 197–198 Munoz, Ricardo 16 Munslow, Alun 455 mute syntax 351 ‘The Mutual Translation of Culture’ (Budick) 234 mythos 444, 447, 455 Nachahmung/Nachbildung ‘simulation’ 416 ‘The Name and Nature of Translation Studies’ (Holmes) 13, 60–61, 185–186 named language 385n1 Nancy, Jean-Luc 37, 47 narrative, defined 423 narrativization 423 narratoriality 419–421 National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) 330 national languages 385n1 National Liberation Army (ALN) 246 National Liberation Front (FLN) 243, 246 Nationwide 466 natural gender 268 natural languages 327 natural sciences 318–319 natural translation 88 negentropic process 45 negentropic semiotic work, translation as 272 negentropy 44, 109, 111n9 negotiated messages 475 neo-Firthian traditions 56 neologism 354 Neubert, Albrecht 231 neural machine translation (NMT) 334 new libidinal economy 121–123 Newmark, P. 54 New Materialism 28 ‘New Possibilities for Translation: Care Theory as criteria for Negotiation’ (Cornelio) 120 Newton, Isaac 443 Nicolescu, Basarab 146 Nida, Eugene A. 36, 51, 53, 54, 155, 160, 161–164, 170, 230 Nietzsche, Friedrich 29, 43, 47, 52 Nineteen Eighty-Four (Orwell) 265, 266 Niranjana, T. 311 Nisbett, Richard 226 non-being 38–40 non-living organisms 89 non-semiotic translation 80 non-systemic structures 215–219 non-translational interpretations 83 nonverbal language 351, 358, 361 nonverbal to nonverbal intersemiotic translation 347 495

Index

nonverbal to verbal intersemiotic translation 346–347 Nord, Christiane 2, 54, 174, 175, 180 Nordenstam, Johan Mauritz 428 normative content 196 normative force and subjectivity 196–197 norms: cultural (see cultural norms); linguistic 269 Noth, Winfried 85 noumena 28 Nowotny, S. 312 object: defined 437; first-order 198; level vs. meta level 198; second-order 198; vs. thing 437; translation 6, 436 Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement 263, 278 Oeser, Hans-Christian 419 Of Grammatology (Derrida) 136 Ogden, C. K. 295 Olteanu, C. 435 ‘On Linguistic Aspects of Translation’ ( Jakobson) 209, 230 ‘On the Different Methods of Translating’ (Schleiermacher) 130 onticology 45–47; see also flat ontology ‘ontological relativism’ 132 ontological traditions 40–47; flat ontology (onticology) 45–47; process ontology 43–45; substance ontology 40–43 ontology/ontological 28, 29, 30, 34, 35, 37, 42, 43, 44, 46; being and non-being 38–40; categories and categorization 31–34; change and stability 35–38; flat 45–47; foundations 28–29; hermeneutics 144; paradigm 131; process 43–45; study of 29–31; substance 40–43; traditions 40–47 On Translation (Ricoeur) 141 “open-minded rationality” 147 open sign network 355–356 open systems 46 opera librettos 180 operational meaning 289 OPUS2 project 57 organisms: living 89; non-living 89 Orwell, George 265–266 otherness 353–354, 357 Otsuji, E. 236 Outward Turn (Bassnett and Johnston) 455 Owen, Richard 87 pan-philosophy of translation 142–146 Parables for the Virtual (Massumi) 420 Paracelsus 450 ‘parasite’ 136, 138 The Parasite 137 Paris Collège international de philosophie 141 Paris School 14, 15 496

Parmenides 35, 38 Parmenides (Heidegger) 134 participant-oriented research 60–63 Pascalian Meditations (Bourdieu) 243 Peirce, Charles S. 43, 166, 209, 285, 341, 354, 389, 393, 413, 420, 468, 471, 474–477 Peircean: approach 79, 91n5; phenomenology 4, 18, 19; semiotics 4, 140, 142, 287, 298, 345, 436; semiotic tradition 5 Pennycook, A. 236 perceptual judgment 471 Perez, Calzada 348 Perez-Gonzalez, L. 59 period of gestation 298 perspectivist translation 454 Peterson, Jordan 266–267 Petrilli, Susan 5, 80, 88, 340, 342, 343–344, 347 Phaenomena (Aratus) 448 phaneroscopy 468–470; skopein of 468 phenomenology of landscape 248 Phenomenology of Perception (Merleau-Ponty) 245 ‘The Phenomenon of Culture’ (Lotman) 234 Phillips, J. B. 163 philosophical approaches: overview 129–130; pan-philosophy of translation 142–146; philosophy of existence 133–134; philosophy of language and hermeneutics 130–132; philosophy of meaning 132–133; philosophy of modes 135–136; philosophy of relations 136–140; toward a philosophy of translation 142; transdisciplinary philosophy of translation 146–148; translation and philosophy 140–142; translation in philosophy 130 philosophical impressionism 141 philosophy: of existence 133–134; of language and hermeneutics 130–132; of meaning 132–133; of modes 135–136; of relations 136–140; translation and 130, 140–142; translation in 130 philosophy of translation 130, 134, 140, 142, 145–146 photography 251–256; and Bourdieu Algerian research 251–256; fleeting images 253; as mnemonic tools 253 plasticity 356 Plato 28, 31, 35, 36, 37, 38, 41, 47, 48n4, 48n5 platypus 5 plenilunum 457n12 pluralism 21; scientific 19–23 plurality of humanity 131 Polanyi, Michael 242, 258 political correctness 264–267 political resistance 269 politics: prefigurative 267; queer 267 Poltermann, Andreas 211 polysystem theory 55, 185, 186, 189, 205, 210, 232

Index

Poncharal, Bruno 119 Ponzio, Augusto 355 Popovič, Anton 55, 303n22 pop songs 180 positionality 420 positional meaning 289 positions in research methodology 51–67 positivism 24, 95, 132, 203, 453; embodied 453; and empiricism 203–204; logical 132; postpositivism 204 postcolonialism 270 postcolonial studies 4 ‘post-human ethics’ 143 post-humanist 45 poststructuralism 136 Povinelli, E. A. 95, 101 Pratt, Mary Louise 235 The Predicament of Culture (Clifford) 233 prefigurative politics 267 presemiotic mediation 392–393 Prigogine, Ilya 220, 234 primary modeling 351, 352, 364 Primitive Culture (Tylor) 225, 226 Printers Without Borders (Coldiron) 432 problematization 314 Process and Reality (Whitehead) 43 process ontology 43–45 Prodi, Giorgio 354 product-oriented research 53–59 progressive orthodoxy 266 pronouns: and activist translation 268; generic 268; importance of 268 propaganda 481–482 Protestant Reformation 451 protosemiosis 354 prototranslation 88 protranslation 88 Provincializing Europe (Chakrabarty) 233 pseudotranslation 192–193 psychological hermeneutics 414, 416 psychology 4, 190 Ptolemy I 446 Ptolemy II 447 punctum 259 Purchase, Helen C. 394 purification 314 Pym, Anthony 15, 61, 62, 94, 188, 191, 195, 204, 228, 234, 235 qualified media types 395 queer politics 267 Queiroz, Joao 5, 341, 344 Quine, Willard Van Orman 52, 132–133, 141 radical empiricism 420, 436 radical pluralism 20 radical political action 264

‘radical translation’ 132 Rajewsky, Irina 391 Ramos, Prieto 180 Ramos Pinto, S. 382 Rao, Sathya 140–141 Rawling, Piers 36 realist ontology 45 ‘real postmodernism’ 221 Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to ActorNetwork-Theory (Latour) 98 reception 1, 3–4, 44; abilities 175; of an object of value 136; of machine-translated text 64; studies 203; of translated texts 231 reception analysis 464–465 reception research 465–468 recognition 85 Red States 479 ‘Reflections on a New Ethos for Europe’ (Ricoeur) 132 reflexive sociology 149, 257 reflexivity 244 registers 300 Reinventing Social Emancipation: Voices of the World (Santo) 454 Reiss, Katharina 54, 169, 171, 173, 174, 175, 176, 178 rejection messages 475 relationality of things 256–260 relativism 15 relativity theory 44 The Relocation of Culture: Translations, Migrations, Borders (Bertacco and Vallorani) 233 remediation 379 Renaissance 62 Renaissance Humanism 451 Renan, Ernst 227 Rendall, Steven 418 Renn, Joachim 308, 318 representamen 5–6, 18–19, 21–22, 78–80, 82, 285, 342, 344–345, 400–401, 470–471 representation 267–269 research: context-oriented 63–65; participantoriented 60–63; process-oriented 59–60; product-oriented 53–59; translation regularities, norms and laws 201–202 research methodology: context-oriented research 63–65; participant-oriented research 60–63; positions in 51–67; process-oriented research 59–60; product-oriented research 53–59 resemiotization 404 resistance 267–269 responsive understanding interpretant 355 Richards, I. A. 54, 295 Ricoeur, Paul 37, 39, 52, 131, 132, 137, 138, 141, 416 Riedlinger, Albert 155 497

Index

Rigney, A. 287 Rimbaud, Arthur 118 Ringmar, M. 327 rituals 288 Robinson, Douglas 3, 52, 53, 60, 142, 144, 145, 195, 236, 455 Romantic period 54 Rosa, Assis 4 Rosch, Eleanor 32, 429 Rossi-Landi, Ferruccio 353, 358, 361 Rothko, Mark 258, 259 Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Clifford) 233 Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies 34 The Routledge handbook of translation and activism (Gould and Tahmasebian) 269 Routledge Handbook of Translation and Philosophy 36 Routledge Research 62 Rowley, J. 336 Roy, Louis 414 Rozik, Eli 394 Ruddock, Andy 466 rule-based machine translation (RBMT) 332–333 Rushmer, R. 332 Russell, Bertrand 132 Ryle, Gilbert 473 sacred history 457n15 Sadler, N. 48n2 Sager, Juan C. 156 Saldanha, Gabriela 2, 8, 53, 65 Salthe, S. 18, 20 Sandig, Ulrike Almut 117 Santo, Boaventura de Sousa 454 Sapir, Edward 33, 156, 230, 264, 358 Sapiro, G. 444 Sapir-Whorf hypothesis 133, 229 Sartre, Jean-Paul 38, 47, 137 Saussure, Ferdinand de 155–156, 465; theory of the sign 155–156 Saussurean linguistics 39, 157 Saussurean model of translation 82 Saussurean semiology 5 Saussurean sign 157 Sayad, Abdelmalek 242–243; acculturation 247 Schaff, Adam 361 Schaffner, Christina 185, 195 Schleiermacher, Freidrich 14, 52, 54, 130–131, 132, 225, 414, 424 Schleiermacherian hermeneutics 414, 417 Schmidt, Siegfried J. 210 Schmitt, Peter A. 180 Schober, Regina 404 Scholasticism 444, 450 498

Schrodinger, Erwin 44, 87 Schultheis, Franz 251, 259 science: communication 332; defined 457n1; modern 450–452; natural 318–319 Science in Translation (Montgomery) 443 ‘science of relations’ 139 Science’s Others 452–455 scientific discourse 445–446 scientific pluralism 19–23 SciTech 445–446 Scott, Clive 118, 342 Screen Theory 471 Sealey, Alison 119 Sebeok, Thomas A. 342, 351, 352, 354 Sechehaye, Albert 155 Second Law of Thermodynamics 44 second-order objects 198 Seitsemän veljestä (Kivi) 427 Seleskovitch, D. 162 self-aware subjectivity 144 Semenenko, Aleksei 234 semi-narrow intramediality 396 semiocapitalism 277 semioethics 363–365 semiosis 78, 79, 82, 84, 155, 342, 358, 359, 374; common 358; endosemiosis 84; enfolded 79; Enfolded 79; human 358; modeling in 350–351; momentary 78; semiosic process 31, 65; sequential 78–79 semiosphere 219 semiotic 105, 193, 234 semiotic anthropology 294; recent developments in 287; and translation 287–294 semiotic communication 81 semiotic equivalence 289 semiotic materiality 357 semiotic modality 393–394 semiotic process 79, 89; phenomena 142 semiotic realism 18, 19, 23 semiotic relativity 266 semiotic representation 392–393 semiotics 78, 88, 90, 285–287; and cultural studies 465; defined 341; global, and translation 350–365; social (see social semiotics); vs. study of communication 469 semiotic spaces 381–383; Instagram as 381 semiotic systems 219–221 semiotic theory of translation 19, 23, 45 semiotic thinking 389 semiotic transfer 193 semiotic translation 80–81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 90n4; lower and upper thresholds of 81–83 semiotranslation 258, 319–321, 326; see also intersemiotic translation sensorial modality 393–394 sensory configurations 400 sequential semiosis 78–79

Index

Serres, Michel 96, 97, 102, 103, 104, 105, 108, 137–139, 148, 315–316, 320 Seven Brothers (Matson) 427 Sewell, William H., Jr. 226 Shannon, Claude 1, 470 shared culture 377 Sharov, Alexei 89 Shlesinger, M. 57, 201 Shread, Carolyn 116 Shreve, Gregory 231 sight translation (ST) 433 signal transduction 84 sign-making 374–375, 385n2 signs: in human semiosis 361; and ideology 362–363; making 372; as motivated 372–373; verbal 356, 358 Sign System Studies 219 sign translation 80 The Silent Language (Hall) 232 Sillanpaa, F. E. 427 Silverstein, Michael 287, 289–290; notion of transformation 290–291; textual objects 291–292 Simeoni, Daniel 60, 61, 214, 272–273 Simmel, George 137 Simon, Sherry 269 Simondon, Gilbert 420 Singer, T. 287, 422 Sketch Engine 57 Sketch for a Self-Analysis (Bourdieu) 251 skopos theory 54, 169, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 178, 179, 180, 231, 302n2; basic principles of 171–173 Skype 62 slippery slope argument 267 Sloterdijk, Peter 47, 101 Smail, Daniel Lord 121 small ‘c’ culture 225 Smette, Bernard 96, 108, 110n5 Smirl, L. 65 Smith, A. H. 229 Snow, C.P. 224 social 53; Bourdieusian conceptions of 98; mapping 106–108; relocating 97–102; translating 102–106 social anthropology 294–298 ‘The Social Definition of Photography’ (Bourdieu) 254 social dynamics 371 social media spaces 381 social network theory 60 social neuroscience of empathy 414 social planning 361 social reality and language 276 social semiotic multimodal approach: multimodality and translation 376–378;

overview 369–370; social semiotics (see social semiotics); to translation 369–385 social semiotics 219; defined 369; meaningmaking 372; and multimodality 370–375; sign-making 372 social-systemic paradigms 211–215 social systems theory/social-systemic theories 210, 211, 215 social translation 148, 314–318; examples 316–318; roots of 315–316 socio-analysis 246–251 socio-cognitive dimensions 23 sociolinguistics 237 sociological approaches 60, 61, 241–260; field theory 246–251; habitus 246–251; logic of practice 243–246; overview 241–243; photography 251–256; relationality of things 256–260; socio-analysis 246–251 sociological turn 317 sociology of knowledge: mapping the social 106–108; relocating the social 97–102; translating the social 102–106; translation and knowledge 94–97 “sociology of sociology” 149 somatic markers 415 somatics of translation 415 Somers, H. L. 332 source media 399–400 source text 342 Soviet Union 51, 227 spatiality 94 spatiotemporal modality 393–394 Sperber, D. 158 Spivak, Gayatri 231, 437 Sprat, Thomas 458n28 stability 35–38 Stanley Kubrick Archive 58 statistical machine translation (SMT) 333–334 Stecconi, U. 18, 19, 302n6 Steiner, George 53, 229, 231, 237, 358, 416 STEM subjects 452 Stenger, Isabelle 234 Stoermer, Eugene F. 114 Storti, Craigg 224 Strand, D. L. 331 Strevens, Peter Derek 159 structuralism 135 structuralist literary theory 55 structural linguistics 1 structural relativity 265 The Structure of Behavior (Merleau-Ponty) 245 Strümper-Krobb, Sabine 228 Stueber, K. R. 422 Sturge, Kate 293 Stylistique comparée du français et de l’anglais. Méthode de traduction (Vinay and Darbelnet) 156 499

Index

subjectivity, and normative force 196–197 substance ontology 40–43 subtitling: bilingual 433; intralingual 433; monolingual 433 Sudsawad, P. 332 The Suffering of the Immigrant (Sayad) 242 Summers, C. 58 Susam-Sarajeva, Ş. 55 Swift, Jonathan 421 syntax errors 329 Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) 297 systems: dissipative 424–429; earlier systemic inspirations 209–211; fully developed socialsystemic paradigms 211–215; language as symbolic 359; non-systemic structures 215–219; overview 208–209; semiotic system s 219–221 systems thinking 221 ‘tacit knowing’ 242 Taivalkoski-Shilov, Kristiina 119 Talbo-Bernigaud, Jean-Phillipe 248 Tansman, Alan 233 Tarde, Gabriel 137 target audience 377 target media 399–400 target text 342 ‘The Task of the Translator’ (Benjamin) 135–136, 141 Taylor, C. 66 Taylorism 63 technical media of display 392; external 392; internal 392 technical scientific knowledge 444 technocapitalism 444 technological innovation 376–377 technological mediation 431 technology-facilitated activism 271 Tel Aviv–Leuven School 210 TenTen Corpus Family 56 territorialization 102 tertium comparationis 138 tertium non datur 32, 33 text 340–341; -based communication 376; -based programming language 327; source 342; target 342 textual objects 291–292 theme, ecology as 117 ‘theoretism’ 141 theory: of forms 35, 36; of knowledge 242; of norms 144 Thibault, Paul 340–341 thick translation 454 ‘Thick Translation: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture’ 232 thing: defined 437; vs. object 437

500

think-aloud protocols 15 Thiong’o, Ngũgĩwa 227 Thompson, Evan 429 A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze and Guattari) 98, 99 Tillich, Paul 414 Tillion, Germaine 247 Tomei, Renato 117 Torop, Peeter 121, 340–341, 343 Tosi, Arturo 118 total translation 343 totemistic messages 475–476 Toury, Gideon 15, 54, 55, 60, 144, 158, 159, 185, 187, 188, 189, 191, 192, 193, 194, 195, 196, 198, 199, 200, 201, 203, 232, 343 Tractatus (Wittgenstein) 359 tradosphere 3, 89; translators of 113–114 ‘traductosophie’ 141 Traduire les voix de la nature/Translating the Voices of Nature (Taivalkoski-Shilov and Poncharal) 119 traits 357 transcendental anthropology 45 ‘transcendental signified’ 135 transcreation 53 transcription 84 transculturality 312 transdisciplinary philosophy of translation 142, 146–148 transdisciplines 269 transduction 290–291, 300–301, 343 transfer: culture/cultural 308, 312–313; defined 312 transformation: of knowledge 314; media (see media transformation); and translation 390 transformationality 455 transistors 328 translanguaging 453 The Translatability of Cultures: Figurations of the Space Between (Budick) 234 Translating Environments: Translation and Indeterminacy in the Making of Natural Resources (Di Giminiani and Haines) 121 translating the social 102–106 translation 80, 82, 83, 84, 89, 94, 105, 108, 109, 171, 172, 176, 194, 209, 237; across languages 342; activist 268; animal messaging into human language 86; assumed 191–192; audiovisual 271; autotranslation 86; biosemiotics 90; biotranslation 88; chains 272–276; code-based transformation of sign 80; and colonialism 270; in computer programming 327–332; in contemporary semiotic landscape 376–378; and cultural anthropology 294–298; defined 284; dimensions of 383–385; ecotranslation 94; feelings and emotions as relations 85; genetic 88; and

Index

global semiotics 350–365; and iconicity 359–361; and identity 271; ideologies 299; image-to-action 86; image-to-image 86; indirect 192–193; interpretants, in open sign network 355–356; intersemiotic 19–23, 258; and knowledge 94–97; linguistic 88; logotranslation 88; lower threshold of 83; machine 275; mapping 88; mechanic 80, 81, 84, 85; in medicine 318–319; memetic production 276; modeling 88; natural 88; in natural sciences 318–319; as negentropic semiotic work 272; non-semiotic 80; outside Translation Studies 232–235; pain relation 85; and philosophy 130, 140–142; prototranslation 88; protranslation 88; pseudotranslation 192; saussurean model of 82; semiotic 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 87, 90n4, 91n5; and semiotic anthropology 287–294; semiotic perspectives, in linguistic anthropology 298–301; and social anthropology 294–298; in social sciences 314–318; social semiotic multimodal approach 369–385; sociology 94, 95; some earlier work on biosemiotics of 87–89; targetculture-specific 189; and transformation 390; in Translation Studies 228–232; transplantation 87; upper threshold of 83; as verbal phenomenon 341–342; “zoosemiotic” to human speech 88 ‘Translation, Natural history and Music: Thinking Communication Beyond the Verbal’ (Desblache) 119 ‘Translation: A biosemiotic/more-than-human perspective’ (Sealey) 119 translational 85; emonic 85; interpretations 83 translationality 145, 455 Translationality (Robinson) 455 translational medicine 318–319, 320; and computer programming 330–332 translational norms 194; concept and definition 195–196; data for the study of 198–199; genealogy of concept of 194–195; instability of 197–198; multiplicity of 197–198; nature of 199; translational regularities vs. 198; variability of 197–198 translational regularities vs. norms 198 translational research 318–319 Translation and Norms (Schaffner) 195 Translation and Rewriting in the Age of PostTranslation Studies (Gentzler) 455 ‘Translation as a Test of Language Vitality’ (Tosi) 118 Translation Beyond Translation Studies (Marais) 455 translation communication event (TCE) 211, 212, 213

translation concept 308; in cultural studies 308–309; in humanities 308–309; roots of 310 ‘Translation Ecologies: A Beginner’s Guide’ 118 Translation Ecology ( Jianzhong Xu) 118 translation in philosophy 129, 130, 136–137 Translation/Interpreting and social activism (Boeri and Maier) 269 translation knowledge 15 translation laws 200–201; researching 201–202 translation memory (TM) 333 translation norms: and prescription 198; researching 201–202 ‘translation proper’ 119 translation quality assessment 171 translation regularities: researching 201–202 translation sociology 95 Translation Studies (TS) 1, 4, 13, 51, 78, 90, 94, 117, 159, 169, 173, 187, 188, 208, 228, 235, 237, 269–272, 283; and anthropological approaches 285–287; and audiovisual translation 271; complexity epistemologies in 13, 16–19; criticisms of 310–312; culture and translation outside 232–235; culture in 228–232; dichotomous epistemologies in 13–16; interdisciplinary roots of 307; and interlingual translation 308; postcolonial label in 270; translation in 228–232 Translation Studies Bibliography (TSB) 269 “translation turn” 4 translatio studii 443, 448–450, 451 Translatorisches Handeln (Holz-Manttari) 178 translators 61, 273, 328; activist 269, 273; assembler 328; compiler 328; defined 328; interpreter 328; modes 60; of the tradosphere 113–114 Translators Through History (Delisle and Woodsworth) 62 The Translator’s Turn (Robinson) 144 transmediality 397–398, 399–407; intramedial 398; media representation 400–403; media transformation 403–406; media translation 407; source and target media 399–400; transmediation 400–403 transmediation 400–403 transmission model 470–471 transmission theory 473 transmutation 343, 404 transparent messages 475 transplantation 87 transposition 157 Trump, Donald 469, 478–479 Trumpism 481 Truth and Method (Gadamer) 131 Turner, Victor 287–288 ‘The Two Cultures’ (Snow) 224 Tylor, Edward Burnett 225, 227

501

Index

Tymoczko, Maria 113, 122, 269, 285, 289 Tyulenev, Sergey 2

volunteering 273 Von Uexkull, Jakob 353

‘Ubersetsungsnorm’ 194 Ubiquitous Translation (Blumczynski) 146, 455 Uexkull, Jakob von 87 ultrasemiotic translation 344 umwelt 79, 83, 353–354; consecutive 79; momentary 79 uncertainty principle 44 ‘under erasure’ 135 Understanding Cultural Differences (Hall) 227 Universe of the mind (Lotman) 219 University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) Humanities Faculty Higher Degree and Research Committee (HDRC) 464 University of Leipzig (GDR) 170 unlimitedness of interpretability/translatability 356–359 untranslatability 194; equivalence and 194 upper threshold of translation 83 Uprooting see Le déracinement (Bourdieu and Sayad) Utopia, dawning of 121–123

Wacquant, Loic 244–246, 250; on Bourdieu’s photography 252 Wagner, Birgit 309 Warwick, Genevieve 258 Weber, Max 145 Wegener, A. 62 We Have Never Been Modern (Latour) 97 Welby, Victoria 87 Werner, Michael 96, 313 western metaphysics 135, 144 Western philosophy 17 western rationality 145 ‘Western Science’ 444; defined 445; translating 445–446 Western Translation Theories from Herodotus to Nietzsche (Robinson) 53 White, Hayden 455 Whitehead, Alfred North 43, 44, 420 Whorf, Benjamin Lee 230, 264, 358 Williams, Raymond 224–225 Wilson, Philip 36, 158 Winters, M. 419–421 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 6, 52, 132, 243–244, 331, 338, 359 Wolf, Michaela 214–215 women’s studies 4 Woodsworth, Judith 62 Woolgar, Steve 98 Words of Women from the Egyptian Revolution (Baker) 267–268 World Health Organization 332 World Social Forum 271, 274 World War I 248 Wright, Chantal 140–141 Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography 233

Vallorani, Nicoletta 233 Vandepitte, S. 202 Van der Meer, J. 334 Van Rooyen, M. 216 Varela, Francisco 353, 429 variability of translational norms 197–198 Veltrusky, Jiři 394 Venuti, Lawrence 14, 41, 52, 54, 120, 225, 416, 453 verbal language 351, 357–358, 359, 361, 362 verbal signs 356, 358 verbal texts, and material media 432 verbal to nonverbal intersemiotic translation 346 verbal to verbal intersemiotic translation 345–346 Vermeer, Hans J. 54, 169, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 211, 231 Viaggio, Sergio 195 Victoria Lady Welby 354, 359 Vienna Circle 132 Village des Cannibales (Corbin) 453 Vinay, Jean-Paul 51, 155, 158 Vischer, Robert 422 visual hermeneutics 430 visual programming language 327 visual turn 376 voice-over 347, 433

502

Xiaohung Jiang 118 Yildiz, Yasemen 236 Zanotti, S. 58 Zimmermann, B. 97 Žižek, Slavoj 46, 277 Zohn, Harry 418 zoosemiotic 88 zootranslation 85 Zusammenhänge ‘intertwinings’ 420 Zwischenberger, Cornelia 2