Translation of semiotics into translation theory, and vice versa
Reflection on sign processes and translation processes contributes to a better understanding of the problems involved in both and orients relative research methodologies. The dynamics involved is the same and concerns the dialogical relation between one sign and another where the latter as an interpretant confers meaning and sense on the preceding, the interpreted. Though different disciplines, sign theory and translation theory study the same process, albeit from different perspectives. Semiotics and translation act as interpretants of each other illuminating different aspects of the signs forming these processes, their specificities and interrelatedness. According to Thomas Sebeok and his 'global semiotics' all signs, verbal and nonverbal, are part of an overarching sign network. Considering that interpretation is translation, that the relation between interpreted sign and interpretant sign is a translation relation, that interpretants defer to each other in open ended semiosic chains, global semiotics evidences the translational nature of semiosis, therefore the translational vocation of semiotics. Sebeok belongs to a tradition in sign studies that extends from Locke to Peirce and includes authors like Welby, Jakobson, Bakhtin, Morris. All deal with translation, whether directly through their sign theory (Welby, Jakobson) or indirectly with their reflections on dialogue and the relation between reporting and reported discourse (Bakhtin) or whilst searching for signs to talk about signs (Morris) Global semiotics opposes anthropocentric and glottocentric approaches to the life of signs: the entire biosphere is perfused with signs. As a general sign science semiotics has a propensity for dialogic encounter and translation. As an interpretive/translational phenomenon and thanks to its specificity as artistic discourse evolving in the 'great time' (Bakhtin) literary discourse best evidences the dynamics of semiosis and together the properly human, therefore the questions of dialogic otherness, responsive understanding, responsibility/responsivity, translatability/intranslatability, iconicity, visibility/ invisibility, similarity/dissimilaritry, the paradox of translation.