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- Herausgeber: Bruno Osimo
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Roman Jakobson has had a strange fate. Everybody knows his name and are willing to recognise him as an important character of the global cultural scene. Few, however, have read what he wrote beyond those four or five famous quotes. Quotes that, taken out of context, might not be understood completely and correctly. The selected works by Jakobson are in eight large volumes. Taking into account that he wrote on various other topics, from Russian literature, to Slavic philology, to phonology, to neurology, the pages devoted to themes that are relevant to translation semiotics are "only" a thousand. It is evident that Jakobson has so many things to tell us about translation and that so far we were quite reluctant to read him.
Jakobson's approach to translation is a semiotic one. Someone might wonder what relationship there is between semiotics and translation. What does it matter to a translator the theory of the sign of Saussure or Peirce, since she faces practical texts, not theories? To this I reply with two points:
1) all translators, even the most refractory to the theory, follow principles. The reason why it does not make sense "not to be interested in the theory" if you translate is that all translators, perhaps unwittingly, have a theory. We have a theory on how to peel an apple or how to dress pants even if nobody has taught us. We all have a mind whose operation can be parsed, and yet there are people who "are not interested" in psychology. Translation is an activity that inevitably forces its practitioners to think about their target reader, and to formulate a message that takes account of the recipient, and then to draw up a communication strategy. And each translator will read the original document, will process it using her innner mental nonverbal language, and will put out the translated text projecting it onto the receiving culture. Then the difference is between those who knowingly use the theory, and those who use it unconsciously.
2) Any conception of translation is like an application program based on an operating system, and in this case the operating system is the theory of the sign. In other words, if you think that between the word 'dog' and the animal in question there is an equivalence relation, you get a given theory of translation; but if you think that between the word "dog," and the animal in question there is a series of creative and non-reciprocal links, then you get a completely different theory of translation.
This book comes from my reflection activities connected to my teaching work at Milan’s Civica Scuola Interpreti e Traduttori «Altiero Spinelli» and, in turn, will provide study materials for students in the coming years and at the same time, I hope, inspiration for new ideas in the minds of readers.
For criticism, comments, messages you can write me at the address [email protected].
Milan, July 17, 2016
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025
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Roman jakobson s translation handbook formato libro 2
Indice dei contenuti
Bruno Osimo
Introduction
1. Jakobson and the mental phases of translation
1.1. Inner speech
1.2. Writing and reading as intersemiotic translation
1.3. Mental phases
2. Jakobson: translation as imputed similarity
2.1. Peirce’s triad
2.2. Syntax, paradigm
2.3. Evolution of meaning and invariance
2.4. Cultural basis of translation
3. Translation from rags to riches in Jakobson
3.0. Three types of translation misunderstood
3.1. Beyond Saussure
3.2. Mathematical precision in human disciplines
3.3. Beyond the trivium. Translation, center of semiotics
References
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Inizio libro
Bruno Osimo
Roman Jakobson’s Translation Handbook
What a Translation Manual Would Look Like If Written by Jakobson
Copyright © Bruno Osimo 2020
Bruno Osimo is an author who self publishes himself
The paper version is made as print on sale by Kindle Direct Publishing
ISBN 9788898467907 for the paper edition
ISBN 9788890859700 for the ebook edition
Contacts: [email protected]
Summary
Introduction
This book is based on the principle that it is possible to create a text out of the writings of an author, focusing on a subject that had not necessarily been considered central or fundamental in the original author’s view. Roman Jakobson wrote many articles and books, that only partially dealt with translation. My intention here is to synthesize his view of translation by collecting a number of quotations from different papers and essays of different times, originally written in various languages, and rearranging them according to my own criteria.
The result is a series of paragraphs and chapters whose identity derives from the assembling of heterogeneous texts that, however, see one given topic from different perspectives. The first chapters focus on inner language as a nonverbal code, and the consequences of the continuous shift from verbal to nonverbal and viceversa occurring during speech, writing – coding –, hearing, reading – decoding –, and therefore occurring within the translation process itself. The notion of “intersemiotic translation” is considered from a new perspective.
In the central chapter Jakobson’s distinctive features method is applied to translation. Using the similarity/contiguity and imputed/factual variables, taken from Peirce’s writings, Jakobson realizes that one of the four actualizations is missing from Peirce’s treatment. Translation, that according to Jakobson is not equivalence but evolution of sense, may well be imputed similarity, the missing actualization of the aforementioned variables.
In the third chapter the focus is on the difference between humane disciplines and exact sciences, and where translation studies belong. Scientific method should be limited to exact disciplines or extended to humane fields as well? This decision has many implications, starting from the name of our discipline – translation science, translatology, translation studies, translation theory – passing through scientific terminology and arriving to semiotics, that according to Jakobson is the science within which the translation discipline should develop itself. Since in classic times disciplines were divided into trivium (humane fields) and quadrivium (sciences), following Jakobson’s semiotic path would mean to overcome trivium, to get out of triviality, in a sense.
In a slightly different form two of the three chapters were published as articles as follows:
(2009) Jakobson and the mental phases of translation. MutatisMutandis, 2(1), 73-84.
(2008) Translation as imputed similarity”. SignSystemsStudies 36.2:315-339.
1. Jakobson and the mental phases of translation
One of the first aspects that are often underestimated when dealing with the translation process is the mental side of the process itself. Jakobson, as a Russian high-school student, had studied Vygotsky and inner speech as a standard subject. He took it for granted, as more or less all Slavic countries students do. It has a major, if implicit, role in his theory. In Western countries, by contrast, inner speech is not taught at all. As a consequence, all West-European and American translation theories tend to ignore the fundamental passage of the text through the translator's mind, with the implication that the text is deverbalized, and then reverbalized.
1.1. Inner speech
To be able to see the full extent of Jakobson’s revolutionary thought and its implications for intersemiotic translation, it is necessary to follow – through his writings – the consequences of the notion of “interpretant” as far as speech production is concerned. The interpretant, “mental sign” (Peirce: 5.476) mediating between sign and object, makes speech production a very personal matter, with implications of affective and unconscious character. From this point of view, Saussure’s theory could not have been more distant from Peirce’s, and from Jakobson’s:
With respect to all other comparable acts, the character of the verbal act seems to Saussure “the least deliberative, the least premeditated and at the same time the most impersonal of all” (Jakobson 1979: 153).
In contrast, speech is so personal that, in its earliest occurrences, it is exclusively personal, i.e. devised to make communication between the child and himself/herself possible. Without any syntactic constraints, without any linearity, and ready to follow many directions at once, the child’s thought is not something alien to language, and at the same time is not outer language pronounced at mental level: it is speech with oneself, without words. Eventually, the discovery of sentences becomes an obstacle to the absolute linguistic freedom of the first months of life:
[...] the discovery of the sentence and the increasing freedom in its lexical filling out in the child’s linguistic behavior is accompanied by a gradual freezing of word creation. Neologism is eclipsed by syntactic tasks. The period of freedom and productivity of words, which contrasts so strikingly with the fixed vocabulary of the adult, has been shrewdly recognized by the greatest observers of human language. [...] The American thinker Charles Sanders Peirce maintains that the child, “with his wonderful genius for language” [1.349], loses this remarkable gift as time passes (Jakobson 1979: 147).
There is a huge part of language that most linguists never considered, and this is speech genesis (if we do not take into account Chomsky’s unfortunate trial concerning ‘deep structures’, that failed precisely because it tried to follow Saussure’s “impersonal” imprint). With the aid of Peirce’s basic triad, which forces any debate on language to consider the mental (personal) passage of thought and speech production, and using his main tripartition of signs, it is easier to see the difference between the view of speech as loudspeaker and the view of speech as translation. As Jakobson himself says:
