On Translating Signs : Exploring Text and Semio-Translation

Translation produces meaningful versions of textual information. But what is a text? What is translation? What is meaning? And what is a translational version? This book On Translating Signs: Exploring Text and Semio-Translation responds to those and other eternal translation-theoretical questions from a semiotic point of view.
Dinda L. Gorlée notes that in this world of interpretation and translation, surrounded by our semio-translational universe “perfused with signs,” we can intuit whether or not an object in front of us (dis)qualifies as a text. This spontaneous understanding requires no formalized definition in order to “happen” in the receivers of text-signs. The author further observes that translated signs are not only intelligible for target audiences, but also work together as a “theatre of consciousness” or a “theatre of controversy” which the author views as powered by Charles S. Peirce’s three categories of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness.
This book presents the virtual community of translators as emotional, dynamical, intellectual but not infallible semioticians. They translate text-signs from one language and culture into another, thus creating an innovative sign-milieu packed with intuitive, dynamic, and changeable signs. Translators produce fleeting and fallible text-translations, with obvious errors caused by ignorance or misguided knowledge. Text-signs are translatable, yet there is no such thing as a perfect or “final” translation. And without the ongoing creating of translated signs of all kinds, there would be no novelty, no vagueness, no manipulation of texts and – for that matter – no semiosis.

Dinda L. Gorlée directs a multilingual legal translation office in The Hague and is associated with University of Bergen, Wittgenstein Archives and University of Helsinki, Department of Translation Studies. Her research interests are semiotic studies in relation to translation, vocal translation, text semiotics, and legal translation. Gorlée is widely published in semiotics and translation studies. Her publications include the volume Semiotics and the Problem of Translation: With Special Reference to the Semiotics of Charles S. Peirce (1994). After “Grieg’s Swan Songs” in Semiotica (2002), Gorlée is preparing the volume Song and Significance: Interlingual and Intersemiotic Vocal Translation.