The new iconicity: challenges for translation theory and practice

Abstract

For anyone working in Translation Studies, the term “intersemiotic translation” inevitably conjures up Roman Jakobson and his 1959 division of translation into three broad types: 1) intralingual translation or rewording (an interpretation of verbal signs by other signs of the same language); 2) interlingual translation or translation proper (an interpretation of verbal signs by means of some other language; and 3) intersemiotic translation or transmutation, an “interpretation of verbal signs by means of signs belonging to non-verbal systems” (Jakobson, 2000, p. 114). The notion that non-verbal artefacts or events1 might transport meaning was not unprecedented, of course. Ferdinand de Saussure (1959, pp. 15-17) himself had envisaged a broad science of signs (la sémiologie) into which linguistics might one day be subsumed, and before him, Charles Sanders Peirce (1931) had developed a fullyfledged semiotic theory that went far beyond the verbal in reach.2 However, in the structuralist climate in which Jakobson was writing, when translatability between verbal languages was taken for granted,3 it was difficult to make the case that intersemiotic translation was really translation like any other. Despite valiant attempts by theorists of music, theatre, dance and the visual arts to map the grammatical and lexical structures of verbal language onto their respective systems, no one could really assert with confidence that any of these art forms in fact had the resources to transmit a message with the accuracy and precision of verbal language. As a result, the intersemiotic endeavour petered out and the study of such cross-fertilizations left Translation Studies to be accommodated in other domains: adaptation studies, inter-art studies, intermediality, film/dance studies, media studies etc. Now, however, things have changed. Two major shifts in perception have thrown the whole process into a new light, suggesting that intersemiotic translation might not, after all, be qualitatively different from the interor intralingual varieties. The first of these has to do with the way “ordinary” verbal translation is viewed. With the onset of Descriptive Translation Studies in the 1980s, and especially the cultural turn a decade later, the whole notion that there might exist a nugget of meaning that could be extracted from a source text like precious metal from ore and transported unchanged to a new linguistic environment fell into disrepute. Instead, it became clear that “meaning” is a multifaceted, context-dependent and mutable phenomenon which inevitably dissipates and alters during the translation process, losing some layers and gaining others, and occasionally