Translation as meaning negotiator

ABSTRACT The article engages with the meaning-making function of translation. Three case studies demonstrate how translation performs its work of counteracting semiotic-semantic entropy. The first two cases show that translation can combat this entropy by rendering the less familiar with the more familiar by oscillating between its terminological and impressionistic types. These two cases observe translation between music as a semiotic domain and biochemistry, on the one hand, and language, on the other. The third case study looks at how translation negotiates meaning between language and painting. In all these cases, translation performs its negentropic work, but it does so via more or less complex negotiations of meaning.