"Language in Flight: Home and Elsewhere"

Prabuddha Bharata, 2019

In this essay, I discuss very briefly some of the philosophical statements on translation by major Western thinkers and in addition, also consider the idea of translation in the context of major Indian philosophies like Brahmanism and Buddhism and propose that translation in the philosophical schemas ought to be studied separately in translation studies.

If translation is an act of meaning transaction, semiotics should be able to define its specificity in relation to other semiotic acts. Instead, following upon suggestions by Roman Jakobson, the Tartu school, and, more implicitly, Charles Sanders Peirce, the notion of translation has been generalized to cover more or less everything that can be done within and between semiotic resources. In this paper, we start out from a definition of communication elaborated by the author in an earlier text, characterizing translation as a double act of meaning. This characterization takes into account the instances of sending and receiving of both acts involved: the first one at the level of cognition and the second one at the level of communication. Given this definition, we show that Jakobson's "intralinguistic translation" is, in a sense, the opposite of translation and that his "intersemiotic translation" has important differences and well as similarities to real translation. We also suggest that "cultural translation" has very little to do with translation proper except, in some cases, at the end of its operation. Peirce's idea of exchanging signs for other signs is better understood as a characterization of tradition.

TRANS-, 2010

2022

Language is commonly thought of as that which communicates meaning, with the particular associations between sounds, words and their meanings distinguishing given languages from each other. Translation is thus required for us to communicate meaning across languages. In a sense, the possibility of translation depends on this very function - the identification of the correspondence between words and expressions of different languages such that they have the same meaning. In this essay, I explore the complexities associated with the possibility of translation. By giving an initial account of translation, I assess the conditions under which translation could be possible. Based on a referential theory of meaning, I argue that while translation may be possible under these conditions, the lingering subjective element of meaning, that is, the need to refer to conceptions, renders certain types of translation inconsistent with each other.

soas.ac.uk

Translation practices and theories are typically embedded in their respective linguistic, cultural, historical social, or functional contexts. This panel examines discursive frameworks of translation within, across and beyond languages, language families and cultures in Europe and East Asia. Three papers explore these questions from the perspectives of etymology and conceptual history in classical Europe, of linguistic transpositions specific to literary genres and social settings on the Korean peninsula, and of the appropriation or criticism of Western translation theories in Japan. Another focus will be on the relevance of Jakobson’s theories of translation and transmutation for current debates of cultural translation.

Journal of Language and Literary Studies, 2024

The main function of Translation Studies is to study issues of translation production and propose solutions for translation problems. Today, Translation Studies is an academic discipline that is gaining more recognition in the academic community. More than that many scholars of different backgrounds and fields of study like literature, history, anthropology, semiotics, and philosophy have been attracted by translation studies. This article is divided into three sections. The first section presents a brief history of Translation Studies. The second section discusses definitions and meanings of the word 'translation'. The third section analyses different theories of translation.