Translation as Meaning Assignment

Abstract

This thesis aims at an in-depth investigation of the signifying aspect of translation. The investigation is articulated in four parts in which different interdisciplinary approaches are critically exploited. The proposed conception of translation as meaning assignment is constructed out of a synthesis of the critical insights arrived at in the succeeding stages of the analysis. The first part starts with a critique of the standard conception of translation as recoding process. Seen from the viewpoint of Eco’s theory of codes, the recoding model proves to be inadequate, for it fails to take into consideration the hermeneutic depth of translation. A preliminary application of Eco’s theory of codes brings to the fore the intertwinement between the interpretive and the signifying aspects of translation. There occurs then the need for a semiotic description that will portray translation not as an exchange of messages but as a hermeneutic dialogue. Thus, in the second part there is a shift in focus from codes to interpretation and intercultural communication. From this new perspective, translation appears as a sequence of interdependent interpretive moves performed in a thick web of significations. The process of translation is each time performed from within the translator’s hermeneutic horizon but it yields the translated text when a real fusion of horizons is reached. Translation as meaning assignment always presupposes a fusion of horizons.

The essential link between the interdisciplinary approaches presented in the first two parts lies in the fact that both are inscribed in the problematic of meaning. The third part is concerned with the question of meaning itself, focusing in particular on problems regarding the ontological status of meaning and the relationship between language and reality. In connection with these problems, a critical exposition of the major philosophical theories of meaning is attempted, which further provides the basis for a concrete conception of linguistic meaning. This conception is developed in the fourth part and it rests on the notion of cultural unit, which underpins Eco’s model of componential analysis of sememes. With this model as a starting point, two further definitions are given: a general definition of the concept of meaning assignment and a semiotic definition of textuality. These, in turn, enable us to arrive at an adequate definition of translation as meaning assignment. Although semiotic in character, the proposed approach focuses on the hermeneutic rather than the formal aspect of the signifying processes involved in translation, and it attempts to explore the translator’s hermeneutic dialogue with the source text from the perspective of a Wittgensteinian view of language. The conception of translation as meaning assignment presented here emerges precisely out of this synthesis.