Shira's Response to Jakobson and Schogt (comments and crit welcome!)

Both Jakobson and Schogt use semiotic concepts to talk about translation; Schogt takes it a step further by exploring the applicability of “semantic theory” to translation. Semiotics studies language as a system of signs. The lexicon of which consists of signifier, signified, and sign (the union of the two). Signs are arbitrary because there is no fixed relationship between signifier and signified. The signified more or less remains the same; ringo and “apple” denote the same thing (though this example is a little arbitrary given they may translate differently as cultural symbols). The trouble is with the communication of signs and signifiers.

Jakobson outlines this problem in his initial example of “cheese.” One doesn’t need a nonlinguistic relationship with the object or lexical code of English to understand a word. Only signs can communicate other signs: “An array of linguistic signs is needed to introduce an unfamiliar word … … the meaning of any linguistic sign is its translation into some further, alternative sign” (145). In other words, the only possible way I can explain the word “cheese” as a class of objects produced by pressed curds is by use of other signs. The word “cheese” is not the real thing but part of a system of signs. To use one of Jakobson’s previous statements: nobody has ever tasted the meaning of a word.

Thus, languages are like codes and translation “involves two equivalent messages in two different codes” (146) because there are no equivalencies between individual code units; the whole system of signs must replace the other system. That is why translation encounters problems with languages that have different components (like language 1 has A and B modes of expression while language 2 has only B (200)). Russian must convey gender: “Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey” (149).

Schogt does something different with semiotics (or semantics, but discussion of Saussure leads me to believe he means the same thing) in two ways. First, he creates a relationship between translation and semantics (they aren’t close but they’re still related). Semiotics makes the translator’s job harder rather than easier because it exposes the fragility of the connection between the signified and signifier. Prieto’s example shows how the signified can be transmitted innumerable ways: “Prieto starts with the signified, assuming optimistically that people want to say something before they start to speak. How they say what they want to convey depends on a number of factors, the first and most obvious one being the language that is used” (198). If I want to express intense excitement, even within my own language, there are many different ways: “I feel like a kid in a candy shop,” “I could explode, I’m so hyped up,” “there are butterflies in my stomach.” The second thing Schogt does with semantics is assert its limitations: “For texts where cognitive meaning prevails and formal expression of that meaning has no other function than expressing that meaning, the semantic theories are helpful and are adequate for describing the double process of encoding and decoding. For literary texts, it is precisely the literariness that falls outside the domain of semantics” (201). Semantics is only useful in so far as it decodes language with one or few layers of meaning. Literary language uses “the complexities of intention and innuendo” to create new signs (or change old ones) and therefore a semiotic analyst couldn’t rely on their system of interpretation. There are candles as in sticks of wax that burn and there is the candle as in the one that burns out the precise moment Anna Karenina dies.