Abstract
The term code is largely used in the fields of Linguistics, Semiotics, and Translation Studies, but not in a consistent manner. Translation scholars seem to use this term through a semiotic perspective that connotes the complexity of the translation process. This complexity has to do with the transition from one cultural structure to another, a transition that led to coining terms such as equivalence, correspondence, etc. Theorists of translation, in their effort to explain the epistemological character of translation, related the translation process to adjacent disciplines such as linguistics, theory of communication and semiotics, where the term code is a key-term. The same term is used in a different way by semioticians. In this article, I will attempt to answer two questions, namely: how does Roman Jakobson, in his seminal essay on translation, approach the concept of code, and, what do semioticians and semiotically informed translation scholars mean or imply with the use of the concept of code.
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Notes
- 1.
According to Jakobson (2004/[1953]: 139), “[i]ntersemiotic translation or transmutation is an interpretation of verbal signs by means of signs of nonverbal sign systems.”
- 2.
Sonesson takes this a step further and disconnects communication from ‘coding’ altogether. For Sonesson (2014: 251–252), “the most important idea to retain from the Prague School […] is that communication (in the sense of conveying information) is not necessarily about transportation or encoding, but it does involve the presentation of an artifact by somebody to somebody else, giving rise to the task of making sense of this artefact”. He is not interested in the form of the message but, first, in the informational charge of the message that has to remain constant, and, secondly, in the direct and recognisable relation between the source and the target semiotic system.
- 3.
All translations from French are mine.
- 4.
Lotman seems to agree with Jakobson’s position. For Lotman (1977: 96), “at the basis of every act of exchange lies the contradictory formula, ‘equivalent but different’: the first part of the formula makes an exchange technically possible and the second part makes it meaningful in content”.
- 5.
Barthes (1964: 130–131) claims that connotations are second-order semiotic systems, which means that they pertain to the level of ideology.
- 6.
According to Lotman (1990: 2), translation serves as the connective ‘pulley’ between a pair of mutually untranslatable languages.
- 7.
See also Greimas (1966: 71–72).
- 8.
This position is of great importance for translation semioticians. As Petrilli (2015: 102) mentions, “[…] we know that the question of the translation of a text must be connected to the problem of the meaning of a sign. In fact, as Peirce, Welby and Bakhtin (among others) clearly demonstrated, meaning is not in the sign, but in the relation among signs, whether the signs of a defined system, like those forming a code, a langue, or the signs of dynamic interpretive processes, which know no boundaries in the transition from one type of sign to another, from one sign system to another”.
- 9.
Eco also connects code to ideology. Eco (1979: 290) mentions that “[i]deology is therefore a message which starts with a factual description, and then tries to justify it theoretically, gradually being accepted by society through a process of overcoding”.
- 10.
Van Leeuwen (2005: 3) states that, in social semiotics, the key term is not the concept of code, but the concept of semiotic resource, a concept that he attributes to Michael Halliday.
- 11.
My emphasis.
- 12.
Jakobson’s position is identical with Eco’s position (see Eco 1990: 11).
- 13.
Eco also connects the notion of code to culture in his attempt to study the creation of meaning in a process of transformation systems. As Eco (1977: 52) mentions, “[t]o see cultural life as a set of codes and as a continuous reference from code to code is to restore the human animal its true nature”.
- 14.
Cobley (2016: 90) argues that, while semiosis involves codes, semiosis does not amount to codes.
- 15.
For Cobley (2016: 89), not all coding is like cryptography.
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I would like to thank my colleague Lia Yoka for her insightful comments on my manuscript and our discussions.
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Kourdis, E. (2018). The Notion of Code in Semiotics and Semiotically Informed Translation Studies. A Preliminary Study. In: Andreica, O., Olteanu, A. (eds) Readings in Numanities. Numanities - Arts and Humanities in Progress, vol 3. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66914-4_21
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