Keywords

Intersemiotic Translation: Literary and Linguistic Multimodality covers a variety of sign signs, their representation and interpretation and an entire set of manners of examining the field of translation, viewed as a process of transposing meaning from one form into another. The original semiotic representation of the text and the coding used can be transformed according to the requirements of the new semiotic medium, be that a new field, a new system, a new language, a new semantic pattern, etc. Whenever such a change takes place, one should include the transparent rendering of the message at its core.

The Introduction of the book is meant to offer a first glimpse at the main selected topic with a short presentation of the subtopics discussed. This chapter draws attention to the theoretical and practical problems analysed in this work and thus informs the readership about some of the issues that one must deal with when tackling particular types of intersemiotic translation or multimodality. Signs, symbols and meanings are so closely related that one cannot create any communicative strand only by considering one of them.

Chapter 2, Intersemiotic Translation and Multimodality , focuses on the facets of intersemiotic translation viewed as a prism, whenever a switch of multimodality form is taken into account. The immense complexity of the domain allows one to consider it an intrinsic part of communication. Whether it is employed while decoding or re-encoding a message mentally, or while decoding or re-encoding it verbally or in writing, one must think of the impact of the communicative exchange.

Interactional problems may occur when intersemiotic translation is done with an eye to the wrong code sets which determines the misunderstanding of the speaker’s message and thus, subverts communicative goals. According to Rossi-Landi (1978: 25), “all behaviour is communication”, which makes one draw the conclusion that everything can be read in a certain way, consequently decoded in a certain way, so nothing is meaningless and nothing lacks importance when one looks for answers regarding communicative interaction.

Kress’ theory on multimodality clarifies the existence of a plurality of inscription forms whose intersemiotic translation aids the understanding of encoding. Changing coding patterns reveals the flexibility of associating various signs and sign sets for the purpose of meaning clarification or of a mental exercise meant to show one’s depth of understanding.

This part of the book also consists of an analysis of Posner’s (1993: 220–222) fundamental semiotic types, i.e., the signal, the indicator, the expression and the gesture, without which one would not be able to grasp the meaning of various activities taking place around one. The given examples show that behaviour and knowledge are interwoven and that their interpretation depends on the cause-effect relation that one can find beyond the interactional surface.

The connection language-biology stated by different theorists, philosophers and writers, among whom Aristotel, Shakespeare, Garrick, Knowles, Chevalier and Gheerbrant, Pârlog, Brînzeu, etc., reflects the necessity of seeing words as natural vehicles of real meaning that allow a body and mind to be transposed to a distinct medium, there being created an energetic chord between one’s self and one’s text, regardless of the way one choose to express one’s message.

Since Renaissance, literary discourse has been perceived as an “articulate structure” (Pârlog et al. 2009: 14) that functions in a similar way to human anatomic structure. Various organs were turned into symbols and included in cultural expressions whose rendering in a different language generally imposes the use of the same symbolic body part or a different one, as a central focus of the selected expression. This happens in the case of the noun ‘heart’, which can be viewed as very important for several fields, such as that of religion, literature, history, not only suggesting care, love, devotion, but also honesty, spirit and courage.

Communication relies on sign or sign set correspondences or multimodality form correspondences whose slight changes generally mirror cultural issues. No matter what kind of communication one deals with, intersemiotic translation allows the transmission of messages, thus ensuring that the distinctive quality of human nature is not lost.

Chapter 3, Aesthetics, Discourse and Ekphrasis, details the problems connected to the beauty of language, figures of speech, euphony and the semiotic formulae that one employs in arts in order to emphasise concise ways of rendering meaning. The shift of signification between non-verbal and verbal media shows how coded energetic traces create fluctuations of ideas. Body language , for instance, is one of the most debatable codifications of meaning, whose real text is familiar to the agent and to those used to deciphering such code sets according to each context and its specificities. However, its more hermetic instances remain a mystery to most of the people.

Ekphrasis, based on the old principle, “ut pictura poesis” (Horatio), presented as a way of turning visual representation of meaning into poetical representation of meaning through several types of ekphrastic processes, can be viewed as having a wider use in this book. The types of ekphrasis mentioned in this chapter, i.e. the common, the reverse and the notional one (Hollander in Pârlog et al. 2009: 109), indicate a limited number of ways that one can follow in order to transform aesthetically-encoded meaning. Ekphrastic strategies contribute to the process of beautifying meaning and can be extended to the case of re-encoding visual representation of many kinds and textual representation in general, not only poetical representation.

One comes across ekphrastic syntagms in all languages. They abound in literature, where their use makes the expression of meaning much more efficient and aesthetically beautifying for the linguistic stratum. The comparative analysis of some such examples taken from English literature and translated into Romanian and French shows the necessity of faithfully rendering stylistic details for a correct perception of the original writer’s creation and personality for a readership belonging to a different culture.

This time a greater focus is laid on the noun ‘face’ and the noun ‘head’, which are often encountered in common expressions and in original constructions invented in order to determine the evolution of language from an evocative point of view. The connection metaphor-ekphrasis is always interesting to analyse, if one rather deals with a metaphor that does not pertain to the group of clichés. This appears as surrealistic up to a point. The aesthetic importance of ekphrastic expressions in the creation of a vivid discourse makes their poetical leaning transparent and also the necessity of revealing lyric symbolism which is conditioned by culture.

Chapter 4, Visual and Verbal Code Translation, elaborates on the topic of coding, communication and multimodality. Chandler’s social , textual and interpretative codes and their respective subcodes enable the unravelling of the illusions of the world with a high degree of accuracy. Depending on the field that they pertain to, their often manipulative aim betrays the real purposes of their various communicative strands. Multimodality abounds in such codes which cover almost all the fields of knowledge that one may be interested in.

Wittgenstein’s “automaton conception of human life” (cf. Rossi-Landi 1981: 37) explains the occasional highly elusive character of most codes, the urgency of one’s interests determining the neglect of their truthful intent. The cryptic ways of manipulation and their subversive nature, mostly encountered in the case of ideological codes, not only have an inductive effect which turns people into pawns without reason, but also contribute to the programming of behaviour and life in general. Art and literature shows such cases of political madness represented for the purpose of mirroring the lack of logic governing certain societies.

Programming behaviour through sign systems (Rossi-Landi 1981: 37) made up with an eye to reducing range of thought can be considered as a token of the importance of sign set choice and its selection. The reality created by visual and verbal encoding is part of a rather artificial programming of life meant to limit consciousness, if the abstract is perceived as having been the result of learning pre-taught sign systems. Communication thus becomes programmed and no flexibility of intelligence can be possible.

False thought can easily become the norm and “linguistic alienation” (Rossi-Landi 1981: 45) the result. Making the right choices no longer counts and sign sets become aleatory poisons for human mind.

Transparent frames of meaning create glass houses in which power cannot dwell. Kafka’s The Trial is an example in this sense and so are many of the books offering different perspectives on the problems of totalitarianism and its forms. Both visual and verbal codes employed in order to write subtle language, create synonymic sets and various connotational implications are translated with a view to their evocative character and their contribution to the stylistic intricacy of language.

This stylistic intricacy can go as far as annihilating sign sets and their sense value. Fragmentary narratives have the effect of creating loss of meaning, and literary works with such forms, like the absurd ones, appear as if inspired by abstract art being dominated by confusion. Advertising also presents such multimodality problems, because it blends sign sets whose role remains a mystery, not being able to convey any message proper. In the case of various games, the labyrinthine organisation of signs may as well cause loss of meaning, confusion or madness. The regrouping of meaning according to a set of parallel clusters of ideas organised following elusive patterns of logic result in strange associations whose mechanism does not function.

Furthermore, jokes can be included here. They force one to leave aside the usual thinking patterns and to break them at the same time, in order to discover the funny semantic webbing of the joke or witticism. Sign sets that one generally neglects come to the surface only to be forgotten after the mystery has been solved (Gyurcsik 2017: 99).

Reading visual codes is also difficult to do, unless the links of the images are seen as a complex combination of signs which may determine essential changes in one’s life, if heeded. The vibrations of colours, the interaction of planets, the representation of important figures, such as those of saints, all create meaning which influences one’s life through energetic paths unravelled by the reader/viewer.

Chapter 5, Direct and Indirect Intralingual Translation, explains the positive and negative aspects of dealing with intralingual translation. Jakobson’s (1959: 233) view on text transposition from one form into another within the same language is used in order to show the way direct (rephrasing or reformulating and paraphrasing) and indirect (adaptation and free translation) intralingual translation function.

The given examples, be they a sentence which was rephrased and paraphrased or a fragment from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer-Night’s Dream and its adapted versions of translation into French or a fragment from Milton’s Paradise Lost and its freely translated Romanian versions, all reveal the effects of divergent equivalence and its implications. Reformulating messages should not alter their meaning at the level of vocabulary, aesthetics, rhythm, euphony or sequencing of ideas, even though their form is automatically changed. In the same sense, translation as a process of re-encoding should not alter meaning in any essential way allowing the connection between the original author and text and the translated version to be obvious. Consequently, the translated versions belonging to the same language should contain similar texts. The translator must not become an author even in the case of poetry, as it happens with Milton and his epic poem whose title was mentioned above.

Free translation can go as far as rewriting an original and preserving only the framework which is viewed from a different angle. Here, adaptation is defined as the loose expression of the same idea in the same language, while free translation is seen as the interpretation of meaning by indirectly translating an original construction or phrase intralingually.

The chapter also focuses on blends (taken from Carroll’s Jabberwocky) whose innovative linguistic dimension is difficult to trace in another language and whose explanation makes communication less efficient and less expressive. The writer’s playful endeavours, taking the form of telescoped words, find their echo in the translator’s own creations, this time the translator being forced to become a sort of creative author, doing the job of a translator. The reformulation of a portmanteau or a portmanteau construction is impossible unless a new word or a new construction is invented which must carry the meaning of the initial word or construction. Intralingual translation is a cultural tool, necessary for reformulation, which responds to multimodal requirements.

As its title clarifies, the last part of the book centres on The Constraints of Interlingual Translation. Starting with the problems of Google Translate and Google Neural Machine Translation. I have mentioned the importance of conditioning the newer form of GT according to Bruno de Finetti’s theorem on exchangeable sequences of random variables. I have also highlighted the essential matter of regarding language and its classes and subclasses from the perspective of genetics (genetic linguistics). Their intrinsic links which function similarly to those of DNA encoding and its subsequent phenotypic forms draw attention to the main elements that bind stretches of language into unifying entities with a life of their own.

The perspective upon the text, seen as a living organism meant to reach homeostasis which interlingual translation must re-establish with the help of different sign sets, imposes the idea of perceiving textual specificities as part of linguistic processes similar to the complex cellular ones that we encounter in the case of genetic development.

Literary translation, a complex field of interlingual translation is conditioned by supratext and subtext (Pârlog 2014: 73–75). Corrections of literary books are forbidden in the process of translation, the specific constraints centring on the faithful reproduction of vocabulary, grammar, logical or sequencing mistakes made by the original author.

For explanatory purposes, I have included an analysis of the translation of various English idioms and of various French idioms into Romanian. The cultural differences are less pregnant in the case of body idioms and more obvious in the case of other kinds of idioms and expressions. Their etymology plays an important role in viewing the same reality with different eyes. One must be aware of the enantiomorphic feature of translation on switching codes or sign sets.

I have also included some microtexts extracted from Chevalier’s novel The Lady and the Unicorn and pondered on the problems of transforming sense in an inaccurate way in the target language . The translation of these short fragments often emphasises dilutions of meaning, explicitations of sense, stylistic alterations, misinterpretations and semantic improvements.

The constraints of interlingual translation can also be viewed in the case of commonly uttered greetings, statements or descriptions which show that the Romanian language makes use of much more ambiguous sign sets than the English language. Its openness resides in the multiple ways that one can see a particular Romanian utterance as opposed to an English one regardless of context transparency. This is due to the fact that English is a Germanic language that is much more exact than Latin, hence the existence of collocations, whose logic is debatable if this is looked at from a Germanic perspective.

Back translation or translating an original based on a generally accepted published translation results in fluctuations of forms and meanings that can be correctly retraced by keeping in mind the purpose of the translation process in each case. Interlingual translation though must ensure that the specificities of the source language must become transparent in the target language despite its constraints. Thus, back translation becomes more of an exercise than one of the types of interlingual translations which should be taken into account from the point of view discussed in this chapter.

Textual levels that seep into one another must be left with their initial consistence and not blend differently in another language, despite the requirements of foreign constructions that would turn the text into a partially faithful version of the original, with a distinct effect and evocative quality. Whether the translator broods over supra-textual, textual or sub-textual levels (Pârlog 2014: 73–75), s/he must follow the detailed stratification of the original creation. In the case of more intricate works, the translation is bound to contain more generalising or ambiguous interpretations. Both source language and target language are important, but it is source language which must be considered first and only then target language and its available linguistic bank.

The essential nature of intersemiotic translation, viewed as a kaleidoscope of surrounding reality, must be understood for a widely informative perspective on transforming messages or knowledge expressed in various ways. Signs, symbols and their great variety which makes them function as part of different systems of meaning create frames of intelligence necessary for a successful process of communication, which is the aim of all multimodality forms. Without semiotics, one would get lost in the activity of coding meaning and would be unable to interact sensibly and connect pertinently, so that the exchange of messages may be possible in a suitably natural way.