ABSTRACT
Translation is the very condition for making and taking meaning. It is the factor that explains how meaning-making and meaning-taking is possible. Meaning is created in one way only, and that is by translating signs into signs. The complex interplay of the implications of the Second Law of Thermodynamics for cultural systems, thus, has to be worked out in translation studies. Conceptualizing translation in terms of complex adaptive systems provides translation-studies scholars with more nuanced and rigorous conceptual tools with which to study translation. Translation is, thus, a negentropic semiotic process of performing work on meaning by effecting constraints on the possibilities of meaning. Translation can take place by changes to the representamen, i.e. the sign-vehicle. These changes usually entail changes to the material nature of the representamen. Interpretant translation provides three types of interpretants, namely dynamic, immediate, and final interpretants, to which one can add the ten types of ways in which interpretants are engendered.
