ABSTRACT
Translation from the perspective of semiotics today, specifically global semiotics, is the essential condition for general sign processes, as they expand through the entire semio(bio)sphere. As such, translation is not reducible uniquely to the verbal-linguistic order nor uniquely to the sphere of human signs. Translation occurs among different semiospheres, human and nonhuman, in the macro world and in the micro world. This chapter, in two parts, proposes an interdisciplinary approach to translation and translatability by exploring sign processes at the interface between semiotics, translation studies, adaptation studies and intermedia studies where different perspectives and methodologies intersect, challenging canonical boundaries and definitions.
Part I, by Margherita Zanoletti, ‘Intersemiotic translation across semiotics and translation studies: definitions, taxonomies, perspectives,’ offers an overview of some key trends in intersemiotic translation as traditionally understood. Intersemiotic or multimodal translation is investigated, with exemplifications, in relation to cultural traditions, social practices and the production of verbal and nonverbal artifacts, including adaptations, appropriations, remixes and transmediations.
Beyond translation, commonly understood as interlingual communication or as translation among different sign systems in the human world, the second part of this chapter, ‘Global semiotics and translation,’ by Susan Petrilli, conceptualizes translation as an intersemiotic process in addition to evidencing aspects that are not limited to the human world. Intersemiotic translation presupposes intersemiosic translation as it concerns the human and nonhuman world in the macrocosmic and microcosmic spheres, the essential condition of semiosis characteristic of life in general. However, our immediate object of inquiry here is semiosis in the properly human world. In a global semiotic framework, ‘semiotics’ is the name of the science, but it also designates a specifically human competence in sign activity, the capacity for reflection, conscious awareness, therefore responsibility. In light of this, the question of translation considered today relatively to semiotics inevitably also involves the particular orientation now recognized as ‘semioethics.’
