ABSTRACT
Cultural and media studies is the starting point of this chapter and is argued to be directly relevant to some trajectories within Translation Studies. The specific brief was to write about reception, understood by the editors of this volume to be a gap in Translation Studies. In assuming the idealized construct of the ‘implied reader,’ the argument is that Translation Studies lack the audience/reader/ interpreter decoding dimension, that is, how ordinary people interpret – or translate – messages (written, verbal, visual, aural) in terms of their own ontological frameworks (linguistic, cultural, social, political, religious, etc.). In addressing this lack this chapter will revisit some aspects of communication theory and significantly elaborate via Peircean semiotics the germinal 40-year-old Stuart Hall encoding/decoding model, refreshing its potential and elevating it into accounting for fixations of the belief that characterize the post-Truth era.
