ABSTRACT

Increasing digital innovation and mobility have created new environments within which we all produce and interact with texts. Semiotics is generally defined as “the study of signs”, with the concept of sign referring to “anything that stands for something else and gives meaning to it”. It is also generally acknowledged that semiotics is not “widely institutionalized as an academic discipline” and that there is “no unifying theory of semiotics” to date. The semiotician Umberto Eco similarly draws on Jakobson’s typology to explore how semiotics can be useful to translation theory. Eco, however, argues that instead of translation, it is likely that Jakobson was categorizing three broad types of interpretation. The focus on natural languages within and outside translation studies in relation to translation processes can further be explained by how translation is defined by society. The rise of new social languages is also worth exploring from a translational and semiotic perspective.