The discipline of translation studies has been recently challenged with powerful incentives from other sciences. This tendency has become visible especially in the context of more and more interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary methodologies, which have changed the profile of translation research to a considerable degree. It has also shifted the perspective with which scholars perceive key concepts of the discipline, many of which have become rather unpopular if not completely outdated. However, it seems true that instead of rejecting old (...) terms translation scholars should try to reconcile the old and new by adopting more general frameworks that would allow them to re-interpret or re-write the existing knowledge. Moving intellectual investigations beyond the level of natural languages, semiotics may offer this framework. The article is an attempt to show the potential of a semiotics-based model of interlingual translation and to support the hypothesis that every act of translation is semiotic by nature. To this end it outlines the most significant ideas of semiotic approaches to translation studies and semiotics, with special attention to translation semiotics and semiotics of culture. This in turn helps to draft a working model of interlingual translation and its constraints. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2015 Heft: 206 Seiten: 161-179.

In my paper I will discuss both the processes of interlingual and intralingual translation of laws. The objective is to establish how the intralingual and the interlingual translation process influence or even shape a particular language of the law affecting thus the laws and the communication in a given legal system. In order to achieve this, I will initially research into the historical process that produced a series of intralingual translations of major laws in Greece and (...) both interlingual and intralingual translations of laws in Cyprus, investigate the main principles used in interlingual and intralingual translation, examine how the languages of the law in Greece and Cyprus were affected by these translations, and show how intralingual and interlingual translation influenced the law both in Greece and Cyprus. (shrink)

Due to the logical problems of unclear boundaries, staggered parallels, disordered standard, etc., existing in Jakobson’s intralingual, interlingual, and intersemiotic translations, the first triadic division of translation in terms of semiotics has been criticized since the 1980s. However, most of the previous semiotic research in China and the world at large still stays on the interlingual translation of literary texts, neglecting semiotic transformations as a sign activity and semiosis between tangible signs and intangible ones in the (...) same and/or different period of time, within the same ethnic culture or across the distinctive ethnic cultures. Hereby, it is necessary to refer to and redefine the term “semiosphere” introduced by Yuri Lotman in 1984 and the literatures after, to revise intrasemiospheric translation, intersemiospheric translation, and suprasemiospheric translation introduced in Jia. 31–46), and to elaborate on their nature, structure, content, and connotative significance. This is not only conducive to building translation semiotics as a subfield of general semiotics, but also to broadening the theoretical visions of applied semiotics and translation studies, and verifying the theoretical validity of general semiotics and translation semiotics in interpreting and explaining the semiotic transformations in translation as a special sign activity. (shrink)

Based on the distinction between the intra- and interlingual translation, this paper identifies the keywords of Beiträge as the result of Heidegger’s intralingual translation. With his intralingual translation of words such as Ereignis and Ab-grund, Heidegger gives these words entirely new meanings. On this basis, the paper criticizes the existing renditions of the keywords of Beiträge. This criticism is based on the insight that an absolute transfer of the keywords into English is unobtainable. To meet the (...) hermeneutic responsibility of translating Beiträge, we must obtain an approximate translation. The paper concludes by addressing the question whether an approximate translation of the keywords of Beiträge can be faithful to the original German. (shrink)

Based on the distinction between the intra- and interlingual translation, this paper identifies the keywords of Beiträge as the result of Heidegger’s intralingual translation. With his intralingual translation of words such as Ereignis and Ab-grund, Heidegger gives these words entirely new meanings. On this basis, the paper criticizes the existing renditions of the keywords of Beiträge. This criticism is based on the insight that an absolute transfer of the keywords into English is unobtainable. To meet the (...) hermeneutic responsibility of translating Beiträge, we must obtain an approximate translation. The paper concludes by addressing the question whether an approximate translation of the keywords of Beiträge can be faithful to the original German. (shrink)

The paper discusses the problem of translating selected Civil Procedure terminology from Greek into Polish and from Polish into Greek. The research material includes corpora of normative acts and more precisely those, which regulate Civil Procedure of Poland, Greece and the Republic of Cyprus. The research methodology is based on the concept of parameterisation, according to which the legal linguistic reality becomes axiomatic. Then the set of relevant dimensions and parameters is extracted. The set of parameters are a tool where (...) certain information is given: yes/no/none and thus a clear result of comparison between legal system bond terminology can be drawn up. The results of this comparative analysis provide highly regulated and available translation equivalents, which are essential when legal translation is performed within the frame of legal reality. Selected examples of use of these equivalents are given when discussing the results. (shrink)

The paper presents findings gathered in an exploratory, descriptive, corpus-based analysis of a parallel corpus composed of English corporate documents and their translations into Polish with regard to the frequency-related, binary strategy distribution pattern. In general, the author posits a distinctiveness of interlingual communication in the domain of law, as delineated by the institutional and disciplinary framework. The material extracted from the corpus and studied for its generic features points to the hermetic character of corporate written communication in English. (...) The thesis to be verified is whether there are any tendencies in the distribution of the translation strategies in the corpus texts. The research question was operationalised via coding the corpus extracts according to the binary strategy division scheme. Further, the data have been discussed in reference to the sociocultural background of the communicative situation covered under the analysis in order to account for the translators’ motivation. (shrink)

Legal wiretapping has gained importance in law enforcement along with the development of information and communication technology. Understanding the language of intercepted persons is essential for the success of a police investigation. Hence, intercept interpreters, as we suggest calling them in this article, are hired. Little is known about this specific work at the interface between language and law. With this article, we desire to contribute to closing this gap by focussing particularly on the translational activity. Our study identifies a (...) fragmented field of research due to the difficulty in accessing workers in this specific field who interpret in a highly confidential phase of criminal investigations. The findings, which are drawn from scarce studies and our empirical data derived from an online questionnaire for a pilot study in Switzerland, demonstrate the wide range of the performed activity intercept interpreting. This article is the first to present translational activity from the perspective of intercept interpreters. The activity differs in many ways from interpretation in court hearings or police interviews. Hence, we suggest categorising interlingual intercept interpretation as a translational activity sui generis and—since previous research has not done justice to the ethical and deontological questions that intercept interpretation raises—advocate for further transdisciplinary research in this field of translation. (shrink)

In the eleventh of his Antiquarian Letters, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing discusses a phrase from Lucian's description of the painting by Zeuxis called A Family of Centaurs: ‘at the top of the painting a centaur is leaning down as if from an observation point, smiling’. ‘This as if from an observation point, Lessing notes, obviously implies that Lucian himself was uncertain whether this figure was positioned further back, or was at the same time on higher ground. We need to recognize the (...) logic of ancient bas-reliefs where figures further to the back look over those at the front, not because they are actually positioned above them but because they are meant to appear as if standing behind.'1 · 1. The passage is in George Lessing, Briefe, antiquarischen Inhalts, p. 81. Panofsky's discussion does not note that the original text of Lucian makes clear that what is described is a copy of the original painting. This means that some of the issues of misunderstanding situated by Lessing and Panofsky in Lucian's court may in principle be attributable to the copyist. This makes no difference to the conceptual thrust of Panofsky's case.—Trans. (shrink)

Leopoldo Zea was one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. Though in English-language scholarship Zea is known primarily as a historian of ideas, his philosophical producti...

‘Language and End Time’ is a translation of Sections I, IV and V of ‘Sprache und Endzeit’, a substantial essay by Günther Anders that was published in eight instalments in the Austrian journal FORVM from 1989 to 1991. The original essay was planned for inclusion in the third volume of The Obsolescence of Human Beings. ‘Language and End Time’ builds on the diagnosis of ‘our blindness toward the apocalypse’ that was advanced in the first volume of The Obsolescence in (...) 1956. The essay asks if there is a language that is capable of making us fully comprehend the looming ‘man-made apocalypse’. In response to this, it offers a critique of philosophical jargon and of the putatively ‘objective’ language of science, which are both dismissed as unsuitable. Sections I, IV and V introduce this core problematic. The selection of this text for inclusion in this special journal issue responds to present-day realities that inscribe Anders’s reflections on nuclear science and the nuclear situation into new contexts. The critique that ‘Language and End Time’ advances resonates with the way in which the decisions of a few companies and individuals are shaping the future of life on earth. At the same time, the wider stakes of Anders’s turn against the language employed by scientists are newly laid bare by the realities and politics of climate change and fake news. In this new context, the language of science is all too readily dismissed as if it were a mere idiom that can be ignored without consequence. It is against the backdrop of a future that is, if anything, more uncertain than at the time of Anders’s writing, that the essay’s reflections on popularisation, the limits of language and the nature of truth gain added significance. (shrink)

In 1813 Isaak von Sinclair published a poem entitled “The New Acquaintance.” It recounts a meeting between himself, his friend Friedrich Hölderlin, and one other unidentified guest whom Sinclair awaited with keen anticipation. Because of Hölderlin’s well established friendship with Hegel it has been assumed in the past that the unknown acquaintance was in fact Hegel. However, at the time to which the poem refers, Hegel was a relatively obscure and unknown figure with no reputation. If we are therefore to (...) accept that the poem does indeed allude to Hegel then we must assume that Sinclair, as early as 1813, had recognized Hegel’s genius and wanted retrospectively to associate his name with the newly rising star of German philosophy. In that case we must ask why he refrained from mentioning Hegel by name or at least making the character of the unknown unambiguously clear? In translating this poem for the first time into English I offer for consideration another candidate as the “acquaintance,” namely, Wilhelm Heinse. (shrink)

The basic problem affecting humanitarian law today remains that of its implementation. As of now, requests made by individuals before national courts to assess the compatibility of certain acts with international humanitarian law failed. The present case study and commentaries focus on the decision of a German civil court sitting Bonn to deny the victims of a NATO air raid the right to sue Germany and claim compensation for alleged violations of international humanitarian law.

ABSTRACT “Meister Eckhart’s Mysticism in Comparison with Zen Buddhism” originally appeared as the concluding section of Ueda Shizuteru’s first book, Die Gottesgeburt in der Seele und der Durchbruch zur Gottheit: Die mystische Anthropologie Meister Eckharts und ihre Konfrontation mit der Mystik des Zen-Buddhismus. It was first published in 1965 as an expanded version of Ueda’s doctoral dissertation, which was written under the supervision of Ernst Benz at the University of Marburg. Ueda’s careful analysis not only illuminates important points of affinity (...) between Eckhart and Zen, but also explains why Eckhart’s mysticism cannot be simply interchanged with Zen Buddhism. To allow the reader to read for themselves, I kept all interpretative notes to a minimum. The text is translated from the most recent edition of the German text, published in 2018 by Verlag Karl Alber, and edited by Wolf Burbat. The German pagination is interpolated in bold throughout the text. (shrink)

The book that the French reader holds in his hands is one of the century’s most fascinating and liberating. It does nothing less than instigate the psychoanalytic approach as a universal method of...

Michael Heidelberger's exhaustive exploration of Fechner's writings, in relation to current issues in the field, successfully reestablishes Fechner'...

Today’s question concerning technology involves asking about both the post-pandemic world and the post-data-economy world, in a situation where resentments and scapegoats are easily generated. We c...

In European culture the sacred and the secular have existed in a dialectical relationship. Prodi sees the fifteenth-century crisis of Christianity as opening up three paths that eroded this dualism and tended towards modernity: civic-republican religion, sacred monarchy, and the territorial churches. Important counter-forces, which sought to maintain dualism, included the Roman-Tridentine Compromise, and those forms of Radical Christianity which rejected confessionalisation outright. During the Eighteenth Century, all these phenomena tended to contribute to one of two tendencies: towards civic religion, (...) or towards political religion. The former preserved a distinction between conscience and law; the latter comprised a state religion which sought to perfect all of human nature. It was civic religion which become embodied in the early USA, alienating God from worldly power, but leaving him as the guarantor of agreements between humans. Back in Europe, Prodi tracks the relationship between the Catholic Church and the new national states. He then turns to the political religions of the Twentieth Century. Prodi concludes by emphasising that this dualism of sacred and secular power lay at the centre of Western modernity, and expresses his fears about the collapse of civic religion into political religion, especially in the USA. (shrink)

In 1985, Swiss legal philosopher Walter Ott visited Herbert Hart in Oxford and made this record of their meeting, which casts novel light on some of Hart’s ideas. Ott engaged Hart in a fresh encounter with the legal philosophy of Gustav Radbruch, particularly Hart’s and Radbruch’s reasons for a minimum content of justice in law. They also discussed the grudge informer, state responsibility under laws of an earlier régime, and questions of the definition and falsifiability of legal theories. Hart surprisingly (...) reported Hans Kelsen as stating, when they had met at Berkeley in 1961, that Hume (and not Kant, and certainly not Wittgenstein) was the greatest philosopher who had ever lived. The translation is accompanied with annotations explaining references, assumptions and contexts. (shrink)