Translation Of Meaning: A Semiotic Perspective

Our society is like a complicated aggregation of relations, by which all things are connected directly or indirectly. All signs derived from the society conventionally and psychologically are designed for the embodiment of relations. Meaning is also considered as a kind of relation, which will be studied in this thesis.Saussure and Peirce have made great contributions to the nature of meaning. In their opinions, meaning as the relations between different signs should be the focus of semiotics. According to Saussure, a linguistic sign does not consist of a thing and a name, but a sound pattern and a more abstract concept. His assumption lays the foundation for our tentative comparison between the abstract concept and the mental image, and for the interdependence between verbal sign and non-verbal sign. What's further, Peirce's explanation of interpretive function of sign in semiosis proves the fact that meaning is produced in the endless reinterpretation by signs. In this way, a single sign has no meaning, which should be formed among signs.Traditional classifications of meaning also rely on the consideration of meaning as relation. Generally speaking, the most popular classification by Morris consists of referential meaning, syntactic meaning and pragmatic meaning. However, Morris did not tell his semiotic classification of meaning from the semantic one. In this thesis, meaning will be reclassified as intralingual meaning and intersemiotic meaning, which directly come from Jacobson's tripartite classification of translation, namely, intralingual translation, intersemiotic translation and interlingual translation. Intraligual meaning is the relations among verbal signs in one language, and intersemiotic meaning is the relation between verbal signs and nonverbal signs (especially, mental images). The advantage to this classification of meaning is to push forward verbal signs to embrace their intimate mental images for translator's redescription of the original meanings.The term"translation"can be comprehended variously from different perspectives. According to Bell, translation can be understood as a product, a process and a combination of product and process. In a similar way, the Chinese characters"fan yi"can be explained as a translator, an interpreter, a product and a process. In this thesis, the author would think of"translation"as a process analyzing meaning from the semiotic perspective. In semiotics, there are three important concepts about meaning, i.e. code, semiosis and intertextuality. Through their detailed comparisons with some characteristics of translation, the author concludes that semiotic understanding and classification of meaning will be imperative to the study of translation.