Paraphrase or parasite?

1 Foreword

Translation re-creates the perfect one-way replacement of the textual material of the source text in one language into equivalent textual material in another language. The re-creation in a different language is made by a human agent, the translator, whose task is to co-author the translation as a new sign-maker – but often the translator feels more than the secondary interpreter acting independently in the translational work. Inclined to work alone, the translator may co-interpret the thematic, space-time, and conceptual qualities of the source text with personal “differences” to compose the target text. The humble position of the translator introduces different opinions to the beliefs, attitudes, and prejudices wishes to promote the skill and craft of making translations.

In the nineteenth century and toward the twentieth century, contemporary linguistics arose to explain the linguistic qualities of translation. The semiotic masters Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) and Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) focused more closely on the semiotic expression of language, aiming to represent the mimesis of language for reasoning the possibility of verbal and nonverbal signs. Their semiotic deliberations of thought led to new arguments to further elaborate the contemporary fields of theoretical and applied linguistics in order to analyze the future activity of translation.

Today, the primary propositions of the semiotic linguists Saussure and Peirce have different approaches of translatability and untranslatability to the same (or equivalent) object of translation theory. There appear many legitimate ways of identifying their argumentation, but none of them entirely successful in contemporary translation theory. Following Jakobson’s developing from Saussure to Peirce, the semiotic process of writing and thinking has contributed to the creative process of my work in translation theory. Briefly, I have denominated the symbiosis of one language with a second language as “semiotranslation.” Then, I added the semiosis from verbal language into the nonverbal artwork as “transduction” of semiotranslation.

2 Translation of Saussure’s grammar

Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics was edited from the notes of his lectures held at the University of Geneva between 1906 and 1911. Saussure seems to divide the linguistic signs not in the transparent union of a thing and its name but in the arbitrary concept of the sign-image (signifier, signifié) with its object (signified, signifier) to have, in Saussure’s words, “the advantage of indicating the opposition that separates them from each other and from the whole of which they are parts” (1966 [1959]: 67). Language (langue) is not a neutral code of grammar, but interprets the abstract code of signifier with its underlying signified to connect with the process of speech (parole). The word is the fundamental unit of Saussure’s figurative speech but, by deciphering the words, the effect suggests what the word will mean.

The code is defined in general semiotics as the technical or cultural “transformation, or set of unambiguous rules, whereby messages are converted from one representation to another” (Sebeok 1984: 29). For Saussure, language was considered a concentrated system of static rules, in which the verbal code was assumed to be furnished with the structure of the alphabetic script to reproduce the various linguistic signs to provide a meaning. The variety of forms in linguistic signs lacked the ability to change in time and space and remained the graphic representation of words in language. Human speakers learn the semiological system to get used to the habits of reading and speaking to understand the written or spoken texts. Over time, some phonetic and punctuational modification could be accepted as conservative innovation, but any trend of creativity in language will invent from grammar the novelty of change (Saussure (1966 [1959]: 67–74). Saussure suggested the use of language with complete information as playing a game of chess (1966 [1959]: 22–23, 88–89, 110).

Saussure’s rule was not really the arbitrary game of language, because the information of the formal image could be mastered and learned. The normative claim of grammar was ruling the game of meanings in which the word is attached to the decipherment of verbal pieces in language. The chess player (and the translator) turned the pieces into binary choices of known and unknown moves, according to in the manipulation of the rules in the chess game (de Groot 1965). The chess player memorizes the layout of the game to replicate the hierarchy of patterns into a new move, but not creating a new game. Language was the collection of algebraic formulas to present the approximate and unmotivated pieces of different, even contradictory, occasions. In Saussure’s outlook, the translator added together two elements from different languages, but the implications of imaginary moves are kept away from the grammar of translation in a game theory of possible alternatives (Gorlée 1993: 67–85).

Saussure’s problem of translation was observing synonymity between source and target texts, because the two (or more) structures could be identical in reference while the emotive profiles were quite different. But Saussure’s general division into two faces of the linguistic sign created ambiguous forms of signification: signifier and signified, langue and parole, denotation and connotation, matter and form, sound and meaning, synchrony and diachrony, were all Saussure’s forms of quasi-communication. However, the real communication of words and sentences remained for many language speakers (mainly the translators) the unlogical paradox of not fully apprehensible near-and quasi-synonyms.

In the dualist approach of Saussure’s structuralist semiology, language was divided into the oppositional concepts of unmotivated arbitrariness to infer the meaning from syntagmatic and paradigmatic (associative) interrelations (1966 [1959]: 122–127; see de Beaugrande 1991: 22–27). Linguistic units form the line of groups of words in Saussure’s syntagms, meaning the discrete particles of language. The linear order of the particles is regulated by the rules of the grammar to analyze horizontally the given units of language. The units and terms of language were called by Saussure the different forms of the verbal syntagms, the substance of their meaning is expressed vertically by the story of the significant word-clues. The history, geography, and etymology of the particles explain their vertical separation to generate for the language speaker meaningful facts of discourse (meaning thinking and speech). The substance of words and sentences provides the paradigmatic proportions a pre-established harmony or disharmony, called by Saussure the associative equations in and between linguistic units. The opposed concepts enabled the grammatical interrelations to make differences to change or exchange the facts of terminology, but a definitive meaning in the vocabulary of the speaker’s opposed words easily is not a possibility (Saussure 1966 [1959]: 122).

Saussure did not pay much attention to translation. Since he promoted linguistics to the “pilot science” (Marcus 1974: 2871) of the entire program of semiology, Saussure’s arguments led into “many a cul-de-sac” (Sebeok 1985: 296) in the dilemmas of the human sciences in anthropology, sociological, mathematics, the theory of literature, as well as in the theory and practice of translation of itself (Marcus 1975; see Gorlée 2019). Translation was for Saussure the classic dogma of dealing with his structural differences, yet the doubtful but opposite forms of language were unable to consolidate the cultural, ideological, and fictional meaning into one target text (1966 [1959]: 126–127). Saussure’s codification of language in the dual construction of synchronic and diachronic units needs a decoder to break the code and understand the meaning of language.

The general term of langue (synchrony) can explain the forms and facts of language, but how to use the creative rhetoric of the parole (diachrony) of actual speakers (including the translator) remains an unpredictable matter (Saussure 1966 [1959]: 101–139, 140–190). Indeed, Saussure formed a minimal linguistic theory to change one language into another language from absolute into relative arbitrariness to form the codified whole. The forms and facts of language could be marginally constructed and re-constructed, but translation itself was neutralized to “natural” speech without cultural, ideological, even fictional differences without inspirations between languages. Translation remained, in Saussure’s outlook, an impossible task.

Saussure understood the translator to be doubling back and forward to find a coherent system of relating one language against another language to restructure the variety of different meanings into one. The translator searches in the logical brain, transferring the psychological and other alternative findings of two (or more) languages in the practical situation to find what they have in common. The result for Saussure’s followers (Mackay and Donato [eds.] 1970) was that the linguistic units of words needed to expose and even interpolate the variety of meaningful senses with each other (see the French tradition of poststructuralist rhetoric of translation in Foucault, Ricoeur, Lyotard, Derrida, and others, to find the meaning). No anticipation of a solution for the criticism could be found in the arbitrary transaction of the double status facing the reader or translator.

Despite Saussure’s declarations for the philological and philosophical theory of translation, the progress of the practice and study of translation continued after him in a rupture with Saussure’s original resistance in poststructuralism. The counterviolence of the etymological sense covers the cultural interplay of all kinds of Derrida’s différances of form and meaning by reproducing the source text into the target text (or target texts) (Derrida 1996 [1973]: 129–160). Poststructuralism tore down the system of contrastive terms of structuralism to freely demonstrate the reservations and disagreements of individual ideas and thoughts of readers. The polemical effect of translation performed the fine “art” of deconstructuring the subjective meaning in Derrida’s free play of signifiers (1969, 1978). Translation will have a dynamic similarity to move, interchange, and interact in explosive liberty with each other’s speeches.

To constructively build the utility of the structuralist methodology, Vinay and Darbelnet’s textbook Stylistique comparée du français et de l’anglais (1958) serves as the standard procedure of the linguistic methodology to teach translation. This French manual has recently, after 40 years, been translated into English to serve the apprenticeship for international readers (1995). Based on the duality of contrastive terms of Saussure (Vinay and Darbelnet 1958: 28–35, 1995: 12–19), languages in translation transact with the codified contrast between two opposed units and terms, as indicated before. The conventional language theory about the double process of translation must agree with Saussure’s systematization of contrastive terms in grammar to work toward rationally valid coherence with the practical activities of information in translation. The modalities of self-thought in educating sign and object has turned Vinay and Darbelnet into the stimulus for the trainee translators to tackle translation as learning principle to analyze the distinctive features that make the differences of language.

The division of the dual organization of Vinay and Darbelnet did not reckon with the reasonable assumption that private translators tend to generate a number of “good,” “bad,” and “in-between” variations or versions of the translation. The semiotic form and substance aspects of signs referring to objects were already present in the terminological history of semiotics as in Hjelmslev’s paradigm of expression and content, form and substance, and Pike’s emic and etic problems. The theory of translation was modernized by Mounin (1963), who took Saussure’s semiological concept of language with the help of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis to build the lexical variations of word and sentence in order to construct some grammatical interrelations between languages.

The cultural perspective of semiotics arrived with Jakobson’s code and message, selection and combination, metaphor and metonymy, whole and details, and other terms (de Beaugrande 1991: 343–372). Jakobson followed Saussure, but instead adjusted the system of translation theory into the code and message of the functional doctrine of Peircean semiotics in the American tradition. The combinatorial relations of “in-between” versions is the confusion between “good” and “bad,” without re-arranging the contextual and intertextual parameters of the changeable nature in translation. The “in-between” mode of translation blurs the dual outline of Saussure’s arbitrary dichotomy into the creative view of Peirce’s imaginary “interpretants” transforming the received signs from the impossibility of Saussure’s forms of translation to Peirce’s three divisions to focus on the analytic and cultural articulations of the state of linguistic affairs of semiotranslation (Morris 1946: 217–220).

3 Peirce’s semiotranslation

Saussure’s principle of learnability of the chess game led to Peirce’s jigsaw game of translatability. According to the doctrine of semiotics of Peirce, the logical semiotics of translation continued with the importance of grammar. Peirce’s formal semiotics organized language in the semiosis of three “algebraic” formulas; but he also highlighted the functional (that is, social and personal) meaning of culture to establish the non-semiosic dimensions of human culture. The formal basis of Peirce’s logical semiotics was not confined to the fixed system of language (as in Saussure’s langue); rather, the vitality of Peirce’s thoughts extended the emphasis to cultural speech (parole) used in the human conversations reassessed in verbal and nonverbal speech (Rauch and Carr [eds.] 1980). Saussure’s principle of learnability may lead to Peirce’s idea of translatability (Osgood 1980: 28–29).

Peirce’s hypothesis of “speculative rhetoric” (EP: 326–330, 1904; see Lizka 1996: 78–108, Gorlée 2016: 54–57) comes from the reasoned thought of speculative grammar and critical logic to signify the varieties of “multicultural” meaning given to the sign. Speculative rhetoric works as active force to build the linguistic parts of speech. Instead of the ruled and sometimes unruled rhetoric of grammar learned by the language speaker, the translator became a co-author to work as active sign-maker of language. Peirce’s formal and informal interpretation would study the diagrammatical conditions under which the logical method can connect language to the speculative speech of Peirce’s individual idiolect can express the mental representation; or returning to the sign-maker, who can communicate in the non-logical variety of virtual dialect or idiolect to send “speech surrogates” to the language speakers (Sebeok and Umiker-Sebeok 1976; Sebeok 1976: 111–116).

Peirce’s possible, actual, and probable “interpretant” of the sign is functionalized by the material arguments of objective reason of language to be recognizable as meaningful linguistic words in speech. The interpreter (translator) reacted to the received messages in actual interpretant-signs to decipher them by the subjective standards of language interpreters. Speculative rhetoric may apply to reply persuasively, economically, and mathematically to the native knowledge of the language speakers. The informational messages lead to linguistic-and-cultural education, learning, and erudition. Peirce’s “linguïcultural” theory (Anderson and Gorlée 2011: 221–226) works well in parallel forms of translation between source and target texts to respond to the received synonyms of near- or quasi-equivalences and translate between different languages. Semiotranslation is a semiotic game to change the complex meaning of two languages into creating the single meaning of one language.

The “Suggestives, Imperatives, and Indicatives” (SS: 85, 1908) were the habitual diagrams of firstness, secondness, and thirdness. Reflected in Peirce’s three interpretants (or habits), this diagram represents in toto the linguïcultural method referred to in the evolutionary law of Peirce’s cosmology (Turley 1977: 64–88) to formalize arithmetically the “new features and bring them into harmony with the great morphology and function of the animals and plants to which they belong” (CP: 6.300, 1893; see CP 6.307, 1893). The formation of animal and human habits represents the mathematical logic of cosmic evolutionism. Peirce invoked Charles Darwin’s natural rule to reproduce the infliction and punishment of the events of life transpiring on the “three Universes of Experiences” (CP: 6.455, 1908). The simple way of habit can be codified into a cultural cluster of repeated habits (Peirce’s “habituality”) and end up in the routine of “habituescence” (Gorlée 2016a: 24–31).

But the reactionary and broken habits may jeopardize the growth of semiosis (Gorlée 2015: 40–41, 60–61.). If the speaker’s call to action is a weak sign, it cannot generate the translation of Saussure’s “good” habits but classified as Peirce’s “good” and even “bad” ones. The reactionary signs of the sign-receiver (translator) is the “good” habit of social and critical sign which can turn into “bad” habits transmitting erroneous and ignorant messages (CP: 5.225, 1868). The human self is the ambiguous and contradictory sign of intellectual and emotive associations on producing to the external world a variety of weakened signs in what Peirce called “degenerated” facts (Gorlée 1990). Yet in Peirce-inspired semiotranslation, there is no formal division: all the “good” and “bad” habits are translated (and mistranslated) to create a new interpretant-sign.

Peirce generalized the interpretants or habits of dichotomic algebra from Saussure’s contradiction and opposition to the wider landscape of trichotomic mathematics of logical reasoning. By the fundamental hypothesis of integrating three forms of interpretant-signs, he gave a workable result for the interpretation and translation (CP: 4.307, 1902). Peirce integrated the reasoning of his logic on the universal categories of firstness, secondness, and thirdness. The theory of language is the final symbol (thirdness) indicating the syntactic system of grammar to work for increasing the final significance of human language. The abstract and conventional link with the grammar works on the concrete mind of the reader by doing self-controlled habits of giving meanings or definitions in the index (secondness) and icon (firstness). Iconic and indexical words referee in the unilingual and bilingual “dictionary” to provide near- or quasi-synonymous particles paraphrasing in the “encyclopedic” translation (Eco 1984: 46–86). As “dictionary” definitions, the differences between the human ideas and personal thoughts (uncertainty, untruth) is the translator’s struggle to reach the general symbols of certainty and truth.

Although Peirce in his early manuscripts wrote on the verbal particles of speech, he found it “awkward and often puzzling to translate one’s thought into words” (SS: 84, 1908). This was the “dictionary” level. Only later did Peirce study the logical analysis and division of language in the system of “existential graphs” (Roberts 1973). Peirce’s speculative grammar tried to categorize the verbal units of language taken from the common ground of human discourse to the triad of the categories. In the existential graphs, the speech of the “composite photograph of many images of past experiences” (CP: 4.447, c.1903) imagined in visual form the symbols of language interpreting the separate parts of speech geometrically. In Peirce’s final works, the evolution of the grammatical categories grows from the symbiosis of firstness and secondness to reach the semiosis of thinking about language in thirdness (Ruthrof 2015).

Peirce’s symbiosis of universal categories (Gorlée 1994: 40–42) starts with the icon. With icons, the image represents and imitates the real sign to give the physical resemblance of photographs. The icon is based on “likenesses” (not real sameness) between the model and the object, but there must be “a topological similarity between the signifier and its denotata” (Sebeok 1976: 7, 43). With iconic images, the sameness can be figurative, as in the critical and satirical purpose of caricatures, but the meaning of icons suggests the dreamy use of subjective imagination to correspond the sign to the object. Icons denote the tentative agreement not in details but in the similarity of the appearance, form, or quality brought out by the correspondence of the sign to the similarity to the real thing. For Peirce, icons are

all mere Ideas, those airy nothings to which the mind of poet, pure mathematician, or another might give local habitation and a name within that mind. Their very airynothingness, the fact that their Being consists in mere capability of getting through, not in anybody’s Actually thinking them, saves their Reality. (CP: 6.455, 1908)

Icons are abstract pre-signs (CP: 5.44, 1903) standing on their own as an open image but with a hidden meaning. In language, iconic forms are used in preverbs, prenouns, pronouns, and predicates, which give no real meaning, but depend on the psychological meaning of the interpreter’s mood or temperament to get a sense. Iconic examples are the algebraic formulas, but also the caricature image of Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, or Kim Jong-un, and other parodies of indirect mimesis to imagine the real sign. Iconic pre-forms of language are punctuation signs, prefixes, participles, adjuncts, graphs, and abstract numbers, but can also happen in the relative forms of Peirce’s “portions of verbs, such as adjectives, common nouns, etc.” (CP: 4.157, 1897), see –s, –ed, –er, –est, –ing, –ly. Icons are the pre-signs of the purely imaginary signals in alarm calls (Gorlée 2015).

The index points to the real proximity of the thing or fact, in Peirce’s words the “Brute Actuality of things and facts” largely consisting of indirect “reactions against Brute forces, notwithstanding objections redoubtable until [it is] closely and fairly examined” (CP: 6.455, 1908). This means for Sebeok that the “signifier is contiguous with its signified, or is a sample of it” (1976: 43). The index does not represent itself, but is a “fragment torn away from the Object, the two in their Existence being one whole or part of a whole” (CP: 2.230, 1910). The index points to the real meaning, just “as the footprint that Crusoe found in the sand was an Index to him of some creature’” (Sebeok 1976: 7). Peirce’s example was the weathervane as an arrow on top of a building. Turned by the wind, the weathervane does not indicate itself but points to “the direction of the wind” (CP: 2.286, c.1893). The declarative examples of language indicate “such words as that, this, I, you, which, here, now, yonder, etc.” (CP: 4.447, c.1903) pointing out to the direction of the word. Further examples of indexical relation are (in) definite articles, demonstrative pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, proper names, and numerals (CP: 2.287, c.1983; 3.460, 1897; 4.153, c.1897). The meaning of the index is a close or nearby event (for example, smoke as a sign of fire, fever as a sign of illness), making the indexical form a sign of actual reality.

Eventually, the general sign of language is the symbol (thirdness) which reflects icon and index together in the reason of Peirce’s “Sign’s Soul” (CP: 6.455, 1908). Symbols are universal signs, “without either similarity or contiguity,” of icon and index (Sebeok 1984: 30) but with a conventional link “between its signifier and its denotata, and with an intensional class for its class” (Sebeok 1976: 43). The symbol serves as “intermediary between its Object and a Mind” (CP: 6.455, 1908) to produce a definite belief of truth. The agreed thought of the grammar predicts for Peirce and Saussure the “‘ratio’, or reason of the Object” (CP: 2.230, 1910). The symbol presents the final state of information and thought to provide the linguistic habits of scientific progress. Peirce’s examples of symbol are not the human thoughts, but are interconnected to other ideas and thoughts of the human brain as well as animal minds. Peirce generalized the concept of signs here in this crucial paragraph:

Thought is not necessarily connected with a brain. It appears in the work of bees, of crystals, and throughout the purely physical world [...] Not only is thought in the organic world, but it develops there. But as there cannot be a General with Instances embodying it, so there cannot be thought with Signs. We must give “Sign” a very wide sense, no doubt, but not too wide a sense to come within our definition […] (CP: 4.551, 1906)

Pure logic of signs does not include the criticism of animal context embodied in the human sign: the organic sign is engaged in by people and animals but also by plants, bacteria, and viruses, so that the organic sign is oriented toward this goal, to be interpreted as a living entity and be interpreted and thus allows growth (as argued in this article). Within the general notion of the sign, the perfect symbol can be repeatable in multiple copies, but a mere “replica” looks like an authentic sign, but can only be imperfect in iconic and indexical signs (Ruthrof 2015). In Peirce, all linguistic signs fall first and foremost into the thirdness of symbols. But human language works as a repeatable system of replicas: the same word can be spoken or written many times in the grammatical replicas re-playing the original image in unconscious molecules (Burks 1997: 515–517).

Peirce’s logical argument of pure symbols given as such without human argumentation are directed toward reaching the symbolic truth. Symbolicity involves the abstract world of the cosmology of the manifold of Nature and the logos of God (CP: 6.455, 1908). The absolute mind of the symbolic meaning of thirdness is embodied in the human world in the doctrines of royalty, the president, priesthood, and the state, and concretely embodied in the religious books of Bible, Koran, and Torah, as well as the technical and systematic conventions of the lawbook, archives, telephone book, and other supporting roles ascribed to the law of human convention. To interact with each other without narrowing down the rule to the opinion of a single individual with his (her) personal circumstances, the symbolic value provides the general law guiding the human patterns of the variety of behavior into the absolute mind of truth.

Peirce’s information and misinformation of the “imperfect” signs finalized into “the most perfect of signs,” in which the meaning is no longer the “arbitrary conventional nor purely conventional” form of the index but represents the external world, in which the “dynamical object” (index) represents the “ordinary graph” of the “immediate object” (icon) (CP: 4.448, c.1903; see Gorlée 1994: 53–56). Verbs and common nouns can stand by themselves to signify the listener’s habit of feeling like “a mere dream, an imagination unattended to any particular occasion” (CP: 3.459, 1897). In Peirce’s logic of relatives, the iconic image requires the identity of the verb or noun to make the complement of adjectives, adverbs, and other words giving them “a local habitation and a name” (CP: 6.455, 1908). Adding such linguistic complements to language, the parts of speech add the indexical habit to react in language to (or against) the real world. In Peirce’s final symbol, the listener has learned the preparatory events of icon and index to form the general shape and meaning of the final and definitive symbolicity (CP 2.295–2.296, c.1893). The three categories lead in language to the indicative, subjunctive, and imperative functions interacting in linguistic units. This evolution represents firstness, secondness, and thirdness as the collective process of symbiosis to reach Peirce’s semiosis.

In Peirce’s doctrine of logical signs, form and meaning can be designated, named, but also changed, rebuilt, and refashioned from internal to external signs, moving from subjective to collective stages of mind and heart. In the three stages of interpretation and translation, the virtue and sin of the growing habits generate the “good” or “bad” activities of the sign-maker (interpreter) to suit the neutral consumers of the sign and react correctly to the received sign as speaker, listener, reader, interpreter, and translator. In reality, the reaction to the received sign is the interpretant to decipher the interpretation and translation of the translator’s interpretants (habits).

In Peirce’s infinite semiosis of semiolinguistic operations, the reactor signs are sent back to the addressees to enable them to interpret the received message in their interpretants to communicate the information. The new information can be again rephrased in new interpretants, and so forth. Peirce’s notion of the interpretant does not allow close synonyms to the original signs, but rather creates something like the extensional equivalence of homophones in sound and homonyms in appearance, situating the original sign into all kinds of strange and marginal interpretant-signs, unlike in meaning. Applied to the case of translation, the interpretation and translation mediate in all ways between the original source text and the new target text according to the stimulus received by the interpreter-translator to give new ideas, opinion, and judgment.

The variety of translated interpretants indicates that semiotranslation must be the vague act of interpretation and translation. The translation not only posits linguistic knowledge, but from Peirce’s doctrine of signs also embodies the cultural intuition to attempt to comprehend the invisible “historical” ideas, thoughts, and arguments to embody the original “story.” In terms of the semiotic interpretant-signs, the translation remains a subjective interpretation but builds on systematic versions with variable and invariable factors of meaning. Peirce’s interpretants are themselves interpretant-signs qualified by the representing system, in this case the three-way impressions of the translator from form to meaning. The consciousness of the translator is codified beyond Saussure’s paradigmatic and syntagmatic differences to embrace the metapoem (icon) and metatext (index) to achieve the expressive symbol of the interpretation and translation. The translation can be standardized in grammatical links with moral norms of grammar to intensify the new line in alternative or radical norms. The translation is supposed to be an affectionate or rational exhortation to the readers, but the final word is a strong exception to the semiotic rule.

One may conclude that the novelty and invention of the translator reaches out through emotional and energetic interpretant-signs (firstness and secondness) to logical semiotics (thirdness), but the cycle of translation never presents a whole or definitive interpretation. A translation is never a final text-sign in complete isolation, but acts in company of contexts, intertexts, and subtexts to give other meanings to supplement the translated text in time and space. The knowledge and intuition of a different translator could in fact transpose the source text into another target text with totally different elements and characteristics of giving meaning. Also, the translator’s task is not to integrate word equivalences but to translate the situations with the company of contexts, intertexts, and subtexts from one language into another, compared with the same in another culture to make language something like a jigsaw puzzle of playing with a variety of meanings. The idea of building a bridge from form to meaning, or from comparison to representation, is not made by a machine but an experiment based on duplicate portions of “good” or “bad” signs.

The terminology of the names of the person-oriented interpretants sways and turns between the sign and the object it stands for, to name the interpretants, which could be right or wrong, suppressed or distorted, and so forth. The series of Peirce’s three interpretants that follow and interact with each other are the immediate and dynamical interpretants, as well as the final interpretant, also called the emotional, energetic, and logical interpretants. These three interpretants give kinds of reasoning, moving from illogical to logical. The first trio (immediate, dynamical, and final interpretants) can be limited to the stages in the interpretive evolution of translation. The second one (emotional, energetic, and logical interpretants) indicates the sign-action from the psychological perspective of the emotions of the interpreter or translator. Peirce’s continuity stressed the three-way movement of semiosis from belief and inspiration to reach the definitive solution, showing the workings of the final interpretant to follow the bodily sensation of bringing out the sway of interpretants in the verbal signs of the translation. The concept of interpretant is defined as Peirce’s “Suggestives” by “Instinct,” then “Imperatives” by “Experience,” and subsequently the “Indicatives” by “Form” (SS: 85, 1908).

Peirce’s semiotics argues that any scientific inquiry is best conceived as a dynamic truth-searching process, meaning that semiosis is a goal-directed (teleological) search of the semiotic evolution, while the interpretants determine the interpreter’s mind – but without real results, without fixed methods, without fixed redefinitions, and even without fixed agents. All results, methods, and agents are temporary habits, which are repeatable and nonrepeatable habits of behavior (habituality) but never reach habituescence (Gorlée 2016a: 24–31). The same is also true for the interpretative translation of semiotranslation. Peirce’s three-way ideology dramatically changed the whole traditional approach of Saussure’s two oppositions, which concentrated heavily on basically unverifiable dichotomies labeled as the dogmatic description of dual expression. Semiotranslation offers to the questions of translation exhortative and persuasive answers of an evolutionary and skeptical nature about the interdisciplinary meaning of translatability and untranslatability, equivalence and fidelity and infidelity, the function and role of the intelligence, will, and emotionality in the translator’s fallibilistic brain, translation and retranslation, the fate of the source text, the destiny of the target text, as well as other semiotic questions. Semiotranslation is the suggestive, imperative, and indicative tool of interdisciplinary investigation in applied linguistics, including anthropological, psychological, sociological, biological, and artistic insights.

4 Parallel translations

Saussure’s angular system of comparative and historical work construed (or misconstrued) the meaning of the opposite and even contradictory sides of the translation to recompose the message into the equivalence of linguistic synonyms to employ the “truth” of extensional constructs from Saussurean “paraphrase” but finished in Peirce’s figurative version of “parasite.”

Translation theory following Saussure tried to achieve the parallel link of reason in the rhetoric of French philosophy provided with literary intertexts to illustrate the argument with Freudian and Marxist commentaries. To illustrate, the example of Serres’ books La traduction (1974) and The parasite (1982, French original 1980), Baudrillard’s book Simulacra and simulation (1994, French original 1981), and others. The linguistic figures of Saussure’s programmatic statements followed by the structuralist followers applies the work of translation to fit into the intellectual labyrinth of French metaphors and similes. The literary themes must agree with the linguistic levels and lexicographic contrasts of style, but the rhetorical style of French philosophy stays out of step with the scope and complexity of Peirce-inspired semiotranslation. Interesting in the contrary aspects of Saussure’s method is that translation is discussed as parallel relations to form the critical discourse. The communication of translation is ready to redouble the translator’s effort to free the equivalence from the debilitating burden of synonymy of language to step into cultural reformulations. The goal is generating scientific, that is “good” translations, but the parody of “bad” versions could kill the effect of the translation.

Semiotranslation is the cosmology of Peirce’s more developed semiosis (CP: 2.228, 1897) to distinguish and characterize the political, strategical, environmental, and psychological changes of the cultural context, which remains in the social transformation of readings and misreadings (Eco 1993). The ongoing concern of cultural crisis negotiates how the linguistic signs can move away from the linear scheme of grammar to assimilate the “curves” of daily life in the cultural conversation of present-day target language. Peirce’s “circuitous roads” (see CP: 3.398, 1995) introduced the terminology of interlanguage to show the cultural translation between source and target texts (Gorlée 2015b: 32–47). Semiotranslation focuses on the adaptive otherness of the translator to adapt to the “Pure Play” (CP: 6.458, 1908) of writing “multicultural” translations. The goal was pure semiosis (Ketner 1981: 331; Oehler 1981: 349–351), but Peirce’s scientific terms and notations possess a moral or ethical component to formulate the translator’s semiosis into complete “good” habits or even “bad” ones without claim to completeness.

While Saussure’s linguistic motivations were dialectal and mechanistic subdivisions by transacting the internal and unmotivated pairs into arbitrary relations, Peirce comprehended language as a changing system of languages with cultural meanings (Anderson and Gorlée 2011). Cultures are ideologies seen from the outside to exchange the inside spirit of the interpreter (translator and reader). The inside/outside interconnection is a question of faith, doubt, and belief in the interdisciplinary metacommentary of the interdisciplinary fields of psychology, anthropology, and mythology (Boon 1979: 83–96), but the linguistic creativity of translation can easily drive the translator into a corner to turn to “bad” versions (Eco 2003).

The parallel of synonymy moves the point of strategy from the philosophical argument to the rules of logical grammar. Linguistics and translation theory were governed by the transformational-generative trends of Chomsky’s Syntactic structures (1969 [1957], 1965; Gorlée 2012: 104, 130–131). In Chomsky’s sharp rise of the construction of generative grammar, the linguistic interaction of important questions of translation theory were the lexical and grammatical forms of language, but Chomsky paid little attention to the native competence of the language-user. In Chomsky’s view, the translation centered on the syntactic data to form language and less on the semantic reality of the personal style or rhetoric. Meaning was marginalized or explained away. In the book Aspects of the theory of syntax (1965), Chomsky stressed the practical use of the “encyclopedia” to provide the “extralinguistic messages” according to the “reasonable procedure for translating between messages” (1965: 30), but the surface emphasis of Chomsky’s generative grammar left no place for the deep structure of the intuitive habits and rules of the native translator.

Against the trend of the generative grammar, Catford’s fuller and clearer book A linguistic theory of translation (1965) seemed to practically disappear from the scientific and linguistic arena to give room for Chomsky’s Aspects of the theory of syntax (1965) published in the same year. Catford did not discuss the competence of all linguistic meanings but emphasized the individual performance of the translator founding descriptive linguistics to form the base for translation theory of the future. The same danger seemed to apply to the argumentation of semiotranslation, which was directed against Chomsky’s theory but used Peirce’s semiotics to integrate the logical perspective of language into applied linguistics to construct the semiotic aspects of translation. Sponsored by New York’s American Bible Society of New York, the method started with new media formats to communicate the Bible across different cultures. The method expanded the traditional notions of literary translation (now called pseudo-translation) with the historical communication of the linguistic, imagistic, and sonic meanings to remarket Peirce’s technology for the computer age (Soukup and Hodgson [eds.] 1997, 1999). However, the aesthetic vanguard of semiotranslation was subjected to all sorts of Philistine attacks.

In-between Saussure and Peirce, Jakobson’s article “On linguistic aspects of translation” (1966 [1959]) changed the ideal of translation in a radical way. From about 1980, Jakobson’s revolution guided me away from traditional linguistics mixed with literature to announce the global approach to semiotranslation, refigured into poetry, film, music, and generally the fine arts as cardinal points of transduction (Gorlée 2015b). Jakobson’s three kinds of translation were almost an extraneous fact arising from the static methodology of Saussure that he knew from his native Russia, but producing instead the dynamic semiosis of translation:

Intralingual translation or rewording is an interpretation of verbal signs by means of other signs of the same language.

Interlingual translation or translation proper is an interpretation of verbal signs by means of some other language.

Intersemiotic translation or transmutation is an interpretation of verbal signs by means of signs of nonverbal sign systems. (Jakobson 1969: 233)

Jakobson got to know the general semiotics of Peirce later in life, when he arrived in the United States in 1941. Peirce’s Collected Papers (1931–1966) were under publication, but Peirce was not yet well known as a theoretical linguist. As a semiotic thinker about the intricacies of logical language with arts, Peirce added non-logical and emotional associations to the evolutionary units of language.

Peirce’s analytical and logical semiotics exchanged Jakobson’s traditional symbolicity of discussing the phonetic, punctational, and morphological use of language to pre-announce the imaginative and effective approaches of Jakobson’s poetics in language. Peirce’s semiolinguistics can effortlessly alternate with logical and non-logical lines to generate translation in three different stages of evolution, subdivided into other steps (Burks 1997: 498–508). Omitting Saussure’s plan of dual absolutes in contradictory oppositions, Peirce’s three-way role-switching jumped from rewording of translation proper to the senses of transmutation. Peirce’s evolutionary process was based on the three stages of the categories, starting with the iconic oneness of same ideas, then the indexical secondness of things and facts, and ending with the symbolic thirdness of rule and reason (CO: 6.455, 1908). Jakobson learned the voluminous works of Peirce to exchange, as far as possible, translation into transcription, transposition, and other artful transformations of translation.

The existing performance of semiotranslation is the biofiction of sign-maker and co-interpreter into transliterating and translating the source text by the intuitive interpretation of the text to the simple and complex signs of illogical and logical interpretants. To achieve this goal of including objective and subjective statements into the grammatical and ungrammatical structures of human speech, original Bible translation was no longer the right methodology to serve translation theorists. The sacred texts with religious rules no longer exemplified the ordinary and casual source text of applied linguistics as the recent methodology of translation studies. Instead, cultural anthropology evolved the “mythological” example of dealing with the “primitive” languages of tribes and “popular” groups of people. The natural and biological development of Charles Darwin’s evolutionary method pointed to the different speech events of folk traditions in the anthropological fieldwork of Malinowski, Benedict, and Firth (de Beaugrande 1991: 214–216; Gorlée 2012: 36–37, 245).

While archeological speech provided “information about cultures for which there are no historic, written records and tells us how these cultures were organized” (Rosman and Rubel 1989: 14), anthropology glides into two directions. Physical anthropology, or now bioanthropology, views humans as biological organisms, while cultural anthropology studies the Otherness of social languages. The cultural anthropologists were ready earlier than linguists were to pioneer the “alien” field of emerging general linguistics (Schutz; Rosman and Rubel 1989; Anderson 2003) to introduce the metaphorical notion of paraphrase and parasite in the enculturalism and “multiculturalism” of translation. For the cultural anthropologists, semiotics became the central importance of the current trends of thinking and cognitive processes in trans-and cross-cultural studies (Boon 1979).

The central thesis of semiotranslation is that Peirce’s definition of sign “stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity” that is, the sign “creates in the mind of that person an equivalent sign, or perhaps a more developed sign” (CP: 2.228, 1897). The “more developed sign” with different meaning “stands for that object, not in all respects, but in reference to a sort of idea” (CP: 2.228, 1897). This “idea” drew Peirce to Darwin’s natural selection to add the “correlated variations” to “acclimatize” organically the natural sign (Darwin’s animal, plant, or man) into the mechanical habituation as the principle ruling the future (see Darwin’s chapter “Laws of variation” in The origin of species 1958 [1859]: 128–155). The flexible variability of the compensation counterbalances the opposing forces in the translator’s “false correlations” of “good” and “bad” corrections. In the strategy to fight the battles to reproduce and survive, Darwin’s point of paraphrase and parasite illustrated the forms of Peirce’s creative progress. Peirce’s “more developed sign” tried to discover the modifications and re-adaptations to be reproduced. Darwin’s “multiple, rudimentary, and lowly-organized structures” are transitional varieties, which must be checked and verified for deviations to survive (1958 [1859]: 141–144, 156–191). Darwin’s evolutionary cycle was the organic principle of the “survival of the fittest” to determine the natural selection of animals and plants for the future, but his theory can also be applied metaphorically to human actions and reactions, as in the myth of changed habits (interpretants) of the activity of translation.

The ampliative expressions of the target text stand for the translator’s revolt against the source text, in which the translator reforms and rephrases the target text with the non-semiosic transparency of personal remarks in paraphrase and parasite. The technical trick escapes Saussure’s challenge of source interpretation and instead focuses on Peirce’s environmental changes of quasi-communication in real communication. Instead of mediating in semiosis between the target thoughts, the paraphrase and parasite take up direct and indirect patterns of linguistic evasions or violations to produce in semiotics a difference of meanings. Kockelman’s “enemies, parasites, and noises” (2010) play the game of second-guesses to put the translator on the wrong reality and thereby exploit the readers. The readers have no part in the semiosic failure of translation but must accept the translator’s practical mechanism against the disturbances of language to understand the non-semiosic efforts to generate from replicas the real thing.

5 Paraphrase

The paraphrase is the false correction introduced as a figure of speech to the translation. The translator can re-organize the translation by adding the alternative experiment to the target text. Some words, sentences, or fragments of the source text might be obscured to fabricate the target text. The disguised sense of paraphrase with invention and finesse was the opportunity to establish the translator’s indexical act (with iconic undertones). The translator plays a trick on himself (herself) to mislead the readers. Leaving aside the basic trust with the sign-maker, the translator’s precautionary advice is to trouble the readers with the temporary setback to make the translation possible. The Saussurean form of paraphrase escapes the translator’s professional responsibility, without informing the readers of the incident— but playing “bad” or “good” tricks on the translational trade. The translator’s intervention is never excused for the transgression by exempting him (her) from the blame of limited knowledge (DU: 788–799, 737–739).

The Oxford English Dictionary tells us that the prefix para-, used in “paraphrase,” “parasite,” “paradigm,” “parasynonymy,” “paradox,” and other words, is derived from the Greek preposition Παρα, meaning “by the side of, beside, whence alongside of, by, past, beyond, etc.” (OED: 11: 172). For the ancient Greek to Latin derivations of paraphrase (Robinson 1998), see the “implants” of Shakespeare’s dramas (Vassallo 2015: 177–178 discussing Eco 2003: 9–31). In modern times, para- functions in adverbial compositions to modify verbs, nouns (or other adverbs or adverbial phrases) into “living elements in the formation of technical nomenclatures” with the marginal sense of “to one side, aside, amiss, faulty, irregular, disordered, improper, wrong” (OED: 11: 172). Within the “subsidiary relation, alteration, perversion, simulation, etc.” (OED: 11: 172), the effect of the prefix para- alternates between positive and negative qualities.

The paraphrase is the pars pro toto form of language, in which some part of the source text was taken to change the target text. The substance of the paraphrase is the translator’s “expression in other words, usually fuller and clearer, of the sense of any passage or text [or] a free rendering or amplification of a passage” (OED: 11: 204). Used as a literary commentary, the representation of the meaning of the paraphrase performs a trick “in a realistic or other manner so as to convey its essential qualities” (OED: 11: 204). Through the irregular and unscientific quality of the translator’s state of mind, the paraphrase is a joke to play on the consciousness of the readers. The native readers look upon the translation from the selfish point of view of reading the information to understand the meaning. The rest of the translational message is not calculated upon. This means that the work of the paraphrase is considered negatively as unwanted “noise” with “information out of place” (Kockelman 2010: 412).

However, the translational activity is not regarded as a misleading information of redundant messages provided with coded errors (Cherry 1966 [1957]: 186–189). The translator as artist does not bring the “pervasive sense of death, or at least of that moral ‘paralysis’” (Chambers 1984: 183) in a not functioning paraphrase. The source text is considered positively as an “open” sign ready to integrate the translator’s cultural and spiritual sense of paraphrase. If the target translation often consists of the variety of human actions and transactions, it results in multiple or plural readings, re-structuring the interpretation as coded by the author’s experiences. The first role of the translator is the critical interpreter of the source text. Aware of the further stylization of the target text, the text is encoded and re-encoded by the structuralist “censorship” of different interpreters (editors, producers, translators), so that the source text is diversified with a plurality of meanings (Barthes 1977: 158). The readers can read the translation but equally be easily outmaneuvered by the artful moves of the individual paraphrases by escaping the translator’s codification of the source text and following the paraphrase in the target text. The interpretation of the readers (addressees) reads and interprets the authorized target text without problems. Some individual readers may encounter informal casual meetings with problematic meanings — the sign of parasitism.

In Saussure’s paradigmatic idealism of translation, the norm of synonymy between source term and target term acted as the main point of the translator’s mechanism to be strictly followed and to ensure the equivalence in the scientific series of synonyms. But the result of quasi- or near-synonyms could not stand the proof in the deconstructive set of translation. Peirce’s speculative rhetoric of reasoning put the “relative terms” to the “proof of the validity of these inferences” to see the “truth of certain general statements” (W: 2: 245, 1903) without synonymy. Synonymy is for Peirce deduced from “a system of signs in which no sign is taken in two different senses, two signs which differ only in their manner of representing their object, but which are equivalent in meaning, can always be substituted for one another” (W: 2: 246, 1903).

For Peirce, the paraphrase exists to disentangle the problems of understanding the text by re-adapting the vagueness of the source sign into the adaptive or substitutive formulas of the target paraphrase. The result is to see how the readers will possibly react to the target text. The paraphrase exists to decode the coded target text and formulate the interpreted signs. By circulating the emotion, sensation, and attention in the interpretants, the paraphrases must transmit some mental (coded) reaction to reading the actual translation.

After Saussure, the emerging field of linguistics started with the grammatical descriptions of the sounds in phonetics, but the scenery of linguistics was reset in different analytical and descriptive views of analyzing text discourse into social (that is, political, logical, and philosophical) studies. Inspired by the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Pike’s work moved from Saussure’s fixed structure of language to develop from linguistic phonetics the new field of cultural phonemics (Pike 1961 [1943], 1964) [1947]. The sociocultural range of language was a historical and essential step forward in linguistics (Gorlée 2015a), but the contrasts of the parallel structures in translation received only casual mention in applied linguistic studies.

Quine’s Word and object (1960) provides the philosophical approach to translation in which the alternative meaning lies in the logical paraphrase. Since language changes all the time and is unreliable, synonymy is an impossible hypothesis. Quine solved the “ambiguous terms, simple or composite” in paraphrases to get over a “sudden block in communication” (1960: 157). Quine’s sentences are information in pseudo-language caught in the analytic quality of geometrical formulas (1960: 251–257). The scale of translation is not based on synonymy, but suggests a plausible algorithmic solution to lead to conventional truth. Quine’s approximate identification explains sentences by logical paragraphs construed as analytical hypotheses (1960: 68–72). If the referential responses are familiar to the native speakers, the positive reactions set the stage for Quine’s “radical translation” (1960: 28–30, 57–60, 75–76; discussed in Gorlée 2012: 71–73).

The logical paraphrase serves as the experimental web of language, generalizing and particularizing sentences of ordinary language into the idealized and artificial formulation of logic to preserve the essentials of the linguistic argument. The lexical imprecision is a counter-argument to the grounds of translation, since the paraphrase is not ordinary speech but guarantees a conventional answer in logical mathematics. Quine’s indeterminate translation defined the logical picture-writing as the final goal, but without being ruled by the inclusive grammar of Saussure’s abstract entities nor reconstructing the scientific reason of Peirce’s existential graphs (CP: 2.315, c.1902). Peirce was briefly mentioned in footnotes (Quine 1960: 23 fn1, 101 fn1, 135 fn1, 186 fn6). Peirce’s concept of “dyad” (CP: 2.316, c.1902) provided Quine with an ordered pair of “diagrammatical” symbol whose meaning is index and icon (1960: 257 and fn3). The bipartite diagram of subject and predicate analyzed the proposition of a sentence with a complex structure to deal with the fuzzy logic of translation (Roberts 1973: 114–116).

Quine’s solution of logic graphs was pure logic, but this scientific remedy seems backward to the reality of the public’s assent and acceptance (de Beaugrande 1991: 117 fn7). The paraphrase was to simplify logic in logical notations to straighten particular sentences of ordinary language but Quine’s effort “to keep theory simple” (Quine 1860: 158) transformed the indeterminate variant of logic into a reductio ad absurdum. Although Quine’s analytical graphs respond better to the economy of language, the complex network of graphs connected by lines, hyphens, and curves was too technical to be understandable for the physical reality of “ordinary” language speakers. For them, Quine’s artificial paraphrase does not reflect logical truth but gives some relative forms of “indefinable” synonymy readjusted in the artificial context of algorithmic paraphrases to guarantee a conventional answer (1960: 70; see 157– 161).

The orientation of Nolan’s Foundations for an adequate criterion of paraphrase (1970) was analytic linguistics, far away from the arbitrary description of Saussure’s linguistic signs and Peirce’s linguistic-cultural semiosis. Nolan defined the notion of paraphrase in sentences (not words) as the intentional structures of complex (that is, not synonymous) meaning. Combining the words into a sentence and various sentences can produce the difference of forms to have the same meaning but not be the same. The equivalence of paraphrase is generally defined as “a relation borne by a sentence a to a sentence b if and only if a means the same as b and a is clearer or more easily understood than b,” while Nolan specified the definition in her version as “a relation that seems to be recognized by speakers of a language that a sentence a bears to a sentence b if and only if a means the same as b” (1970: 14). Synonymy is the standard of paraphrase in a and b, as well as in b and a (Nolan 1970: 15), but the adequacy of paraphrase consists of vague and ambiguous parasynonymy.

In translation, the sentences a and b can belong to one language, or can be sentences of different languages (Nolan 1970: 15). The diversity of various languages was for Nolan the “additional semantic question” (1970: 63), because the two sentences can have linguistic parallels, but often both languages are different from each other. Nolan could not overlook Chomsky’s surface and deep structures to clarify “some system of syntactic description that is, we might say, language-neutral, in the sense that it encompasses within its descriptive power the languages for which the criterion of translation is formulated” (1970: 63). For the different languages of translation, we need in Nolan’s analytic view the sense of “grammatical and other categories” in pairs of sentences for “syntactic description” (1970: 64). To recapitulate, the language-neutral interlingua might help to translate from connected languages, say Swedish to Norwegian or from Spanish to Portuguese, but not from disconnected languages such as from Navajo or Hindi to English, despite their common history. Translation was mostly regarded as a near-synonymous operation.

In the double identity of languages, the paraphrase would be for Peirce’s semiotics the quasi-communicative signs of the agent’s (translator’s) voluntary action, that is index including icon. The action (secondness) of the interpreter’s index refers to the “instrumental system which would encompass the kind of activities which are variously called ‘skilled’, ‘goal-directed’, or ‘purposive’ behavior, and which is culturally shaped and patterned” (Schutz 1975: 591). The index in translation occurs in the technical replicas as target copies of the source text, but the grammatical replicas are exact copies or clones, not real semiotic signs.

Transposed into the evolution of the human script, the elliptic hypothesis of the paraphrase imitates the analytical linearity of language in words developed into sentences and fragments — written horizontally in the English alphabet or verticality, as in the 6,000 or more ideographic characters of Chinese writing. But the paraphrase is a replica written in the form and shape of the index with icon, meaning that it agrees with the linguistic word but identifies itself with the “same,” but transliterated and embellished, visual image. The subjective icon (firstness) comes from the agent’s (translator’s)

aesthetic, or emotive, system which would include the kinds of activities considered to be expressions of a different kind of semiotic than that of the communicative or the instrumental system — the kind of activities concerned with artistic expression in its most refined forms, or with the expressions of emotions in more mundane circumstances. (Schutz 1975: 591)

The paraphrase being the mixture of index with icon, the translator keeps him- or herself in the major role of co-author or secondary interpreter as paraphraser. The translation is ruled by the index to give real facts, but the translator feels free to “dream” the individual words in the paraphrase. The reagent signs of the paraphrase are described as the translator’s emotional and energetic interpretants to signify the supplementary paraphrase, but the final interpretant stays completely unattainable in the target text. Due to the eternal trial-and-error of the human agent, translation conforms to the translator’s quasi-thought (Gorlée 2004: 66–67, 129–130, 202–203, 206–209).

The immediate and dynamical interpretants of the linguistic system can be translated into the emotional and energetic interpretant to address the meaning of the interpreters. The paraphrase is a weak (degenerated) interpretant with “good” and “evil” elements not addressed to real forms of communication but with hidden agency of paraphrase in pseudo-communication. At certain moments, new information can easily supplement the limited knowledge of the translator, allowing the paraphrase to re-arrange or modify the formulation and be communicated as final translation. The “bad” paraphrase can easily be regenerated into a “good” translation, but for a written text the improvement is mostly impossible.

The readers might expect from the translation a “good” reading from index (secondness) to symbol (thirdness) to fully understand the impressions and thoughts of the professional translator. Instead, the subjective reasoning of the translator indicates the methodology of quick knowledge of linguistic languages and cultural background to produce a “good” translation. The critical norm of synonymy between source and target terms can be freed from the debilitating burden of synonymy of actual words and dangerously turn into the unresolved conflict of the translator’s thoughts. The “bad” paraphrase can even provide the more developed into fuller signs negotiating between Saussure’s signifiers. But in Peirce’s doctrine of signs, the paraphrase remains the imperfect clone of the target text, co-working as practical index (secondness) influenced by the emotional icon (firstness) of the speech of the human agent (translator).

The artificial paraphrase is Peirce’s degenerate message negotiating the physical and psychological strategy of verbal and nonverbal signs. The paraphrase breaks the cultural impasse of the deconstructive set of homonyms to replace the unknown passage into a new pattern. But the paraphrase is not a blind alley: although it stands for a “bad” habit, this could possibly progress into the quasi-sameness of the cultural reference to mean something else. Other forms of semantic translations can create for the unknown readers adequate, even “good”, translations, but the cultural version of emotional paraphrases can influence the “bad” version of mistreating source and target languages by composing a generally understandable version calculated to be understood by all the readers. The “good” or “bad” paraphrases are the usual routine of lay translators, but the complexity of real and imaginary parts is not a genetic code for easy interpretation: the translator may eventually learn more knowledge to make up the professional mind to correct the “false” version into a “good” one without adding substitutive paraphrases.

The paraphrase exists as a conservative (self-interested) and enterprising (other-oriented) activity willfully intended by the translator to rescue the translator from his (her) captivity of misunderstanding or misinterpretation. The paraphrase disguises the accurate meaning of the source text into the correlated, but more diluted or freer, target text. The translator wants to attribute correctly and adequately, even elegantly, the limited knowledge by intuitive improvisation in the target text. But the paraphrase can be described diagnostically as the medical or psychological placebo meant to instrument the symptoms of lack of knowledge. It justifies the translator’s unknowledge by the “good” or “bad” intuition in the aesthetic bonus to save the real translation. Since the placebo has a yes/no answer to the translator’s problem, sometimes it suggests a relief for the general symptoms, but on other occasions the medication does not heal and the complaints leave the readers with the social vacuum of incoherent and disordered speech (Gorlée 2020: 185, 201, 204).

The exploratory paraphrase searches for the positive and negative connotations of re-writing, reformulating, and reconstructing the source text, to a degree that the expertise of the translator as invader of the original text could claim administrative responsibility as artificial co-author. But the indexicality of the paraphrase conceals to a high degree the limited knowledge to enable the translator to integrate false parts of the findings to form the main target text.

6 Parasite

Paraphrase is explained as a non-isomorphic form of non-semiosic life. The paraphrase can have “good” and “bad” meanings, but like the paraphrase, the “bad” thought and negative feeling seem often predominant. The Oxford English Dictionary tells us that the parasite is defined as a living organism, deriving its biochemical life through the connection to “another organism (technically called its host) and draws its nutriment directly from it”; the parasite is explained in biology as the life of “animals or plants that live as tenants of others, but not at their expense (strictly called commensal or symbiotic)” (OED: 11: 207).

As a symbiotic example of the parasite, a virus starts as a small “living” creature, acting as the dependent parasite of Peirce’s icon. As a meaningless particle, it can attach itself to a living cell and become coded. In the biodiversity of host and parasite, the parasite multiplies into copies of itself, the chemical replicas of the coded particle take over the cell’s function to become itself the fertilized or “pure code” (Shands 1971: 22). After invading the host cell, the connective cell can fuse with the cell’s machinery to transform into the doppelgänger of the coded cell. The parasite makes exact copies of itself to prepare the infectious virus to kill the susceptible cells living in the environment, including destroying the host cell. Creating thousands of replicas offers thousands of probable chances to eradicate the host and other cells with all kinds of diseases. The parasitical compound infects human patients with influenza, measles, polio, rabies, herpes, malaria, and many other diseases. There is no antiseptic to combat the dangerous cells in the immune system, so that the “virus becomes master in its new ‘home’” (Shands 1971: 23; see Groopman 2019).

The coded life of the iconic parasite cannot stand alone: for practical purposes, it must co-live with the host to survive as alien (indexical) guest in the neurochemical (that is, coded) complexity of the biosphere (Monod 1972: 132– 137). The complexity reaches its ultimate expression in the nervous system of the human brain, but a remarkable change can also take place. The single parasite produces in the coded cell the creation of its iconic energy (Burks 1997: 518–521). The hospitality to the house guests supplies food to the parasiting cell, but the fertilized cell can attack the rudimentary life with the host cell and other enemies to solve the delicate problem of the food reserve (Ambrose 1982: 96). The coded cell can demonstrate a move toward greater independence and have a higher degree of life in the complete, that is multicellular, organism to struggle with the living world (Serres 1982). ^[1] In Peirce’s interpretation, the virus would re-organize the “brain” of the coded messages to be like the semiosic complexity of the harmonious molecules of crystals (CP: 4.551, 1906).

A crystal is a clear transparent icelike mineral, but still a living cell. The atoms or molecules come from gas or liquid to replicate into the solid state of the chemical composition of single particles forming the anatomical network of crystals. The symmetrical equal and unequal faces form a regular arrangement of atoms, but the imaginary lines of the particles may rotate to intersect with various forms (cubic, isometric, hexagonal, tetragonal, and other types) to produce from variant symmetry a local and broken asymmetry to raise new and chaotic possibilities (Weinberg 2011). The crystalline growth of crystals is rearranged into the coded geometry of the same and different crystals to make the scaffolding of optical images (quality of icons). The artificial permutation arranges itself in a possible chaos of cells without rules and relationships. The goal of chaos and order is to create a space for invariant possibilities to ignite in the living (non)logic of creation and metacreation (Whitelaw 2004). The biochemistry of the network of crystals causes an electrical charge, in which the crystals themselves multiply their own replicas in the irregular mechanics of crystallography.

The electrical radiation of crystals works as a “self-reproducing machine” (Monod 1972: 22–23) producing or reproducing the crystallographic framework of cells with complex structures in coded information (Duhem 1974 [1954]: 214– 216). Crystallography searches for the order and function of making “from one generation to another in the simplest living beings we are acquainted with” (Serres 1972: 23). The iconic-indexical nature of crystals implies the balance of the re-arrangement of natural molecules carrying the artificial properties of electrical codes. The reason for the code is a puzzle for human reason: for example, Peirce wrote that the “physical phenomenon [was] absolutely inexplicable by mechanical action“ (CP: 5.65, 1903). The icon-index biology of parasites may in turn naturally transform into innumerable replicas of, for example, insects with no vital function except for finding refuge from predators in the host source for their own nourishment and survive (Ambrose 1982: 94– 98). But if parasites are coded substances, the variations in the virus could take over the host cell’s coded organism and itself take on the role of the enemy, reversing the negative role of parasitical icon into the positive indexical master of its own life.

The virus can turn into a hostile enemy with the electric charge to lose its dependence and infect the environment by generating the active re-variation of viruses, causing the mortal disease which the antagonist cannot decode to escape the disorganization. The self-producing type of virus causes infection or deformation in the mortal gem, turning itself from source specimen (source text) into a mortal drug (target text). In the activity of human translation, the parasitical plant or animal stands for the target text, which survives as alien (alienated, alienizing) target organism in another language by living at the expense of, and harmful to, the cultural species of the source text. The parasite could produce coded toxins to empoison the translation to make an unfamiliar zombie.

The controversial aspects of parasites are that co-evolution from one species to the next seems to fight in symbiosis with the host to change into “hard” or “soft” semiosis (Anderson et al. 1984: 33–35). The host–parasite relationship is the dual organism to win the struggle, but the parasite now works as human producer or social consumer, as enemy or friend of the host (argued by Kockelman 2010). Living together with the host explains the parasite’s “hard” struggle to stay alive — this means that the subjective target intruder can invade the host prey and destroy the objective code of the source text. The “hard” sense of the target text could kill the body or mind of the host to live its own life. However, parasites can also suggest a “soft” kind of symbiosis by the genetic engineering of the natural togetherness of source and target texts in semiosis. If so, the parasite would seek to cure the mistrust and heal the breach between friends in an emptied body — a fragmented body without organs, nerves, and energy (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 150–153). Both varieties of the parasite are analyzed as Peirce’s dangers or reforms in indexical-iconic actions, meaning that the “system may not represent every variety of non-human thought” (CP: 4.551, 1906). The parasite does not live in thought but is reduced to the accessory form of replica. The “soft” replica focuses on its bodily needs for food and water, as with plants or animals.

For example, lichen or moss manages to stick closely on leaves and branches or exposed rock and stone to feed itself and survive. Lichen is part of the biological soil crust but lives in symbiosis with upper- and undergrowth. Arctic reindeer eat the parasitical moss, which is the moldy source environment to be assimilated by the steady uppergrowth of green moss to be eaten by the reindeer. The iconic parasite identifies and screens the source host to modify the cultural fabric and make the indexical target co-pattern. The creative whole of source-and-target performs the “soft” duties of the double (viral and antiviral) co-household without harming, specifically, the life cycle of the base (the host).

Whereas the semiotic perspective of human translation was the “neurophysiologist activity represented by nerve impulses linked by chemical exchanges” (Sebeok 1984: 8), the parasitical organism of language stands for the “soft” propagation of the

neurobiological transmutation from one form of energy to another, such as a photon undergoes when impinging on the vertebrate retina: we know that it entrains impulses in the optic nerve that change rhodopsin (a pigment) in the retina rods of the eyes, through four intermediate steps, from one state to another. (Sebeok 1984: 8)

The neurobiological reconversion into a new decoding part of the target cell happens through the harmless retrovirus to decode the virus. The “soft” code was antiviral and resistant to infection, but the infectious “diseases” shifts the target replication from the natural heart into the parasitical habits of Darwin’s evolutionary selection of plants and animals.

For example, mushrooms, a simple kind of organism (fungus) without chlorophyll, are edible (or sometimes poisonous) plants. Growing on stretches of field or meadow in the wild, these parasite organisms take compost from the ground to fertilize and reproduce themselves from the undergrowth of the host. The fruiting body of the mushrooms above ground can transform from “soft” into “hard” parasites. The hybrid strategy is that the mushrooms will, in danger, spread toxic spores from the underside of the umbrella and spread the code of tiny seeds to produce in human individuals vomiting, diarrhea, infections, allergies, and hallucinations. Due to their underground networks, these organisms have hidden roots — the Earth’s natural internet — to help the genetic images of health to reproduce variations of the fungi species, or the reverse operation. The parasites take their nutrients from the roots of different plants to flourish. But the marked difference is that the mushrooms can sabotage unwelcome plants by spreading toxic chemicals through the network, destroying the immune system of the other plants, including that of the host cell (Fleming 2014).

Darwin’s crucial chapter of The origin of species, called “Variation under domestication” (1958 [1859]: 21–49), discussed the fate of “natural” target parasites domesticated into replicas of deliberate or “unnatural” clones (called by Darwin “layering” or “taking cuttings or slips”) (Graham 2002: 114–115). The chapter about the “Struggle for existence” (Darwin 1958 [1859]: 74–79) included “the life of the individual, but success in leaving progeny” (Darwin 1958 [1859]: 68). Darwin discussed that some species of plants and animals died out, but other varieties replicated themselves “with the same species, or with the individuals of distinct species, or with the physical conditions of life” (1958 [1859]: 68). Cloning the next generation through “good” or “bad” copies of the first breed fabricates coded compounds in “unnatural” parasites, as observed in the struggle of coded copies as the cultivated mechanism of agriculture and horticulture:

For if several varieties of wheat be down together, and the mixed seed be resown, some of the varies which best suit the soil or climate, or are naturally the most fertile, will beat the others and so yield more seed, and will consequently in a few years supplant the other varieties. […] So again with the varieties of sheep: it has been asserted that certain mountain varieties will starve out other mountain varieties, so that they cannot be kept together. (Darwin 1958 [1859]: 77)

Darwin’s exemplified parasitical animals are demonstrated by the cuckoo laying her egg into other birds’ nests. The cuckoo parent migrates without worrying about the life of the offspring (Darwin 1958 [1859]: 237–241). The young birds are a sexual species but grow up with “alien,” that is asexual, parents. The codes of non-semiotic replicas may evolve in the generation of “good” and “bad” clones of “[c]ells, colonies of cells, organisms with organs, societies of organisms, and societies of societies [building] some organic building blocks [which] are used repeatedly: the four-chambered heart is an example” (Burks 1997: 518).

Man’s productions follow the evolutionary progress of animals by applying Darwin’s “principle of divergence, causing differences, at first barely appreciable, steadily to increase, and the breeds to diverge in character both from each other and from the common parent” (1958 [1859]: 106). In the input of new information, the “biotranslation” (Kull and Torop 2003) increased complexity in the operation of translation. The replicas of the cellular structure from the source text engineer Darwin’s random variations to “breed” the separate target text. The codes of the parasitical compound selectively “destroy” the “natural” host text to clone the variable habits of the habituality of the reproduced target text encoded in a different coded pattern to survive in a different life. Darwin’s new species of variations in human translation means that the parasite’s target text generates the coded species as the experimental evidence of Saussure’s contrastive translation. The translation demonstrates the failure of overtranslation, undertranslation, concentration, compensation, explicitation, and other strategies of sign types self-corrected by Peirce’s “logotranslation” (Kull and Torop 2003: 316) to apply to the evolutionary semiotranslation and transduction.

The evolution of parasitical habits expands from the simplicity of Peirce’s icons. The icons are the mimetic half-coded image which “involves no progression of being a sign” (MS 599: 40, 1902). Icons act through evolutionary replicas to make imperfect signs, which cannot alone take part in the mediation of semiosis (Parmentier 1985). Peirce wrote:

All icons, from mirror-images to algebraic formulae, are much alike, committing themselves to nothing at all, yet the source of all our information. They play in knowledge a part iconized by that played in evolution, according to the Darwinian theory, by fortuitous variations in reproduction. (MS 599: 41–42, 1902)

The habits (interpretants) of parasites point to the “significant character” (MS: 599: 40, 1902) of Peirce’s indexicality. The coded index indicates the replication of the environmental meaning. Are human reproductions of biotranslation progressed by choosing Darwin’s “any analogous principle” (1958 [1859]: 106) to apply the double structure to transform old into new? Darwin replied that

I believe it can and does apply most efficiently, from the simple circumstance of the more diversified the descendants from any one species become in structure, constitution, and habits, by so much will they be better enabled to seize on many and widely diversified the descendants, by so much will they be better enabled to seize on many and widely diversified places in the policy of nature, and so be enabled to increase the numbers. (1958 [1859]: 106–107)

The “bad” habits of the “slave-making instinct” (Darwin 1958 [1859]: 242) of parasites can grow from a “bad” master-slave bond into the sense of “good” life manifesting the evolution of Darwin’s “longevity, fecundity, and fidelity” (Graham 2002: 43). Darwin’s cycle of life encompasses Peirce’s three habits (interpretants). After the single habit, the repeated habituality can grow into permanent habituescence, in which the parasitical cell-making can become intolerant and aggressive and attempts to kill the host cell. But the natural selection of the meaning of the parasite is performed through Darwin’s coded interaction from parents to offspring, leaving the symbiosis of the host cell. In the repeated struggle for life, Darwin’s evolutionary rules are adapted to choose the prominent target principle to ensure the “survival of the fittest.” The creative complexity of the host–parasite relationship can be seen as the genetic process of evolutionary biology (Schmid-Hempel 2009).

The genealogy of different species in human, animal, and plant universes can be co-evolved with the structural and biochemical cooperation of contrastive or differential linguistics to achieve the real possibility of translation. This explains the two-phase evolution of biological forms of Saussure’s method, in which human translation is seen as interchangeable with the evolutionary biology of animals and plants. In the “conversation with Nature” (Kull and Torop 2003: 315), the notion of biotranslation seemed to hypostatize the work of Peirce’s interdisciplinary – biological, chemical, and neurological – semiotranslation by struggling against the normative fixities of Saussure’s translation. The target text exists to exchange the second-hand status (habit) of the cultural source text into the inferior position. The source text remains the host text, which survives and is not killed as the enemy, but the target text is the biological hybrid eager to sacrifice the host text for the sake of supporting the new organisms and new species in the logotranslation of the semiotranslation and transduction.

As a parasite cell of the natural environment, the target text is the future offspring of the parent, being constantly fed, indeed alimented, by the coded ideas and thoughts coming from the host. The target text is derived from the train of sign-maker – Darwin’s parent, here Peirce’s translator – to reproduce the subordinate source text into the target text. But the target text still feels like a superior artifact to receive the fact that man is a sign, since, for Peirce, “life is a train of thought” so that “man is a sign” (CP: 6.314, 1868). The external symbols of the target text stand for the “continuity of thought” (CP: 6.315, 1893) of the evolutionary generation to leave the old culture behind and create new features. The target mind creates human ideas, to color the target texts in all kinds of “differences.”

The grammatical rules of the target text are fictionalized by the cultural (that is, multifunctional and open-ended) flow of the sign-maker’s (called transducer’s) “magnetic” ideas and thoughts to alter the parasitical juxtaposition of language into cultural patterns of literature, art, and music. This cultural event of change happens in transduction to exchange the whole form of the source text into a different genre (Gorlée 2015), so that the target effect totalizes the fascination with a totally different universe. The inferior status of the source text is seen as unhelpful and inconceivable in the new setting of the linguïcultural way of feeling art and thinking science. The marked difference with the target text makes new word-clues that excite and provoke the spectators through the experimental and negative mixture of prominent signs (in fact, cell signs) to the total mixture of transduction. Unlike the compound of the paraphrase, which acts negatively on the reading process, the cultural parasitism acts positively on the creative processes to inspire the interpreters. The spectators feel like enfants terribles, ready to interpret any cultural novelty. The coded parasite is the legitimate manipulation of the coauthor to please and entertain the audience with a multiplicity of styles in tragedy and joy (Frye 1973 [1957]: 166, 168, 175, Gorlée 2015: 11–14 and developed further).

The “good” parasite is called the totum pro parte adaptation to decode the original codes of the source language to the creative novelty of target codes. The whole text of the source language is subject to what seems parallel transformation to assimilate the target language from language to forms of paralanguage (that is, speech and gestures). The definition of parasitical language is carried one step further than semiotranslation to share not in the artistic content itself but in the rules of the “parasitic formations” of “(a) speech and (b) script […) (a) tending toward context freedom, as in calculi, and (b) tending toward context sensitivity, as in verse” (Sebeok 1979: 249, qtd. John Lotz). Sebeok and Umiker-Sebeok (1976) concentrated on speech surrogates in drum and whistle systems as different speech from spoken language to create the human–animal hybridization of languages.

In the Introduction to Sebeok’s Speech surrogates: Drum and whistle systems (1976: XIII–XXIV), Jakobson’s transmutation of intersemiotic translation was divided into the vast terrain of “partial transformations” like “paraphrase, graphic illustration, pastiche, imitation, thematic variation, parody, citation in a supporting or undermining context, false attribution (accidental or deliberate), plagiarism, collage, and many other” (Steiner 1975: 415). The biosemiotic fable was that

[t]he life of the individual and of the species depends on the rapid and/ or accurate reading and interpretation of a web of vital information. There is a vocabulary, a grammar, possibly a semantic of colours, sounds, odours, textures, and gestures as multiple as that of language, and there may be dilemmas of decipherment and translation as resistant as any we have met. Though it is polysemic, speech cannot identify, let alone paraphrase, even a fraction of the sensory data which man […] can […] register. (Steiner 1975: 415)

Steiner criticized the symptoms of parasitical culture, which infected art through the anesthetics of paraphrase (1989: 1–50). The parasite was a change of symptoms to reconfigure the target text, while the paraphrase was the modification of the source text. Steiner added that “[p]arasitical discourse feeds upon living utterance; as in microbiological food-chains, the parasitic in turn feeds upon itself” making “[c]riticism, meta-criticism, dia-criticism, the criticism of criticism, pullulate” (1989: 47–48). For Steiner, man looks upon the fine arts from his selfish point of view, without knowing that language is a living organism growing toward its evolutionary destiny with the ultimate sign-maker, God as creator of the universe.

The parasitical culture paves the way for social communication as the trend of contemporary art. The “new look” of the target is supposed to be a more marketable design than the original one. The changeable trends of fashion established the exorbitant prize for the chic thrills and cultural theory of the transducer, but the poetical subject matter could be strange, even alien. The sense of likeness with the cultural content of the source text was gone with the target material, which could be “degenerated” into caricatural, propagandistic, or even draconian images of artistic expressions. The transduction is the metaphorical collection of “encyclopedia” (Eco 1984: 46–86). The goal of transduction is the “moderately” and “radically” symbolic work (Barthes 1977: 158) moving away from structuralist language to puzzle the readers with the parasite.

The transduction comes alive in Barthes’ ideals of poetical Text, which must be “structured but off-centered, without close” and the meaning is the “irreducible” plurality of the unfamiliar “explosion” of the “stereographic plurality of its weave of signifiers (etymologically, the text is a tissue, a woven fabric”) (Barthes 1977: 159). Barthes’ ideal of Text (with a capital T) is the anthropological-linguistic example of the “multiple, irreducible” universe pervading from language to

a disconnected, heterogeneous variety of substances and perspectives: lights, colours, vegetation, heat, air, slender explosions of noises, scant cries of birds, children’s voices from over on the other side, passages, gestures, clothes of inhabitants near or far away. All these incidents are half-identifiable: they come from codes which are known but their combination is unique, founds the stroll in a difference repeatable only as difference. So the Text: it can be only in its difference (which does not mean its individuality), its reading is semelfactive (this rendering illusory any deductive-deductive science of texts — no ‘grammar’ of the text) and nevertheless woven entirely with citations, references, echoes, cultural languages (what language is not?), antecedent or contemporary, which cut across it through and through in a vast stereophony. (Barthes 1977: 159-160)

7 Automaton or robot

At first, the parasite was a solitary creature confined to a small region of the host. Then, sometime later, the parasite–host relationship gave up the dependent position together with the host to live in wild and spontaneous Nature. The directed process of evolution is that the sedentary parasite can move and evolve its talents with the help of the “micro-mind” to play a different tune. The mind can regenerate away from Darwin’s biological diversity of animals to the environmental pressure of replicating on its own the cultural behavior of predator preying on other animals. The parasites come very close to the aggressive nature of primitive warriors.

Endowed with new significance, the parasite has moved from old to new mind, away from the symbiosis of Nature’s biological environment to build the “human” habits of the informed creature and sense the full semiosis of the “concrete jungle” (Quammen 2018). In Darwin’s endlessness of natural selection, new life-forms can evolve artificial creatures with unique technical mutations, as happened in the “complex, mobile three-dimensional forms, ranging from the clearly biomorphic […] to more abstract, geometric structures” (Whitelaw 2004: 30).

Life-altering changes to biodiversity is a possibility for the unhoused parasite, for example, to be “sheltered,” protecting itself against wild animals and bad weather. The “mechanism of inflation” seems to humanize the parasite’s life, but the unpredictable world oppresses the possible encounters with the calamity of “political barbarism and technocratic servitude” (Steiner 1989: 48–49). The new-born species needs a permanent home in the new world to remain safe. The evolutionary migration of parasites recreated from “bad” form a relatively “good” organism to explore and learn the limits of fragile and aggressive behavior. Instead of moving freely from place and place to derive its nourishment from meal to meal, the natural independence has exchanged the parasite’s mind-set into the evolution from the natural context together with the host to reach the hybrid organism of human individuals.

The parasite pushes the evolution to the human sense of intelligence, imagination, will, and ambition. It is in search of the Latin domus with a plurality of meanings such as “domicile, domesticate, dominate, dominion, domain, (con)dominion, dominus, domineer; and through these the house speaks to us precisely as the symbol of rulership, ownership, mastery, and power” (Danto 1990: 8–9), the parasite does not become archeological fossil. Although a “normal” parasite survives without changing the parasitical environment (Ambrose 1982: 116–118), some resistant or special parasites can display the extension of the rule of logic to correct themselves from natural life to the artificial activity of different biocultures (Monod 1972: 150–167). The rule of law integrates the source text into the target text not by negative reactions involving “enemies and noise, pirates and exploits, catalysts and assassins” but by catalyzing one’s bodily and mental relations with the whole situation and context through the “displacement in time, through time, between persons, and across possible worlds” (Kockelman 2010: 406). The coded rule of co-evolution is the “sheltered” home transmigrating the tourist to be a distinguished member of society.

The anthropomorphized organism is capable of shapeshifting into animal and “human” form (CP: 5.47, 1903). Changing the technical and cultural codes, the “transformation, or set of unambiguous rules, whereby messages are converted from one representation to another” (Sebeok 1984: 29) played the human or animal games of behavior. Instead of the special joking codes of the buffoon, the source and target texts are now regarded as imperfect replicas, ready to absorb cultural codes to change into the new evolutionary field of social order. The passing messages of animal and man are multiplied and mixed to function elastically together in the encounter with the artificial alien world. Serres described the pure chaos of the parasite’s evolution, writing that

[w]e no longer know who enters or who leaves; everything enters and leaves, no longer a parasite, but a sequence, a band […] in the plural; when a system admits a parasite, the parasite multiplies immediately, reproduces, makes a chain, a crowd, a number, an inundation. At the end of a few hours one single bacterium will have produced several million. Epidemic. The joyous band heads straight for the beds, towards the table. It occupies space; it goes right to the center. (Serres 1982: 250)

Serres’ joker effect transforms the theatrical play of the technical replicas by pushing Peirce’s iconic to the indexical game to find the “good” symbol necessary for shelter from the dangers around.

Jakobson’s transmutation is called “transduction” by Sebeok (and myself), in which the evolutionary quasi-communication of symbiosis finds the third aspect of Peirce’s semiosis including the categories of firstness, secondness, and thirdness. Sebeok wrote that “one part of the brain communicated with another, how the messages are constructed and stacked in a hierarchy, or how the meanings are ‘agreed to’ (coded)” (1984: 7). Sebeok’s metamorphosis of the

complex (viz., nonisomorphic) transductions [moved] into parasitic or restricted formations, like script or other optical displays of the chain of speech signs (the Morse code, or any of the several acoustic alphabets designed to aid the blind, or sound spectrograms) [were] optionally imposed upon chronologically prior acoustic patterns […] and more or less context-free artificial constructs developed for various scientific or technical purposes […] (Sebeok 1985 [1977]: 297; see 303)

The complex nature of “encoding” blank messages into quasi-communication discloses the full capacity of real communication. In translation, the jump from pre-signs to genuine messages offers “good” answers to the evolution of semiotranslation to the creative culture of transduction. Transduction illuminates the poetical inventory of human ideas to re-organize the sporadic imagination and re-think the target text in elastic forms of reasoning.

The parasitical translator mingles all particles, units, and elements of the linguistic source text together into the discursive approach of a different target rhetoric. The target text is not in variance with the logical definitions and practical meanings, but the habit of gesture transforms language into the modeling system of a different category of art. In the narratives of From translation to transduction: The glassy essence of intersemiosis (2015), the naturalist Henry Thoreau translated Homer’s verses about the military battle of Troy into a battle of insects as parasites; or Thoreau’s re-imagination of American and Indian ecological traces left in the lakes of Concord, Massachusetts; or Edvard Grieg’s operetta Peer Gynt relating the adventures of trolls, gypsies, and emperors as a musical re-creation of Henrik Ibsen’s poetic script (Gorlée 2015: 139–211).

Transduction is a complete metamorphosis of the source text to recreate the one-way replacement of the original text into the newly patterned cultural discourse of the target text. The target idiom has different meanings but is vaguely or loosely correlated to the source text. The translator composes “equivalent” textual material in another language – culturally transposed into another medium of art in music, dance, sculpture, architecture, or other fields without language. The linguïcultural recreation into the different script or idiom is re-adapted, re-imagined, refashioned, reconstructed, or rebuilt by the translator. The thematic, spatio-temporal, and conceptual fabric of the source text is transposed into the different language of the target text to be in its activities enjoyed by the readers/listeners and analyzed by semiotic scholars.

In transduction, the target sign is not an abstract action but the change in human reactions comes from turning the mood or temperament of the artistic talents of the translator. The transducer creates the irreversible sign in the “nonconservative” character in “one determinate direction and tend[s] asymptotically toward bringing about an ultimate state of things” so that “[t]he final state is irreversible” (CP: 7.471; see 7.471–7.483). Transformation from target back to source is a noble, but impossible, effort. This effort is different from back translation, in which one expects that the translator practically generates reversible signs. The reversibility of translation is an imaginary illusion. Sometimes a partial reversibility of some expressions is possible, but the whole is a new text. Semiotranslation demonstrates that all translation is disguised in Otherness; the sameness is “gone with the wind.” The transducer works as a disruptive agent battling onwards in the critical posture as a new coauthor. The strategy of the new sign-maker is to struggle from the “bad” source text to the “good” target translation. The target text highlights the organic (that is, the natural and cultural) communication for the translator’s work. Transduction has generated from the source text a genuine work of art, which can even be copied in non-reproducible replicas (not the real work) to enjoy the evolutionary cycle with iconic and indexical steps.

Peirce’s stereophony of linguistic signs is branched off to the positive harmony of symbiosis. Peirce’s semiosis of firstness, secondness, and thirdness give the variety of meanings. The interim translation of the paraphrase is bound in the alliance of mutual benefit, but the extension of the whole text holds out the branch of freedom taken from the original source into the target texts. The metaphor of parasitism can mean the mutual benefit of sheltering each other in a new well-being, or rather develop a risk of resistance to infectious diseases coming from outside. The literary freedom of the transducer has a geometrical or static basis, but can represent all relations in the

simple juxtaposition (literal metaphor), a rhetorical statement of likeness or similarity (descriptive metaphor), an analogy of proportion among four terms (formal metaphor), an identity of an individual with its class (concrete universal or archetypal metaphor), or statement of hypothetical identity (anagogic metaphor). (Frye 1973 [1957]: 366)

The imperfect patterns of emotional and energetic interpretants are the stages of affectionate firstness and brute secondness, as in the indexical-iconic nature of the imperfect paraphrase.

Within Peirce’s logical cosmology of the universal categories, the “uneducated” (CP: 7.579, 1886) parasite has the weakness of the microorganism, forcing it to live together with the coded host. Darwin’s evolution has broken new ground by developing higher organisms from the single fertilized cell into an imperfect paraphrase. The perfection of Darwin’s theory of evolution exemplified a structural pattern of natural selection for all organisms, but Darwin added to the formalized calculus of nature the complex novelty of parasitical variations (Ambrose 1982: 140–144) trespassed into other fields of mental activities (Sebeok (1979: 251, 1985 [1977]: 297), as meant by Peirce’s cosmology of logic in his later years (from 1890).

The variations of norms and ideas came from Peirce’s “evolutionary love” (CP: 6.287–6.317, 1893; Potter 1967: 171–190). In sharp contrast with the so-called “greed-philosophy” relevant in the Victorian epoch, the political economy of the United States promoted the industrial revolution and abolition of slavery. Peirce embodied the “counter-gospel” (title of CP: 6.287–6.295, 1893) of the moral code: God is love and growth comes from love. Peirce’s evolutionary meaning is the continuity of semiosis from a generalized description to the cues of a forward-looking action. In the evolutionary growth of contrary terms, love and hate, beauty and ugliness are the same sentiments, first imperfect then perfect (CP: 6.287, 1893).

Peirce’s cosmology of universal logic was certainly influenced by Darwin’s mechanical principles of diversification and increase in the variety of the animal and human nature, but he broadened the scope of Darwin’s evolution of species into the universal goal-directed cosmology ranging from individual indexes and pure icons to produce the third aspect of evolution in the symbol (CP: 6.306–6.308). The trial-and-error of human translation can equally grow by the selective factor of the agency of the translator to make radical reactions to “gratify the egoistic impulses of others,” but Peirce states that one must “[s]acrifice your own perfection to the perfectionism of your neighbor” (CP: 6.288, 1893).

To reason the evolutionary cycle of human thought, progress opposed the coded disorder of the states of mental activities in paraphrase and parasite to decode the symbol of authority. Abandoning the iconic identity of the indexical association of living together with the host, the parasite wants to leave the microstructure of coded dependency to reach the uncoded macrostructure of logical philosophy. The parasite’s final interpretants are the actual domain of the goal of togetherness away from the secondary adaptation to life in the host. To modify its physical and mental structure into the novelty of the new life as non-parasite, it must withstand the antibodies itself to get the upper hand as a non-parasite. The parasite yearns for a better brain by having a new home to speak with the voice and vote of a citizen. The parasite no longer lives in the concrete cell of “word association,” but in its more advanced stages it advances from the coded index to build the symbolic principle of attempting to build a thinking machine to speak with the thirdness of “language.”

In Peirce’s early philosophy, the parasite was transformed into the “intuitive man” with a humanoid “soul” to embody the “heterogeneous hodgepodge of the most contradictory theories” (CP: 7.580, 1866). Through the “extension and comprehension” (CP: 7.580, 1866) of the creative rationality of human agents, the sum total of parasitical men reaches from iconic firstness to indexical secondness, but the non-parasite wants to reach the more developed sign, thirdness. This further step was the mental idealism of the parasite, enclosed in the organic logic of the mechanical “automaton” (CP: 7.582, 1866). The automatic figure is a robot-like machine of high technology. The coded robot seems to act by its own motive power to synthesize the logico-mechanical thought and mind of the humanoid species (Monod 1972: 15–31).

The artificial “intelligence” of robots can calculate, think, and remember certain chores of language and culture such as playing chess, crossing a street, lifting weights, and socially interacting with partners. However, the set of instructions is a fixed program of technical algorithms provided with exact coded steps. Without the program, the robot is a “plain thing” — in Peirce’s terminology, a dead “stone” which is “deaf and has no reason” (CP: 5.48, 1903). Its non-semiotic “intelligence” is the anthropocentric hypothesis of simple stupidity, since the self-constructing machine is merely the construction of the human brain. The “mind” of androids or cyborgs can think and rule the technical information of human existence, but the “outside” source of “inside” activity is not organic but totally biomechatronic activity. The step-by-step method depends totally on the mechanical assemblages of the technical program of a human program; no varieties are accepted to predict the unpredictable dimensions by adding madness to the system or turning life from animal instinct into a genuine human project.

Robots are depicted as realistic but alien figures, but turn out to be ghostly manipulators of logograms expressing in a single word-sign the rudimentary meaning of whole sentences or paragraphs (Gleick 2017: 28). It seems that the brain of robots equally possesses two brains, trying to unsettle the animal form to attempt to turn into a human person. The automatic behavior of robots acts as greedy “predator” directed to their own needs. The exclusive self-organization of robots is unable to evolve into the “RESPONSIBLE and IMMORTAL soul” of the ethical view of humankind but stays confined to the myth of “parasitical reflection” (CP: 7.581, 1866). The religious virtues of “Man, love yourself” did not evolve into “love the other.”

The ideographical mind of the automaton remains the primitive form of learning pattern recognition and other cognitive skills, but without including the cultural understanding of the emotional or creative thinking of human beings. The thought of language requires the problem of consciousness to string together sequences of behavior into a complexity of thought, but any thought of language turned into a rudimentary dream. The activity of building a better brain for body and soul was artificially manipulated away from human consciousness into the technical performance of robotic life. The robots seemed to transform from animal into man, but the sharp dichotomy between man and Nature confused, at least for English speakers, the pictographical logograms into ideographs.

The symbolicity (thirdness) of the automatic brain was Peirce’s late system of existential graphs in which he worked on a reasoning machine (CP: 5.594, 1903; see MS 831: 2–12, 1900, MS 318: 40–45, 1907). Peirce announced computerized translation, moving away from human consciousness to logic-mechanical machines. Peirce’s efforts were equivalent to translating the rule of syntax into another sign in which it is more fully developed. In Peirce’s evolution of categories, “[t]hought must live and grow in incessant new and higher translations, or it proves itself not to be genuine thought” (CP: 5.594, 1903). In the process of the automaton-robot, “the mind loses itself in such general questions and seems to be floating in a limitless vacuity” to settle that it is “of the very essence of thought and purpose that it should be special, just as truly as it is of the essence of either that it should be general” (CP: 5.594–5.595, 1903).

Peirce’s automaton or robot evolved into the micro-evolutionary structure. Outfitted with the low-focused emotions of animal approaching man, the robot could solve practical problems with the individual rules of secondness and firstness in the adhesive forms of paraphrase. Against the dualism of firstness and secondness, the automatic parasite uses mathematical and symbolic logic to deal with the routine of real-life games (thirdness). The natural behavior incorporated the organic systems of the instinctive behavior of the bird to build a nest, or the beaver building a dam and underwater lodges (Sebeok 1979a: 3–7, 20, 42–54, 1981: 246–247). But the parasite’s automatic awareness abandoned the principle of dependence to live without food and prey, searching to build the bird’s “nest” against predators (Hall 1982 [1966]: 15–18, 28).

The architectural scene of building a house was Sebeok’s “prefigurement of art” (1979a, 1981: 239–246). In the parasite’s animal-human form, the animal organism was conscious of co-adaptation and modification to survive in a humanoid organism. Thirdness was the parasite’s attempt to start a new life with new standards, but the effort of codes in symbolicity was a noble effort to construct the rule of human reasoning from firstness and secondness to thirdness. The speculative hypothesis of paraphrase and parasite was translated into the sub-human mind of animal’s life. The mental capacity of the parasitical agent was to be an ego-centric and instrumental translator. It missed the capacity of the reversible and remediating signer of the creative interpretant: the mind of the parasite was alien from semiotranslation and transduction. The sense of mystery stays, as most of the questions of automaton or robot remain as yet unanswered.

8 Final words

The items of “paraphrase” and “parasite” are unmentioned in the Saussure-inspired encyclopedia of Dictionary of untranslatables (DU 2014). Does this absence mean that paraphrase and parasite were not untranslatable but translatable concepts that defy Saussure’s untranslatability and belong to Peirce’s semiotranslation? Eco’s items of “dictionary” and “encyclopedia” (1984) gave some support to differentiate between the methodology of paraphrase and parasite. Saussure’s chaos of random effect of translation opposed a simple or unitary definition, but Jakobson’s imaginative translation traced literary translation to Peirce’s triadic process of evolutionary categories to the evolutionary keystone of logical and unlogical semiotranslation. First, the process of Saussure’s formation was traditional and mechanical translation. Second, translation evolved from transformation into Peirce’s semiotranslation. And, third, there exists the evolutionary development of semiosis in verbal and nonverbal transduction. The quasi-communicative shifts of paraphrase and parasite indicate the metaphorical figures of speech in which the indexical-iconic subtext can work its way upwards to symbolic metalanguage.

The fallacy of the sign-maker (here, the co-interpretation of the secondary translator) signified that free-standing and embedded paraphrases could add solidity and accuracy to the informers (readers). The parasite evolved itself from the unconscious term of laziness to point to conscious love. Both constructs gave alienation and strangeness to the readers. Paraphrase and parasite are the temporary breakdown of the traditional bonds of translation in constructions of Otherness. Derived from Darwin’s biological evolution to Peirce’s logical evolutionism of human categories, semiotranslation stands for the translator’s “good” or “bad” forms of interpretation. The human translator is ready to adapt, modify, and actualize the language of the target text away from the original model of the source text to the target text. The target text is no longer another language, but the virtual speech of the “dialect” of the idiomatic patterns of music, dance, and other artistic scenarios.

The pars pro toto paraphrase and the totum pro parte parasite are figures of speech to direct the trajectories of translation. The bold leaps of dreams and imagination of the translator can take a significant turn to the evolution of semiosis as the conscious mediation of Peirce’s three categories. The interplay between the translator, Nature, and art reveals the radical adventures of translation: the immediate-emotional interpretant attached to the dynamical-energetic interpretant but perhaps replaced by the final-logical interpretant. The universe of artistic thoughts, movements, and transfigurations of semiotranslation and transduction reflect Peirce’s dynamical micro-intentionality (secondness) with undertones of emotional persuasion (firstness), but spreading further to the intervention of any directive agency of secondness to the final speculation of thirdness (SS: 84, 1908).

Translation is a forward-looking activity to build from Saussure’s protoscience the new moral practice of the anthropomorphic reaction of Peirce’s evolutionary signs. Peirce intermediated the cosmogony of object and mind in the curved path of “a living consciousness, and such the life, the power of growth, of a plant. Such is, for Peirce, a living constitution — a daily newspaper, a great fortune, a social ‘movement’” (CP: 6.455, 1908). Peirce’s conscious activity of translation produced the final trajectories of semiotranslation or transduction availing idealistic ideas about applied, that is experimental problems and borderline troubles with translation, but neither periphrase nor parasites furnish any basis to set up the symbolic level of Pure Science.