Translation, materiality, intersemioticity: Excursions in experimental literature
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Tong-King Lee
Tong-King Lee (b. 1978) is a professor at the University of Hong Kong 〈leetk@hku.hk〉. His research interests include intersemiotic translation, intercultural poetics, technology, and contemporary literature. His publications include “The crisis of representation in translating bilingual texts: A social semiotic perspective” (2011); “The death of the translator in machine translation: A bilingual poetry project” (2011); “Epistemological dilemma in translating ‘Otherness’ ” (2012); and “Translation and language power relations in heterolingual anthologies of literature” (2012).
Abstract
This paper presents case examples of experimental literature that tap into the potentials of multimodality in the creation of an embodied aesthetic experience. In each case, translation performs the contingency of meaning by traversing the interliminal space between discursive sites: two versions of the same language, two semiotic planes. By reading the multimodal aspects of these texts, the paper traces the function of translation in foregrounding the materiality of the linguistic sign. It argues that in enacting an embodied literature, translation is not primarily about the transference of meaning from one text-site to another; it becomes an intervening site in its own right, where signs, readers and media intercourse to create a sensuous fabric that adduces “the pleasure of the text.” The paper also discusses the nature of aesthetics created by translation-mediated multimodal literature, and argues for critical attention to the role of translation in advancing the corporeality of literature.
About the author
Tong-King Lee (b. 1978) is a professor at the University of Hong Kong 〈leetk@hku.hk〉. His research interests include intersemiotic translation, intercultural poetics, technology, and contemporary literature. His publications include “The crisis of representation in translating bilingual texts: A social semiotic perspective” (2011); “The death of the translator in machine translation: A bilingual poetry project” (2011); “Epistemological dilemma in translating ‘Otherness’ ” (2012); and “Translation and language power relations in heterolingual anthologies of literature” (2012).
©2014 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Munich/Boston
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Semiotic degeneracy of social life: Prolegomenon to a human science of semiosis
- Heterosemiosis: Mixing sign systems in graphic narrative texts
- Do speakers really unconsciously and imagistically gesture about what is important when they are telling a story?
- On the institutional aspect of institutionalized and institutionalizing semiotics
- At the intersection of text and talk: On the reproduction and transformation of language in the multi-lingual evaluation of multi-lingual texts
- Cave paintings of the Early Stone Age: The early writings of modern man
- Revisiting legal terms: A semiotic perspective
- Two child narrators: Defamiliarization, empathy, and reader-response in Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident and Emma Donoghue's Room
- The development of an idea in a context of rejection
- Stopovers at logic and cybernetics: Georg Klaus's road to semiotics
- The sign in Heidegger's Sein und Zeit
- The semiotic logic of signification of conspiracy theories
- Biopolitics, surveillance, and the subject of ADHD
- Signification in atonal, amotivic music? Extending the properties of actoriality in Ligeti's second string quartet
- Translation, materiality, intersemioticity: Excursions in experimental literature
- Teleological historical narrative as a strategy for constructing political antagonism: The example of the narrative of Estonia's regaining of independence
- Testing the limits of oral narration
- How to do things with websites: Reconsidering Austin's perlocutionary act in online communication
- Fashionable yet strategic similarities: Diego Velázquez's creative consciousness seen through Saussurean-Hegelian composite approach
- Piaget's system of spatial logic: The semiosis of index
- The types of codes and their combinations: Visual perception and visual art
- Minimal acting: On the existential gap between theatre and performance art
- Visual semiotics and the national flag: A Kenyan perspective of Anglo-America's globe-cultural domination through mainstream music videos
- Dinner is ready! Studying the dynamics and semiotics of dinner
- Linking transculturality and transdisciplinarity
- Towards a semiotic theory of historico-cultural cycles: The semiotic contours of Spengler's “prime symbols”
- The taxicab-hailing encounter: The politics of gesture in the interaction order
- A semiotic model of visual change
- Semiotics, theatre, and the body: The performative disjunctures between theory and praxis
- On Peirce's diagrammatic models for ten classes of signs
- Phytosemiotics revisited: Botanical behavior and sign transduction
- Review article
- The dialogic lacuna in Fenves's Messianic Reduction: Walter Benjamin and the Shape of Time
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Semiotic degeneracy of social life: Prolegomenon to a human science of semiosis
- Heterosemiosis: Mixing sign systems in graphic narrative texts
- Do speakers really unconsciously and imagistically gesture about what is important when they are telling a story?
- On the institutional aspect of institutionalized and institutionalizing semiotics
- At the intersection of text and talk: On the reproduction and transformation of language in the multi-lingual evaluation of multi-lingual texts
- Cave paintings of the Early Stone Age: The early writings of modern man
- Revisiting legal terms: A semiotic perspective
- Two child narrators: Defamiliarization, empathy, and reader-response in Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident and Emma Donoghue's Room
- The development of an idea in a context of rejection
- Stopovers at logic and cybernetics: Georg Klaus's road to semiotics
- The sign in Heidegger's Sein und Zeit
- The semiotic logic of signification of conspiracy theories
- Biopolitics, surveillance, and the subject of ADHD
- Signification in atonal, amotivic music? Extending the properties of actoriality in Ligeti's second string quartet
- Translation, materiality, intersemioticity: Excursions in experimental literature
- Teleological historical narrative as a strategy for constructing political antagonism: The example of the narrative of Estonia's regaining of independence
- Testing the limits of oral narration
- How to do things with websites: Reconsidering Austin's perlocutionary act in online communication
- Fashionable yet strategic similarities: Diego Velázquez's creative consciousness seen through Saussurean-Hegelian composite approach
- Piaget's system of spatial logic: The semiosis of index
- The types of codes and their combinations: Visual perception and visual art
- Minimal acting: On the existential gap between theatre and performance art
- Visual semiotics and the national flag: A Kenyan perspective of Anglo-America's globe-cultural domination through mainstream music videos
- Dinner is ready! Studying the dynamics and semiotics of dinner
- Linking transculturality and transdisciplinarity
- Towards a semiotic theory of historico-cultural cycles: The semiotic contours of Spengler's “prime symbols”
- The taxicab-hailing encounter: The politics of gesture in the interaction order
- A semiotic model of visual change
- Semiotics, theatre, and the body: The performative disjunctures between theory and praxis
- On Peirce's diagrammatic models for ten classes of signs
- Phytosemiotics revisited: Botanical behavior and sign transduction
- Review article
- The dialogic lacuna in Fenves's Messianic Reduction: Walter Benjamin and the Shape of Time
