The black box of translation: A glassy essence
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Dinda L. Gorlée
Abstract
The mental processes of the black box — what happens in the translator's mind — is not open to direct scrutiny and its study must remain empirical. The black box is called “black” because we cannot see inside the “box” or any closed department of the multilingual brain. We explain the information of looking at the input (source text) and output (target text) to look at what happens in the neurophysiological brain of the translator. Peirce discussed determinacy and indeterminacy of verbal signs: moving from a two-step to a three-step model. The neural activity of translating deals with the study of the immediate and dynamical objects in order to generate the immediate, dynamical, and final interpretants. The complexity of the black box is processed through the conceptual blending of the three signs of reasoning: abduction, induction, and deduction. The black box of the translating brain is understood as a translatability claim, construing a translated draft, and drawing a translated conclusion. Peirce's hypostatic abstraction transforms the quantity and quality of (in)determinacy into a new translated hypoicon in a different language.
© 2010 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/New York
Articles in the same Issue
- Reflexivity and self-augmentation
- Le phénomène interartistique
- Two notions of indexicality
- The highway code in Nigeria: Examples of domestic strategies
- The black box of translation: A glassy essence
- The performative potential of metaphor
- Whiteness matters: What lies in the future?
- Organizing connotations in works of visual art (through the example of works by Giovanni Bellini)
Articles in the same Issue
- Reflexivity and self-augmentation
- Le phénomène interartistique
- Two notions of indexicality
- The highway code in Nigeria: Examples of domestic strategies
- The black box of translation: A glassy essence
- The performative potential of metaphor
- Whiteness matters: What lies in the future?
- Organizing connotations in works of visual art (through the example of works by Giovanni Bellini)
