Volume 9, Issue 4

Poetry is often seen as the ultimate challenge for a literary translator. Why it is so and how in reality translators manage to accomplish this feat remain to be explored. This article contributes a new way of understanding poetry translation by re-theorizing the practice with reference to the concept of blank-sign. In the light of the blank-sign, we see poetry as a genre rich with meaning-charged blank-signs and poetry translation as a “blank-filling” endeavour to seek relevance for the poem in the target sociocultural context while craftily leaving its overall poetic “blankness” intact for meaningful reading and contemplation. We illustrate this idea with the Spanish translation of two contemporary Chinese poems, with a focus on discussing the challenges with regard to communicating the culture-laden images and the intertextual connections in the original poem. Based on our preliminary findings, we highlight the value of the study of blank-signs in poetry translation and the need for translators to draw insights from cross-linguistic analysis to inform their practice. This semiotic account offers insights into how poetry translation can be alternatively conceptualised and has implications for practitioners involved in poetry and translation.

Margaret Atwood is a Canadian author of more than thirty-five books and the winner of prestigious literary prizes, such as the Booker Prize, the Giller Prize, and the Governor General’s Award. Her influence on Canadian literature and contemporary literature as a whole is phenomenal. Nevertheless, little is known with respect to how Atwood represents animals covering the full range of her novels. This paper reports on the analysis of animal representations in Atwood’s seventeen novels through Python programming and close reading under the framework of a new semiotic research finding, a pan-indexicality model within the context of literature and the environment. This study investigates the frequencies of animal vocabulary in the seventeen novels, the changes of animal representations in her novels before 1990s and after 1990s, and the implication of the ever-changing animal representations during the fifty years. This paper concludes that nonhuman animal descriptions in Atwood’s novels of 1970s and 1980s run at a high level and decrease in her novels of 1990s, while scientific animal descriptions increase in her novels of 2000s and 2010s. Nonhuman animals in her novels of 1970s and 1980s are instrumentalized as a vehicle for indigenization and national individuation from the United States, and scientific animals in her novels of 2000s and 2010s are instrumentalized in the service of environmental apocalypticism. This study suggests that the pan-indexicality model can be employed to understand the meaning of signs in literature and the environment from the perspective of authorial intention, with reference to authors’ encyclopedic knowledge, personal experience, social, and cultural background information.

The article focuses on the Hebrew prototypes terms (PTs) of white in the Old Testament – light, milk, and snow. The aim is to explore the worldview of Hebrew to reveal the original messages of the Bible. The translation is an essential tool that shows which translation elements (the word and its root derivatives) are symmetrical, asymmetric, and dissymmetric to Hebrew due to the different worldviews of languages. The method is interdisciplinary and includes several theories and approaches. Original is Almalech’s methodology for tracking all verbal options to signify color: Basic color term (BCT), prototype term (PT), rival terms to prototype (RT), and terms for the basic feature of the prototype (TBFP). Semiotic osmosis is also an original element of Almalech’s methodology and has a place in the study of colors in the Bible. The phenomenon is observed when Hebrew PT is translated with the BCT, Hebrew TBFP is translated with BCT in the Indo-European language, e.g., darkness is translated with black , fresh is translated with green . In the case of light, semiotic osmosis is when a quality of light is perceived as synonymous with light, e.g., brilliance is synonymous with light in Hebrew, English, Bulgarian, and other languages. The importance of light in religious systems, regional culture, and natural features are taken into account. Almalech’s semiotic approach to color, i.e., treating them as a sign communication system, involves the insisting that a distinction must be made between verbal and visual color because of their different potential to have primary and secondary (figurative and cultural) meanings. The substance of the language sign (sound is a mechanical wave) is physically different from the visual sign (electromagnetic wave). Almalech considered prototypes to be the cognitive interface between verbal and visual colors. Therefore, semiotically understood, color is a cultural unit that contains verbal and visual colors, complemented by social, religious, and folkloric use of primary and secondary color meanings.

Following Per Aage Brandt’s “Towards a cognitive semiotics” (2011), culture as a cognitive-semiotic model allows us to look into the interrelation of cognition and signs through the act of interpretation of culture. Thus, culture characterized as habits of feeling, attention, thought, and action plays a role of modeling in the lifeworld. Regarding cultural evolution, culture also has a feature of practice of habit-taking for transformation through dialogic relations of semiosis from Peirce’s semiotic perspective. This paper argues for narrative modeling which enables habit-taking in feelings by way of analogical reasoning in a form of parable as cognitive process. A story in a form of qualia as a model for thought is embodied in narrative modeling to be enactive by a storytelling agent. Therefore, narrative modeling reveals the process of thought through habit-taking in feelings of empathy and sympathy to a feeling of an idea as a person. This leads to an act of understanding other mind, sharing the meaning and value of a story for enhancing sensibility and cultural literacy for cultural evolution. This journey of story-making and story-telling by way of narrative modeling shows a trajectory for a quest for meaning and value which will be found between “you” and “I”.

Chinese is commonly believed to be an analytic language, but evidence from philological works and cross-linguistic comparisons clearly suggests that various morphological operations existed in Old Chinese. The loss of Chinese morphology can be explained by the ideographic nature of Chinese characters: the Chinese language has been evolving in a way that stabilizes the pronunciation of each character. The effects of writing systems on language evolution can be widely observed from world languages, while writing per se has been evolving along the path of phonetization driven mainly by borrowings instead of conscious linguistic analysis. In history, language never picked writing systems based on linguistic features; instead, writing systems affect the evolutionary paths of languages: single signs of a writing system stabilize the basic units of the language.

This paper examines categories and functions of interactive and interactional textual elements used in the contractual discourse of selling/purchasing 100 shares of the Suez Canal Company in 1947. The exchanged documents between the involved parties, the Egyptian (buyer) and the American (seller), are analyzed using Metadiscourse Analysis (MDA) as an approach to analyzing the textual resources used in the selected corpus. Game Theory is also used in conjunction with MDA to allocate the strategic behaviors of the players within the competitive contextual surroundings of the selected discourse. The analysis explains the structural constructions of the correspondences exploring how interactional relations between the participants are linguistically crafted. The analysis of the contract discourse is argued to contribute to econo-linguistics by examining how MDA and Game Theory can be integrated to construe/construct discourses about economics. The article concludes that metadiscourse resources enable the discourse of contracts to maintain a dialogic interactional language between the seller and the buyer. This interaction assimilates a game where the author and the reader (or players) exchange moves strategically to reach the target payoff. Thus, it can be argued that integrating MDA and Game Theory benefits econo-linguistics in highlighting hidden agendas and understanding interactive and interactional meanings in the discourse.