Translation as evidence of linguistic and cognitive complexity

Translation is an ever-green research field, and a very challenging one, which is well-suited not only to investigate meaning across languages, but also to shed light onto the hermeneutic process needed to extrapolate the meaning hidden within the textual folds. Text understanding is preliminary to translation: it is a process of construction guided by a set of strategies, a process where, on the basis of the information provided by the text and the individual knowledge, the translator shapes his own representation of the meaning of the text. When the translator sets out to transpose the meaning of a text from one system of signification into another, be it intrasemiotic or intersemiotic, he offers his own individual act of interpretation that presupposes meaning understanding. Given the substantial subjectivity of the interpretive process, the notion of indeterminacy of translation is consequential. Thus the outcome of any translatorial action is always an instance of Überhellung. As a matter of fact, to transpose meaning from one system of signification to another involves a number of actions whose complexity changes according to the variables of the source and target languages, media, cultures, and recipients. The final product, i.e. the target text, is not the “mirror copy” of the original, but a textual configuration which tries to resemble the original text as much as possible. Translation is thus an asyntotic process, an approach ad infinitum toward equivalence with the original through a different system of signification, a process that cannot reach a perfect coincidence with the source text. Hence, translation is a quantitative and qualitative process distributed on various axis, linguistic as well as extralinguistic. The ad infinitum approach allows the target text to be constructed in such a way as to pursue the configuration of the source text at a maximal extent.