Intersemiotic approaches

As a condition for sign activity overall, translation is not reducible to the verbal-linguistic order but expands through the entire semio(bio)sphere. Translation occurs internally, endosemiosically, within the different semiospheres, including the non-human, as much as it occurs intersemiosically between the human and non-human, and within the human between the verbal and nonverbal, and so forth. This chapter proposes an interdisciplinary approach to translation and translatability exploring sign activity at the interface between semiotics, translation studies, adaptation studies and intermedia studies where different perspectives and methodologies intersect, challenging canonical boundaries and definitions. Relatedly to semiosis in the human world and beyond, translation commonly understood as interlingual communication, we investigate intersemiotic or multimodal translation involving cultural traditions, social practices, the production of verbal and nonverbal artifacts, including adaptations, appropriations, remixes, and transmediations. This chapter is structured in two parts: the first, ‘Intersemiotic translation across semiotics and translation studies: definitions, taxonomies, perspectives,’ offers an overview of some key trends in intersemiotic translation. Exemplifications are offered from translational practice, thus strengthening our intersemiotic and interpretive perspective. The second part, ‘The intersemiotic nature of sign, language and meaning, and implications for translation,’ conceptualizes translation as intersemiotic process and explores aspects of the deeper theory. Translation serves as a meta-concept for thinking about different orders of dialogic transferral, transformation, transvaluation. Intersemiotic translation presupposes ongoing and all-encompassing intersemiosic activity occurring in and among organisms, where meaning is in becoming in the dynamic interaction among sign systems in their globality. Our focus in this chapter is on semiosis in the proper human world.