Reading Like Derrida: Jakobson, Babel, and the Meaning of "Translation Proper"

Jakobson's Breakthrough

When people think about translation, they usually imagine moving a text from one language into another: an English novel translated into Spanish, or a German philosophical work rendered in French. Roman Jakobson argued that this common understanding is too narrow. Translation, he claimed, is not simply an activity that occurs between languages. It is a fundamental feature of meaning itself.

Jakobson's starting point is a simple but powerful insight borrowed from Charles Sanders Peirce: the meaning of a sign is another sign. We understand words not because they somehow contain their meanings, but because they can be interpreted by means of other signs. Meaning is therefore always an act of interpretation.

His famous example is the English word cheese. Bertrand Russell had argued that no one can understand the word unless they have had direct, nonlinguistic experience of cheese itself. Jakobson disagrees. Someone who has never encountered cheese can still understand the word if it is explained as "food made from pressed curds." Even mythical objects such as ambrosia or nectar are perfectly intelligible despite the fact that no one has ever tasted them. Words are understood through other words.

This leads Jakobson to a striking conclusion: translation begins long before we move between different languages. Whenever we explain one expression by means of another, we are already translating.

He distinguishes three forms of translation:

• Intralingual translation or rewording, where a verbal sign is interpreted by means of other signs within the same language.
• Interlingual translation or translation proper, where a verbal sign is interpreted through another language.
• Intersemiotic translation or transmutation, where verbal signs are interpreted through nonverbal systems such as images, music, diagrams, or other symbolic media.

This taxonomy transformed the study of translation. Translation was no longer a specialized literary activity but a general semiotic process that permeates language itself. Every act of explanation, paraphrase, definition, and interpretation already involves translation.

Up to this point, Jacques Derrida is largely in agreement. Indeed, one of the central ideas of Des Tours de Babel is that translation does not begin when we cross linguistic borders. Language is already translating itself from within.

The Tiny Detail Everyone Overlooks

Jakobson's threefold classification has become one of the most influential ideas in modern translation studies. Yet Derrida notices something that most readers pass over without a second thought.

Jakobson introduces the three categories as follows:

Intralingual translation or rewording

Interlingual translation or translation proper

Intersemiotic translation or transmutation

At first glance, the pattern appears perfectly symmetrical. Each category is followed by another expression that seems to clarify its meaning.

But Derrida slows the reading down.

The first category is explained by rewording. The third is explained by transmutation. Both receive an alternative term that helps define what they involve.

The second category is different.

Instead of receiving another explanatory expression, it is simply called translation proper.

Translation becomes... translation.

The very category that appears to require the least explanation is left unexplained.

Why?

Most readers simply move on. Derrida does not. This tiny asymmetry becomes the point from which his entire reading unfolds.

Reading Like Derrida #1

Don't begin by looking for contradictions or mistakes. Begin by looking for asymmetries. Why are two categories explained while the third apparently explains itself?

Derrida Begins Reading

Derrida's first move is surprisingly modest. He does not reject Jakobson's taxonomy, nor does he claim that it is mistaken. Instead, he asks an almost embarrassingly simple question:

Why does Jakobson explain intralingual translation by calling it rewording? Why does he explain intersemiotic translation by calling it transmutation? Yet when he reaches interlingual translation, why does he simply repeat the word translation and add the adjective proper?

The question is not merely lexical. It concerns what the text quietly assumes without argument.

Calling interlingual translation "translation proper" suggests that this is the ordinary, self-evident meaning of translation. The other two categories appear to be extensions of that central case. They are still called translations, but only by analogy or enlargement.

Derrida asks why this central meaning is treated as transparent.

His answer is that Jakobson assumes a great deal without explicitly saying so. He assumes that everyone already knows what counts as a language. He assumes that the boundaries between languages are clear and stable. He assumes that everyone shares an immediate understanding of what translation ordinarily means.

None of these assumptions is defended because none appears to require defense.

This is precisely where Derrida's method becomes visible. Rather than challenging the explicit claims of the text, he investigates the concepts that the text treats as obvious.

Reading Like Derrida #2

When a text treats a concept as self-evident, ask what assumptions make that self-evidence possible.

Notice that Derrida is not searching for hidden intentions or psychological motives. His attention remains entirely on the text itself. The word proper is doing philosophical work. It establishes a hierarchy between a supposedly primary sense of translation and other, less central senses.

But can this distinction really be maintained?

The adjective proper traditionally marks what is literal, original, or authentic. By contrast, figurative or extended uses are regarded as secondary. Derrida suspects that this hierarchy is less secure than it appears.

Instead of immediately arguing against it, he chooses a different strategy. He looks for a place where the distinction between proper and improper, literal and figurative, begins to blur. That place turns out to be a single word: Babel.

Reading Like Derrida #3

A deconstructive reading often begins with a tiny detail—a word, an adjective, a parenthesis, even a footnote. Such details are rarely accidental. They often reveal the conceptual architecture that supports an entire argument.

Babel Enters the Discussion

If Derrida wanted simply to criticize Jakobson's terminology, he could have done so in a few paragraphs. Instead, he turns to one of the oldest stories about language in the Western tradition: the Tower of Babel. At first this may seem like a digression. In fact, it is the heart of his argument.

The reason is simple. Derrida is looking for an example that puts pressure on the distinction between proper and common, between what a word merely names and what it means. The word Babel does exactly that.

Ordinarily, a proper name functions differently from an ordinary noun. The name Paris identifies a city; it does not describe one. Likewise, Peter identifies a person but does not tell us anything about that person. Proper names are generally thought to refer without possessing a lexical meaning that can simply be translated.

But Babel refuses to behave like an ordinary proper name.

In the biblical narrative, the name Babel is associated with the Hebrew verb meaning "to confuse." Whether this association is historically or linguistically correct is beside the point. What matters is how the text itself works. Within the narrative, the proper name immediately calls forth a common meaning: confusion. The story itself performs this association. As a result, Babel is simultaneously a name and something more than a name.

This peculiar situation fascinates Derrida. The proper name is already functioning like an ordinary word. It both names and signifies.

Something remarkable follows.

If someone understands Hebrew, the word Babel already evokes the idea of confusion without requiring another language. In a sense, the word translates itself. Within the biblical text, the proper name immediately calls forth an ordinary meaning.

This is precisely the phenomenon that interests Derrida. Translation does not wait until a second language appears. It is already occurring inside what we normally call the original language.

The consequences reach much further than the story of Genesis.

Jakobson had argued that translation already exists within language through paraphrase and rewording. Derrida radicalizes the claim. Even before one word is replaced by another, the supposedly self-identical word is already internally divided. The proper name is never simply proper. It already points beyond itself toward another meaning.

This explains why Derrida calls the Babel narrative "the translation of translation." The story is not merely about the multiplication of languages. It stages the conditions that make translation both necessary and impossible. The very word Babel demonstrates what the narrative is saying. The text performs its own argument.

That is why Derrida spends so much time examining a single name. His purpose is not historical or theological. He is showing that language itself refuses the clean distinctions upon which many theories of translation depend.

Reading Like Derrida #4

Instead of asking, "What does this text mean?" try asking, "What is this text doing?" Sometimes a philosophical argument is performed rather than simply stated.

Derrida notices another irony.

The story of Babel is almost always encountered in translation. Most readers know it through Greek, Latin, English, French, German, or countless other languages. Yet the central word of the narrative resists complete translation. Should translators leave the name Babel unchanged? Should they explain that it also means "confusion"? Neither solution is satisfactory. Leaving the name untranslated loses the semantic association. Replacing it with confusion destroys its status as a proper name. Adding explanatory notes only postpones the problem.

The difficulty is not accidental. It belongs to the structure of the word itself.

Babel therefore becomes a perfect illustration of Derrida's larger point. Translation is never simply the transfer of a fixed meaning from one linguistic container to another. Even before translation begins, the so-called original is already inhabited by multiple meanings, multiple possibilities of interpretation, multiple directions in which it can be read.

Translation begins before translation.

Why "Proper" Collapses

We can now see why Derrida was so interested in Jakobson's expression translation proper.

Jakobson intended the phrase simply to distinguish translation between languages from translation within a language or between different sign systems. Derrida's point is subtler. Once we examine how language actually works, the adjective proper can no longer perform the stabilizing role assigned to it.

The story of Babel demonstrates why.

A proper name turns out not to be simply proper. It already carries an ordinary meaning. It already invites interpretation. It already undergoes a kind of internal translation.

If this is true, then the distinction between proper and figurative, literal and extended, begins to lose its sharpness.

The same happens with translation itself.

Interlingual translation can no longer claim to be the uniquely proper form of translation because the processes that make it possible are already operating within every language. Words are continually interpreted through other words. Meanings shift, expand, overlap, and generate further meanings. Translation is not something that begins once we cross linguistic borders; it is already at work before those borders are crossed.

Derrida is therefore not replacing one definition of translation with another. He is questioning the hierarchy that places one meaning of translation at the center while treating all the others as secondary.

The supposedly proper case turns out to depend upon precisely those processes it was meant to exclude.

Reading Like Derrida #5

When a concept claims to be primary or foundational, ask what makes it possible. Deconstruction often shows that what appears to be secondary is already at work within what claims to come first.

The result is not confusion in the everyday sense. It is a more complex understanding of language. The categories still have value, but they can no longer be regarded as perfectly self-contained. Their boundaries are more porous than they first appeared.

Conclusion: Watching Deconstruction at Work

This exchange between Jakobson and Derrida provides an excellent illustration of what deconstruction actually is.

Derrida does not set out to demolish Jakobson's theory. On the contrary, he accepts one of its central achievements: translation is far broader than the movement from one language to another. Meaning itself is interpretive, and language is already engaged in acts of translation long before professional translators enter the scene.

The difference lies elsewhere.

Derrida notices a detail that almost everyone else overlooks. Two kinds of translation receive explanatory names—rewording and transmutation. The third is simply called translation proper.

Most readers pass over the adjective without hesitation.

Derrida stops.

Why proper? Why is this the one expression that supposedly requires no further explanation? What assumptions about language, identity, and meaning are quietly concealed inside this apparently innocent phrase?

Following these questions leads him to the story of Babel, where the distinction between proper name and ordinary meaning begins to dissolve. Once that happens, the stability of translation proper begins to dissolve as well.

Whether one ultimately agrees with Derrida is almost beside the point. What matters is the lesson in reading.

Deconstruction is not the art of inventing hidden meanings or refuting texts through clever paradoxes. It is the discipline of reading with unusual patience. It pays attention to the small details that most readers ignore—the adjective, the footnote, the unexplained assumption—and asks why they are there. Again and again, those seemingly insignificant details reveal the conceptual architecture supporting the entire argument.

That is why Des Tours de Babel remains such an illuminating example of philosophical reading. Derrida does not defeat Jakobson, he reads him.

Deconstruction is therefore not suspicious reading. It is attentive reading. 

Reference

Derrida, J. (1985). Des tours de Babel. In J. F. Graham (Ed.), Difference in translation (J. F. Graham, Trans., pp. 165–207). Cornell University Press.

Jakobson, R. (1959). On linguistic aspects of translation. In R. A. Brower (Ed.), On translation (pp. 232–239). Harvard University Press.

Peirce, C. S. (1998). The essential Peirce: Selected philosophical writings (Vol. 2, 1893–1913). Indiana University Press.

Russell, B. (1940). An inquiry into meaning and truth. George Allen & Unwin.