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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...

Introduction Why is it easier to translate a scientific article than a sonnet? Most people would answer that poems are simply more difficult. Roman Jakobson offers a more interesting explanation. The decisive difference, he argues, is not between information and poetry but between two ways language functions. Sometimes words primarily direct our attention toward the world they describe. At other times, language draws attention to itself—to its sounds, rhythms, repetitions, and patterns. When this happens, form is no longer a mere vehicle for meaning; it becomes part of meaning itself. This distinction lies at the heart of Jakobson's classic essay On Linguistic Aspects of Translation (1959). It also explains why he can make two apparently contradictory claims. On the one hand, "all cognitive experience and its classification is conveyable in any existing language" (Jakobson, 1959, p. 233). On the other, "poetry by definition is untranslatable" (p. 238). These ...

Introduction Translation is commonly understood as the passage from one language into another. Roman Jakobson opens On Linguistic Aspects of Translation from a very different starting point. Before discussing bilingual dictionaries or lexical equivalence, he offers a striking definition of linguistic meaning itself: "the meaning of any linguistic sign is its translation into some further, alternative sign" (Jakobson, 1959, p. 232). Borrowed directly from Charles Sanders Peirce's theory of signs, this claim transforms the scope of the essay. Translation is no longer a specialized linguistic practice but the very process through which signs become intelligible. Read from this perspective, Jakobson's discussion of lexical equivalence, Benjamin Lee Whorf's linguistic relativity, and even the familiar expressions sunrise and sunset all serve a single philosophical purpose. They illustrate that understanding is inseparable from interpretation, and interpretation ...

Babel, in Braque 's style. AI image A Word We Think We Already Know Everyone knows the story of Babel. It tells of humanity's attempt to build a tower reaching the heavens, only to have God interrupt the project by multiplying languages and scattering peoples across the earth: Genesis 11:7-9 7  Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other. 8  So the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city.   9  That is why it was called Babel—because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world . For Jacques Derrida, however, the story is not primarily about the origin of linguistic diversity. It is about a single word: Babel . Everything that follows in Des Tours de Babel unfolds from the peculiar behavior of that one term. Rather than using the biblical narrative to illustrate philosophical ideas, Derrida turns the word Babel itself into the place where fundamental ques...

The Tower of Babel, Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Source: Wikipedia Translation is a mode. To comprehend it as mode one must go back to the original, for that contains the law governing the translation: its translatability. Translatability is an essential quality of certain works, which is not to say that it is essential that they be translated; it means rather that a specific significance inherent in the original manifests itself in its translatability. It is plausible that no translation, however good it may be, can have any significance as regards the original. Yet, by virtue of its translatability the original is closely connected with the translation; in fact, this connection is all the closer since it is no longer of importance to the original. — Walter Benjamin, The task of the translator Thesis Walter Benjamin's The Task of the Translator argues that translatability (Übersetzbarkeit) is not an external property added to literary works but an essential characteristic of...