Putting meaning back into development; or semio (translating) development
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.26512/belasinfieis.v14.n2.2025.53637Keywords:
Degenerate signs. Development. (Semio) translation.Abstract
Studying the relationship between translation and development is a fledgling enterprise. Apart from my own work, a number of studies and projects have been attempted in this regard. Apart from the above, thinking about development in translation studies is also constrained by the fact that most of this thinking is done in terms of interlinguistic translation. In a world that is increasingly developing in the direction of multimodal communication, this bias cannot hold. Furthermore, literature on how societies develop from the (multimodal) semiosic interactions between people is growing and challenging the linguistic bias that is inherent in translation studies. The paper addresses both of the above limitations by (1) contributing to the theoretical underpinning of the relationship between translation and development through (2) presenting a Peircean view of semiotics which includes his notions of degenerate signs, i.e. signs without interpretants. The theory explains that many social habits (development patterns or trajectories) take place at an unconscious level and at a prelinguistic level. In order for translation studies scholars to contribute to the debate on the emergence or development or society, they need to be able to (also) study the degenerate signs which human beings construct in response to their environment. The aim is to combine Peircean semiotics (also referring to secondary literature on Peirce) and complexity thinking in order to present the parameters of a theory of development from a translation perspective.
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