Article,
Translatability vs. untranslatability: a sociosemiotic perspective
Babel: Revue internationale de la traduction/International Journal of Translation, (1999)
Abstract
The problem of translatability or untranslatability is closely related to man's understand-mg of the nature of language, meaning and translation. From the sociosemiotic point of view, 'untrans\'ıatables' are fundamentally cases of language use wherein the three catego-ries of socioserniotic meaning carried by a source expression do not coincide with those of a comparable expression in the target language. Three types of untranslatability, referential, pragmatic, and intralingual may be the carrier of the message, language-specific norms considered untranslatable by sorne linguists should be excluded from the realm of untranslatables. And since trans\'ıation is a communicative event involving the use of verbal signs, the chance of untranslatability in practical translating tasks may be minimized if the communicative situation is taken into account. In a larger sense, the problem of translatabiliiy is one of degrees: the higher the linguistic levels the source language signs carry meaning(s) at, the higher the degree of translatability these signs may display; the lower the levels they carry meaning(s) at, the lower the degree of translatability they may register
