Translation: The Word That Converted Into an Image (original) (raw)

"Scientific notes of V. I. Vernadsky Taurida National University", Series: "Philology. Journalism"

Abstract

This paper offers a cognitive translation studies perspective on interpretation viewed as a creative act of giving a meaning to a verbal sign and, vice versa, of manifesting a meaning via a verbal sign. Interpretation takes place in the human mind and is powered by the mind’s representational properties brought about by the peculiar embodiment of the species. The author chooses to define interpretation as a meaning-making act driven by mental images that represent in the mind the objects, processes, and states afforded to humans by this world, with the understanding that this world comes to humans, and is known and experienced by them, as the external world and the internal world, the latter involving the interplay of the unconsciousness and of the (self-)consciousness. This is the perspective the author takes to look at and generalize the role that image thinking has had in the evolution of human communication, and to show that verbal communication rests on converting the words that one perceives – hears or reads – as strings of phonemes or graphemes into the mental images that one “sees” with the eye of their mind, and back when mental images are converted into words. The author characterizes verbal communication as the shift between the visual and the auditory codes: this shift draws in different brain areas and brings about a number of different-stage representational changes in the content of the mind, as mental images depict the world, whereas words describe it. The heuristic potential of the theory of image-driven interpretations that the author develops in this and in her other works targets verbal communication generally. This paper, specifically, focuses on translation as a communicative mediation that uses words of natural language(s) in the first place. The Ukrainian word переклад and the English word translation are analyzed etymologically in this paper and shown to be driven by distinct archaic images in their interpretations, which allows the author to define the cognitive mechanism of the word-image-word conversion in terms of transformation and metamorphosis. Key words: communication, conversion, interpretation, mental image, metamorphosis, transformation, translation, word.

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