Experientiality of meaning in interlingual translation: The impossibility of representation and the illusion of transfer

Abstract

Concepts like experientiality, performativity and materiality suggest a paradigm shift in how the communication of meaning is understood in translation studies. Meaning is seen as being constructed in-the-moment through a multitude of semiotic channels, actively performed and experienced in material reality rather than passively transferred through language or represented by words. However, if no transfer of meaning takes place between texts or communicators, and if no representationality is recognized between word and sense or source and target, this reveals a considerable conceptual gap between the new experiential paradigm and many traditional conceptualizations of interlingual translation that may make these new perspectives difficult to adopt for the field at large. This chapter argues that ‘transfer’ and ‘representation’ can still be useful concepts in explaining translation as an experiential meaning construction process, as instances of both can be found in the realm of materiality. How a material text is distributed from one communicator to another is a form of transfer; how letters, words and other signs are identified from the text is a form of representation. Crucially, however, neither phenomenon directly involves meaning: meaning is constructed, not transferred or represented. Instead, shared semiotic conventions constrain communicators’ meaning construction from texts in comparable ways, creating an illusion of meaning being transferred and/or represented. Meaning cannot be directly conveyed through transfer or representation but the construction of meaning from material texts does involve both phenomena and recognizing that may help bridge the gap between traditional and alternative conceptualizations of translation.