Total Translation: Types of translation processes in culture - Softcover

Torop, Peeter

Softcover

ISBN 13: 9791281358782

Verlag: Bruno Osimo, 2026

Inhaltsangabe

This book explores mediation processes in culture. Culture is human creation. Like any creative act, culture arises from the need for self-expression—without which it is difficult to speak of identity. All creation is directed both toward its recipient and the creator themselves. Communicating with others simultaneously means communicating with oneself. On the cultural level, this points to the possibility of interpreting communication processes as autocommunication within a given culture. The relationship between communication and autocommunication also directly concerns the act of translation.

A good example of the connection between communication and autocommunication is the short story "The Art Critic" ("Il critico d'arte", 1958) by the Italian writer Dino Buzzati. It tells the story of a famous realist art critic who tried to continue his career in the context of modern art. He went to the opening of an abstract art exhibition and promised to write a review even before seeing it. For him, realism was a way of creating recognizable reality, and finding no recognition whatsoever in abstractionism, he concluded that abstract painting lacked its own language. After much torment, he found the only possible solution: to write the review in a non-existent language, a sort of "abracadabra." Such situations arise daily in the world. One creator (the abstractionist) sends a message to the viewer through their painting in the language of abstract art. The other creator (the critic) finds that this message has no language and can only be described in an absurd, non-existent language. Or perhaps it's not describable or analyzable at all.

Psychologically, the situation is similar to an affective explosion, which Lev Vygotsky explained using the example of a child participating in a psychological experiment. If a child is given too many tasks during an experiment and their attention is directed to too many different things, at some point the child starts to cry and refuses to continue the experiment. They shut themselves off from the situation. Similar situations occur all the time in culture. Culture offers a person so many different impulses that they can't keep up with everything or find the language to explain these phenomena. Therefore, it can easily happen that an adult also experiences an affective explosion. They shut themselves off from incomprehensible cultural manifestations or begin to doubt their value, even to the point of declaring them meaningless. However, culture's function as an educational system ensures that not everything new or challenging to understand causes affective explosions. A crucial part of a child's development is developing the ability to recognize and, consequently, describe the surrounding world through the enrichment of language use. Becoming a cultured adult requires similar development of descriptive ability through increasing language richness. But in this case, we're dealing with cultural languages. Literature, film, theater, and the arts—including abstractionism within them—are cultural languages that must be learned like foreign languages. Or, if not fully learned, then at least their value as cultural languages must be understood. Just as we cannot call meaningless those foreign languages we do not know.

Just like natural languages, cultural languages are interconnected. Since culture is also a memory system, the repetition of important information in different languages is a crucial part of culture's coherence and sustainability. Cultural semiotics is specifically tasked with studying the connections between cultural languages and their mutual translatability.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Bruno Osimo
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2026
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 13: 9791281358782
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 243
• Herausgeber: Osimo Bruno
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Manufactured by Amazon on behalf of the author; https://www.amazon.de/hz/contact-us; ; c/o Amazon Media EU S.à.r.l., 38 Avenue John F. Kennedy; Luxembourg; L-1855; Luxemburg