On Linguistic Aspects of Translation

Roman Jakobson’s 1959 essay offers a semiotic reflection on translatability. He conceives of meaning, not as a reference to reality, but as a relation to a potentially endless chain of signs. He describes translation as a process of recoding which “involves two equivalent messages in two different codes,” and he distinguishes between three different kinds of translation: “intralingual,” “interlingual,” and “intersemiotic.” He is mindful of the differences among cultural discourses, especially poetry, where “grammatical categories carry a high semantic import” and which therefore requires translation that is a “creative transposition” into a different system of signs.