Intersemiotic translation: the Peircean basis

Abstract

Introduction See the movie and read the book. This apparently innocuous sentence has got many of us into fierce discussions about how the written text compares with its filmic version. More often than not, the argument tipped toward the literary piece, considered a helpless victim in the hands of screenplay writers, directors, and producers. Such a situation arises from the age-old tradition of evaluating a translation according to its faithfulness to the original, which stands as a superior model to be duplicated. The old saying–traduttore traditore, ‘translator traitor’–still holds true to many more than would acknowledge it. Some translation theorists have, however, updated the saying, now recast as “translators have to be traitors”, which applies particularly to intersemiotic translation. Those who insist on comparing the book to the movie fail to perceive that book and film belong to different semiotic systems, and, as such, demand an evaluation based on criteria specific to their media. The appropriate parameter to assess an intersemiotic translation would be the carrying through of meaning from the source system to the new representation. To say that one liked the movie but thought the book was better amounts to little more than stating one=s preference of apples to apple pie. They are not supposed to be compared, for one is what the other has become. It is better to compare how the meaning of a text was rendered into two or more movies. Or, if one wishes, to judge what recipe makes the best pie. The logical way of doing this, I propose, is examining the interpretant of the different signs. This paper provides a theoretical framework, based on Peirce, to analyze differences (to the detriment of specularity) in intersemiotic translation. For this purpose it discusses the importance of the interpretant in intersemiotic translation, mainly from literature to cinema, beginning with Peirce=s definition of the interpretant and proceeding to compare it with the notion of objective worlds.