Intrasemiotic translation in the emulations of ancient art: On the example of the collections of the University of Tartu Art Museum

Abstract

AbstractIn his 1959 paper “On linguistic aspects of translation,” Roman Jakobson distinguished between interlingual, intralingual, and intersemiotic translation. As Gideon Toury (1986, Translation: A cultural-semiotic perspective. In Thomas A. Sebeok (ed.),Encyclopedic dictionary of semiotics, vol. 2, 1111–1124. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter) pointed out, such an approach centers on verbal systems and comprises only the translations that one or another way include some linguistic system, while it discards all the cases of translation from one non-linguistic sign system to another. Consequently, it seems reasonable to add intrasemiotic translation to these types of translation to encompass these cases. The paper follows from an assumption that translation studies could offer a productive perspective to describe the history and development of copy art, as well as to define and typologize the phenomenon itself. The copies in the collections of the University of Tartu Art Museum are analyzed as intrasemiotic translations, distinguishing between a number of different subtypes, while the basis for this distinction is the way and how the copy has changed in comparison with its prototype.