(Re)Appropriation as Translation

Abstract

To describe adaptation as a mode of transformation is not surprising in light of its standard definition, “to modify, alter.”1 To categorize it as translation is more problematic, however, given the common understanding of translation as a process of copying that results in an isomorphic text in a second language. Indeed, the semantic field of the term “translation,” which stems from the Latin translatare, or metaphor, foregrounding its hermeneutic activity, highlights the focus on the identity of meaning in two texts in that it primarily connotes the circulation of translinguistic contexts conceived as separate from the language in which they have been expressed, language being understood as a pure translative medium. Such a poetics of transparency or equivalency maintains that a message may be transferred from one language into another so that the meaning of the message is preserved and there is an identity of content on the two texts: “La traduction consiste à produire dans la langue d’arrivée, l’équivalent naturel le plus proche du message de la langue de départ, quant à la signification, puis quant au style.”2 There is perceived to be an isomorphism between the two texts, a complete parallelism of content and expression, of meaning and sound IMounin 97). Such a translation is characterized by the way in which cultural traces and self-reflexive elements are eliminated from the text so that the translated text is dehistoricized, detached from its foundation in events. The elimination of self-reflexive elements results in the suppression of signs of the author-function and also of the translator-function since her manipulative work on these elements is rendered invisible in the resulting conflation of the two texts to the profit of the “original.” In this imbrication of texts and signs, translation is conceptualized as a signified with several signifiers (Se/Sal, Sa2) along the lines of the complex signs of irony and metaphor.3 By extension, such a theory understands meaning to be unitary and recoverable.