The Sociosemiotic Approach to Translation

Abstract

Sociosemiotics takes all the signs in human society into consideration including linguistic signs and social-cultural signs. There is still some limitation in the semiotic theory of Morris. The limitation of semiotics urges a new perspective to think over the relationship between language and social culture. Under this circumstance, sociosemiotics was developed on the basis of semiotic theory. This paper tries to apply sociosemiotics approach to translation. It is found in the study that the sociosemiotic approach takes into consideration all the signs in human society including linguistic and social-cultural signs. Translating thus is regarded as the message transition between two semiotic systems. Translation study based on sociosemiotics has become a new research sphere along with linguistics, philosophy, aesthetics, psychology and sociology. The development and perfection of sociosemiotics inspire researchers to interpret the meaning of the text in a wider web of relationships among language, culture, psychology, and society. The equivalence translation from a sociosemiotic perspective can be applied in different discourses such as legal translation, foreign news translation, English business advertisements, to name just a few.