The English Studies Department Learns the Significance of Intersemiotic Translation
Κολέγιο CITY College
Main Campus, Thessaloniki, Greece
06 March 2019

The English Studies Department Learns the Significance of Intersemiotic Translation

March 5th marks the beginning of the Spring semester series of the English Studies Department Personal and Professional Development Seminars. Our first guest speaker, Dr. Evangelos Kourdis, presented an interesting topic that extends on the field of Translation Studies. The topic in question: Intericonicity as Intersemiotic Translation in a Globalised Culture.   

Dr Evangelos Kourdis seminar on Intersemiotic Translation at the International Faculty CITY College

Dr. Kourdis began his presentation with a basic theoretical overview of Semiotics as well as the matter of signs and communication. He then introduced and extended on the areas of Intersemiosis/Intertextuality, concepts that reveal networks of relations and can help in understanding Cultural Translation.

According to Dr. Kourdis, the notion of text is very broad when considered from the perspective of Semiotics. Though language is the primary guide, as it can also be applied to understanding and translating non-verbal signs, other aspects that we need to consider for an Intersemiotic approach to translation are context as well as cultural memory. These can assist in multisemiotic and multimodal communication, areas where assessing the similarities and differences are important in order to effectively translate a text.

Dr. Kourdis informs us that Intersemiotic translation or transmutation may occur among non-verbal sign systems and extends this by presenting cases of intersemiotic (intericonic) translatins that have artistic texts as source texts. More specifically, Dr. Kourdis drew our attention to the matter of “posing” and how certain photography recreated or translated paintings into photos.

Dr. Kourdis informs that in these intersemiotic translations the source text, though absent, is always present due to world cultural memory (imagine recreating a photo or movie scene). Furthermore, the repetitiveness in the use of these old and well-known original texts, and their inscription in the collective memory (for instance, The Creation of Adam) as high cultural value texts, seems to affect the fact that they have been chosen as texts capable of being transmuted. Thus, the question of which texts are chosen and in some cases why or by whom also pose as interesting areas for research.

In closing, Dr. Kourdis further argues that translation can be understood as a re-narration of cultural knowledge using different signs but on the same or similar sign space. In addition to cultural knowledge, Intersemiotic Translation can assist in areas such as: Advertising, Graphic Design, Foreign Language Teaching, publishing, working as a cultural mediator and in instances of transcreation. Evidently, the field of Semiotics can greatly contribute and enrich fields such as Linguistics, Language and Communication, Translation, Literary and Cultural Studies.   

 

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