Hodgson - Semiotics and Bible Translation

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Semiotics and Bible translation

ROBERT HODGSON

Abstract Bible translation over the past half century has increasingly supplemented its traditional philological-linguistic approach with a wide variety of disciplines ranging from archaeology to cultural studies. This turn toward an interdisciplinary approach is especially true of new media Bible translation with its theory and practice now engaging virtually every digital and screen medium. Not surprisingly, (new media) Bible translation has discovered the eld of semiotics, thanks in large measure to the work of translation schol e and Ubaldo Stecconi, whose pioneering rears such as Dinda L. Gorle search into Charles Sanders Peirce has unearthed a gold mine of conceptual and even practical applications of semiotics to translation research, training, evaluation, and production. In this essay, we set out some of the foundational elements of Peircean semiotics in its application to Bible translation, including new media Bible translation. In particular, the insights of semiotics into the process of sign production and meaning making will add exponentially to the resources for Bible translators.

1. Connecting semiotics and translation Semiotics studies signs. It explains the three parts of a sign and how they work together to give meaning to persons, places, things, and concepts. The term semiotics goes back to a Greek word semeion. Classical and biblical scholars (Liddell and Scott 1968: 1593) know it, for instance, as a religious term meaning a heavenly or divine sign; or, as a term for establishing a causal connection between things, as in those clouds are a sign that it is going to rain. As a military word it meant battle ag or war cry, while in ancient medicine it served as a medical term for symptom of a disease. The second century BC Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible called the Septuagint uses semeion to mean a sign from God, Semiotica 1631/4 (2007), 163185 DOI 10.1515/SEM.2007.0aa 00371998/07/01630163 6 Walter de Gruyter

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describing, for instance, the plagues against Egypt as such (Exodus 7.9, 10.1). The rst half of the Gospel of John supposedly drew on a sign source, which could explain why it describes two of Jesus miracles with this Greek word (John 2.11, 2.23). Modern semiotics has inuenced just about every humanistic and scientic eld with its methods and applications. Its origins lie in the work of three scholars: Ferdinand de Saussure (18571913), Charles Sanders Peirce (18391914), and Charles William Morris (19011979). Saussurean semiotics is also called structuralism or, in French, semiologie. It lies outside our eld of interest. We focus rather on Peirces semiotics because of its wide-ranging applications to all the forms of translating and interpreting that Jakobson (1959) grouped under inter-linguistic, intralinguistic, and inter-semiotic translation. In a recent essay, Steconni listed some of the points of contact between semiotics and translation: These pages can give the reader a rough idea of what semiotics is about and of its use for a translation scholar. The semiotic notions covered include semiosis, the object-sign-interpretant triad, ground and goal, habit and belief, and pragmaticism. The translation topics include process and product, equivalence, the dialectic between originals and translations, the categories of source and target, and norms. (Steconni 2004: 153)

Signs are everywhere and equal

Semiotics takes for granted that anything can function as a sign. It sees signs in an isolated word or a whole novel, in a single charcoal line or entire sketch, in heaps of rough stones or a fully executed statue, in a random thought or an entire philosophical argument, in a persons name or a whole biography, in a hand gesture or a full ballet production. To qualify for signhood, something must point beyond itself to something else and be capable of interpretation. A beachfront of loose stones does not qualify as a sign. A row of stones along a forest path does. Words and images, cultural artifacts and secret codes, thoughts and feelings, plants and animals, lines and colors, smells and tastes everything is potentially a sign pointing to something else. Semiotics groups signs into two dierent classes. The one divides them according to philosophical categories, the other according to functional relationships between the parts of a sign. When we treat all signs as equal we accept two important consequences. First, we cannot say that one sign system, even a natural-

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language sign system such as Mandarin Chinese or American English, is better than another sign system, say, articial and non-linguistic systems such as American sign language, lm language, or even computer programming language. Natural language sign systems convey information in ways proper to their capacities, functions, and limits, as do articial and non-linguistic sign systems. This consequence applies in a special way to translation. We cannot say that a source language, say biblical Greek or Hebrew, is better than a target language, say Gullah (a Creole language) or Eskimo Yupik. Second, everything is potentially a sign: words, windmills, cats, cuisine, clothing, clouds, books, pictures, gestures, languages, animals, plants, and stars. Vast networks of social mores, street codes, and cultural systems function as signs, as do political institutions, literary genres, and scientic theories and laws. Concepts and ideas as well as feelings and emotions can be signs. When we look at a cloud and predict rain, we are treating the cloud as a sign. When we look at a painting of our great uncle Isaiah and think of our ancestor and family history we are reacting to a sign. When we translate the Bible from one language to another or from one medium to another we are working with signs. The feeling of being hungry and reaching for a Big Mac turns hunger into a sign. A hand wave to a New York taxi driver turns our arm into a sign. Flags that make us feel patriotic, colors that make us feel serene, and a loaf of French bread and a bottle of Medoc wine that take us back to the Paris of our student days are all signs.

3. Semiotic triangle Semiotics recognizes that a sign has three parts: (1) a sign vehicle; (2) an object; (3) and an interpretant. The sign vehicle is the thing or thought that points beyond itself to something else to an object. The interpretant gives meaning to the combination of sign vehicle and object though never a xed or nal meaning, and only in certain respects and in specic conditions. When we approach a fruit stand on the street and see an advertisement (sign vehicle) for Jonathan apples (object) we connect that advertisement with a basket of bright red apples on the stand. If we are of a mind to bake an apple pie, then we act as an interpretant at that moment and in that respect. That ad and its apple-object signify for us that we have reached a destination where we may purchase a pound of apples to bake a pie. If we are allergic to apples and pass by the same ad and basket of apples, we will perhaps quicken our step or give a slight cough or reach for an allergy medication. A semiotic triangle illustrates the relationship of a signs three parts.

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Figure 1. The basic semiotic triangle

The letters c, a, and t form a sign vehicle, namely, the letters that make up the English word cat. Depending on our reference point (cat owner, cat-allergic, musician), we may take the object of this sign vehicle to be either a real or conceptual cat, a source of allergic reactions, or a jazzman. As an interpretant responsible for nding the meaning and signicance of this sign vehicle and object, we may assert that its all about our pet cat Hugo; or, that it is time to renew our allergy prescriptions; or, that in this instance we are to think of jazzman Louis Armstrong. One possible combination of sign vehicle, object, and interpretant is illustrated below.

Figure 2. The semiotic triangle and semiosis

Types of signs: The three categories

Semiotics draws on an ancient philosophical tradition of grouping or categorizing our mental perceptions, a tradition that goes back at least to the Greek philosopher, biologist, and ethicist Aristotle (384322 BC). As the mind receives and organizes information from our outer and inner worlds, it deposits that information into mental spaces or categories. We

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use these mental spaces or categories to sort out all the impressions that pour into our minds via our ve senses of sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell as well as via imagination, emotion, and reason. The categories work like containers into which the mind places related sense impressions so that the mind can go about its work of logically processing the impressions, turning them into thoughts, propositions, and value judgments and then sparking an appropriate action response from us. Aristotle spelled out ten such categories: substance, quality, quantity, relation, where, when, position, having, action, passion. Immanuel Kant (17241804), the German philosopher, postulated four sets of categories for the mind: quantity, quality, relation, and modality. In the Kantian view, for example, my nose and eyes pick up information from a billowing cloud of smoke and transfer these sense impressions to my mind, which in turn assigns them to a category called relation, specically a relation that determines causes and eects. My mind processes this information and determines that the smoke points logically to re. Peircean semiotics works with just three categories, thus simplifying the way we envision thinking, reasoning, and meaning-making. They are called rstness, secondness, and thirdness. We should think of these three categories as containers of related information which the mind uses to order and make sense of the information it receives. Although semiotics treats all signs as potential equals, it distributes signs across the three categories to help us see the limits and possibilities for a sign and its meaning. For translators, the categories reveal new aspects of meaning that they can transplant across the boundaries of e 1994: 4042). Signs that express language, culture and media (Gorle rstness refer us to the primacy of human experience, raw feelings and gut-level emotions, a cry of pain, for instance. Signs that belong to the category of secondness relate these primal experiences to established and past events, as when we say We heard a sharp cry of pain and we took it to be a mothers birth pang. Signs of thirdness point to future, rule-based actions that we may expect on the basis of rstness and secondness, as when we say We assume that a baby will be soon born when we hear a mother cry out in pain and the cry is a birth pang. e, rstness describes a present moment, especially as According to Gorle captured by the realm of feelings. It . . . stands for unanalyzed, instantaneous, immediate feeling: direct suchness dependent on nothing else beyond itself for its comprehension. For example, Firstness is experienced in . . . the feeling of acute pain, an electric shock, a thrill of physical delight, the sensation of redness or blackness, the piercing sound of a train whistle, a penetrating odor . . . Firstness is thus the idea of the timeless

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e present instant experienced as pure emotion of the tout ensemble. (Gorle 1994: 41)

We experience rstness when we read a thermometer calibrated in degrees of Centigrade but only know a Fahrenheit scale. sixteen degrees centigrade is a raw number without any reference point in our own experience. Monolingual English speakers experience rstness when they stare at a text written in Chinese or Arabic and gaze on its strangeness. Firstness is a prominent quality of stories in the Bible where narratives depend on raw feelings, emotions, and direct experiences of God to seize our attention. The Song of Songs conveys wave after wave of erotic passion. The gures of Moses, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Paul shrink back in angst during Gods appearances to them (Exodus 3.13.22; Isaiah 6.16.13; Jeremiah 1.41.10; Ezekiel 2.13.27; Acts 9.19.19; Acts 22.6 22.16; Acts 26.1226.18). Saul is mad and jealous (1 Samuel 18.618.16). Paul is brought to tears by his opponents in the city of Corinth (2 Corinthians 10.112.21). The connection of rstness to experiences in the present shows up in the rapid-re, breathtaking quality of the resurrection story in John 20 where all the verbs are in the present tense. John 20.21 ton Mari mia a h e rwetai Magdalhnh is a case in point: Th de to n sabba av e ti on mnhmeio ble pei to ` n li yon h rme non e k shv eiv to proi skoti n kai on. (On the rst day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary ton mnhmei Magdalene comes to the tomb and sees that the stone is rolled back from the tomb. [authors translation]) We can chart rstness as follows: Table 1. Elements of rstness Qualities Feelings and emotions Examples Falling in love; betrayal; death; angst Bible Song of Songs; Hoseas wife (Hosea 2.113), Davids dirge for Saul and Jonathan (2 Samuel 1.17 1.27); angst of the call narratives (Isaiah 6.16.13) Fall of Jerusalem (Lamentations 1.11.22); discovery of empty tomb (Mark 16.116.8 and parallels) Ecstatic dance (1 Samuel 19.18 19.24); vision (Revelation 1.9 1.20); status and identity of a chosen people (2 Samuel 7.17.17) John 20.120.31 (present tense verbs)

Powerful rst sense impressions

Shock, pain, amazement

States of Mind

Ecstasy, madness, visions, status and identity Here and now

Oriented to Present

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Secondness connects a present rstness to the past. We might say the dread I feel now as I walk through this darkened hallway reminds me of ghost stories I used to read. By connecting rstness with a past event or experience, secondness gives to rstness a quality of otherness. Otherness involves . . . two-sided consciousness, the experience of action and reaction, stimulus and response, change and resistance to change. The idea of hitting and getting hit is a true Second, since it contains the elements of polarity, interaction, comparison and struggle. While a First is a potentiality, a possibility, merely something that might be realized, a Second is a hard fact, an occurrence . . . something that actually takes place . . . All knowledge of the factual world and the more practical aspect of human life such as opening a door, making a phone call, and kicking a e 1994: 41) football are Seconds. (Gorle

When we look at a thermometer scale in the familiar degrees Fahrenheit and read fty we experience secondness because our experience provides us with a correlate, a second, for the raw number. We relate the number to our experience of air whose temperature remains chilly but not cold. Or in the case of the Chinese and Arabic texts, we experience secondness when someone says to us You are looking at the Chinese version of Chairman Maos Sayings or You are holding an Arabiclanguage version of Arabian Nights. In both cases we may not be able to read the words, but we know the contents and thus have experienced secondness. In the Bible, secondness shows up in historical narratives (Joshua, Judges) that tell how Israel applied its rstness (its status as a chosen people) to the other, namely, the Canaanites and the resulting conquest of the other nations. We nd secondness in narratives laying out conict, for example, between Cain and Abel (Genesis 4.14.16) or David and Saul (1 Samuel 18.618.9). Apocalyptic writing regularly appeals to secondness when it connects ancient cosmic battles between good and evil with the struggles of local churches in the rst century AD (Revelation 13.113.21.8). We meet secondness in Pauls letters where he confronts opponents (2 Corinthians 10.110.18). We nd it in stories of polarity, change and resistance to change such as the dynastic histories of Israel and Judea (1 and 2 Kings). The Passion Narratives of the Gospels (for example, Mark 1416; Matthew 2628) illustrate this dialectic side of secondness. We can chart secondness as follows:

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Table 2. Elements of secondness Qualities Otherness; change, polarity, and struggle; two-way consciousness and communication Examples Conquest and defeat; wars and social conict; consciousness of another; dialogue and debate; family conicts; wars and military campaigns Response to need; world views Bible Joshua, Judges, and 1 and 2 Maccabees; Creation accounts; parables conict stories, miracle stories; 3 John (Gaius, Diotrephes, and Demetrius); Joseph and his brothers (Genesis 37); Passion Narratives; Psalms (dialogue) Collection for Jerusalem (2 Corinthians 89); life out of common fund (Acts 4: 3237); signs of the times (Luke 12.5412.56) The Flood (Genesis 7); Ecclesiastes 3 (A time for everything) Kerygma (1 Corinthians 15.115.11)

Action and reaction; knowledge of factual world

Hard facts; occurrences

Oriented to Past

Good old days

Signs with the quality of thirdness take us into the future. They go beyond . . . the vague generality of Firstness . . . and the denite nature of Secondness . . . [to] continuity, the rule of feeling and action by general principles. Since these principles provide logical explanations, all intellectual activity is a Third. Logical thought, Thirdness creates orderliness, law, and regularity . . . Since it is concerned with continuity, Thirdness is future-oriented and permits us to predict what is to e 1994: 41) be, and to adapt our attitude accordingly . . . (Gorle

When we read the scale in degrees Fahrenheit and note that the air temperature is chilly, we may conclude with a general rule of thirdness: This reading and air temperature are customary and predictable for this time of year. In the case of the Arabic text of Arabian Nights, we experience thirdness when we learn the rules of the text (vocabulary, grammar, and syntax of Arabic) and read the story in its original. In the Bible, narratives with this quality of thirdness would include Proverbs, the Holiness Code of Leviticus, the Ten Commandments, and the Sermon on the Mount. We can chart thirdness as follows:

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Table 3. Qualities

Elements of thirdness Examples Lists, tables, maps, charts, blueprints Succession, predictability Wisdom, advice, common sense Laws, rules, codes, norms Bible New Temple (Ezekiel 40.148.35); New Jerusalem (Revelation 21.1 22.5); 1 Chronicles 1.19.44) Call of Twelve Apostles (Mark 3.133.19); Proverbs, Job Ten Commandments (Exodus 20.120.17); Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 57); Holiness Code (Leviticus 1926); Deuteronomic Code; Daniel, Revelation

Orderliness

Regularity Generalizing Authority

Future oriented

Predictions, hypotheses, apocalyptic

5. Types of signs: Functional classes Semiotics also classies signs according to function, that is, according to dierent working relationships among the three parts of a sign (sign vehicle, object, and interpretant). These working relationships reveal information above and beyond what we see in the categories, thus helping us to dig even deeper into the meaning of a sign and to see even more possibilities for translating signs across sign systems. A quality-sign (technically a quali-sign) is given in the letters, morphemes, and lexemes of a language, in the colors on an artists palette, in the numbers of an arithmetical system, in a feeling of happiness, and in a thrill of excitement. A single sign (technically a sin-sign) is present when we have a sign vehicle that is a single occurrence of something in the present, say Haleys comet or a New York transit strike. When a sign vehicle stands for a generality or a repeatable case, for instance, laws and trends, it is called a law-sign (or legi-sign). These functions of sign vehicles illustrate rstness. When we translate sign vehicles in themselves we may wish to transfer the rstness of a narrative from one language or medium to another. In so doing we aim to pass along a feeling or emotional quality inherent in an original source text. The Passion Narratives of the New Testament Gospels are prime instances of rstness in the Bible, although they have suppressed most of the brutal rstness of death on a cross, leaving only hints and implicit information. The Mel Gibson lm The Passion of the Christ made this implicit rstness explicit, with cinematic and visceral information about Jesus death. Whatever else we may say about Gibsons faithfulness to the biblical Passion Narratives, we have to applaud, from

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Table 4. Sign vehicle and rstness Firstness Types Quality Sign Single Sign Law Sign Features Colors, numbers Single occurrences of things Generalities, laws, trends Examples Mathematical and algebraic expressions Halleys Comet Bible Red, purple scarlet (Revelation 17) Birth of Jesus (Matthew 1.181.25) Judges 21.25 (Everyone did what was right in his own eyes)

E mc 2

Table 5. Sign vehicle and secondness Secondness Types Icons Features Representational, Examples Maps, portraits, blueprints, dreams, visions Thermometer, cloud formations, barometers Words, texts, designs, images Bible Biographies of David, Saul, Joseph Parables, miracle stories, exorcism Symbology of Book of Revelation

Index

Cause and eect

Symbols

Conventional, Culture-bound

a translational perspective, a lm that has brilliantly spotted rstness in a source text and transferred it to a screen adaptation. Firstness is also present in the quality signs of a biblical narrative such as Revelation 17 with its palette of colors (red, purple, and scarlet). It is also present as a single sign in the stories of the birth of Jesus, which for Christians stands for a unique event. Statements such as Judges 21.25 (Everyone did what was right in his own eyes) function as law signs, pointing out a regularity and trend in human behavior during the period of the judges. When we combine a sign vehicle with an object we create a case of otherness or of secondness. The lm The Prince of Egypt plays creatively with the secondness of the biblical narrative. It connected the rstness and uniqueness of the Hebrews and their patriarch with the other, the story of Egypt and Israels domicile among the Egyptians. As we have said, signs of secondness connect past events and experiences to each other. Some of these signs are called icons, for instance, maps or portraits that represent an established land mass or an historical person. Icons can include blueprints, dreams, and visions. They represent an external object, as a map may stand for a grid of city streets, a portrait for a person, a blueprint for a skyscraper, a dream or vision for repressed desires or

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divine messages. Bible stories that give us literary portraits of David, Saul, or Joseph serve as icons because they point us beyond themselves to an historical object or correlate. An index is another type of secondness sign. An index connects a cause and an eect. We see an index when a sailboats Windex or wind arrow is caused to point in a certain direction by the blowing of the wind. An action can be an index if it aects something and has a consequence. A killing leads to clan warfare, for instance. Thermometers, barometers, cloud formations are indexes. A thermometer responds to the amount of heat in an object; a barometer reacts to the pressure of the air, a cloud formation builds in response to a weather front. Jesus parables and miracles function as narrative indexes, pointing in cause-eect fashion to, say, the authority and glory of God, or the coming of the Kingdom. If custom or convention dictates that something stands for something, then we have a symbol. A stop sign is a conventional symbol pointing to a trac law. Letters and words are symbols set within the conventions of a language system that give them meaning. Single words and longer texts, along with many designs and images fall mostly into the category of symbol since they are always conventional and culture-bound signs. Convention determines how a language represents its words and draws its semantic maps and how both of those represent the world. Convention, for example, determines that the hooked cross or swastika represents Nazi Germany of the 1930s and 1940s, but that the same symbol has ritual and religious meaning among Native Americans. When a sign vehicle, an object, and an interpretant come together they establish a relation of thirdness, which we dene as a future-oriented action expressed in a rule, prediction, law or habit. Such signs of thirdness often take the form of logical propositions, including those we use in translation, to create the possibilities, propositions, and arguments that structure human knowledge and discourse. If a sign of thirdness states a possibility, it is called a rheme; if a sign stands for a fact, it is a proposition; and if a sign states a reason, then it is an argument. Table 6. Sign vehicle and thirdness Features Examples Bible

Thirdness Types Rheme

Possibility Abductive and Conditional Law (If . . . Then) in inductive Old Testament syllogisms Proposition Facts Deductive syllogism, Apodictic Law in Old Testament Argument Reasons Enthymemes Letter to Philemon

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The statements of conditional law in the Old Testament are examples of rhemes or possibilities within the eld of biblical legislation. The wellknown formula If . . . then represents such a case. If you still continue to resist me and refuse to obey me, I will again increase your punishment seven times (Leviticus 26.21). Some form of ongoing action or thinking (sign vehicle) points to resistance to the divine will (object), which to an interpretant, steeped in conditional law, means that punishment must follow. Statements of apodictic law, the Ten Commandments, for example, stand for propositions or facts. In Exodus 20.120.17, a nite set of actions and thoughts (killing, stealing, coveting) represent sign vehicles pointing to violations of the divine will (object). To an interpretant working out of a tradition of apodictic law killing means a breaking of the covenant with God. Pauls letter to Philemon represents an example of an argument. The disappearance of a slave named Onesimus represents a sign vehicle that points to a breach of social contract between slave and master (object). The meaning of this sign vehicle and object to an interpretant steeped in Roman law (the slaves master Philemon) is clear: Onesimus is guilty and must be punished. But to another interpretant, grounded in a gospel of love and forgiveness (Paul), the meaning is dierent. Paul suggests reconciliation, even the possible liberation of Onesimus in his elaborate argument.

Semiosis, meaning, and translation

Semiosis refers to a process whereby the three parts of a sign (sign vehicle, object, and interpretant) come together in certain respects to establish a meaning or signicance for the something that is pointing to something else. In a 1907 essay on Pragmaticism, Peirce dened semiosis as . . . an action, or inuence, which is, or involves, a cooperation of three subjects, such as a sign, its object, and its interpretant, this tri-relative inuence not being in any way resolvable into actions between pairs (EP 1: 411). Semiosis also describes accurately the process of translation, as Steconni (1999) has shown in the material we rework below. Using the semiotic triangle, we may break translation-semiosis down into three steps or acts whose outcome is what we call meaning or signicance. At the beginning of the semiosis process there is a sign vehicle we call the original text, for example, the Greek text of the Gospel of Luke (for the sake of the argument we exclude any consideration of the oral tradition behind the Greek text though we could easily include it in the process of translation semiosis). The object to which the text points is the life of Jesus. The rst interpretant (there are others, as we will see) would be a kind of proto-

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Figure 3. The semiotic triangle and translation: A rst move

translation that consists in a translators intellectual grasp of the Greek or Hebrew text as well as in his or her emotional reaction to the text. It would also include the translating strategy that is chosen (dynamic or formal equivalence, paraphrase, interlinear). In sum, the rst interpretant would comprise the whole complex set of decisions we call guidelines and principles. The following diagram illustrates this rst movement in the ongoing process of translational semiosis. In a second semiotic move, the interpretant (the hermeneutic or interpretive combination of guidelines, principles, norms, frames, relay translations) turns into a sign vehicle and sets o a new process of semiosis. It still points to the life of Jesus as its object, but a fresh interpretant is now available, the actual translation. This translation gives concrete expression and meaning to its sign vehicle and object. Its diagram would look like this:

Figure 4. The semiotic triangle and translation: A second move

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Figure 5. The semiotic triangle and translation: A third move

In a third (though never nal) move, the translation itself become a sign vehicle. Its object is still the life of Jesus. But now the new interpretants are the readers (or in a performance or media product, the viewers) who engage the text and ll it with their meaning, perhaps their own, perhaps a received meaning, or most likely a combination of both. At some point, the readers or viewers may decide that the meaning of the translation as a whole is dated and awed and that a new translation is necessary. In such a case, the semiotic process starts over again, producing new outcomes for meaning and signicance.

Semiosis is open-ended (and recursive)

The example of translation as semiosis illustrates a key side of semiosis, namely, its recursive or open-ended nature. For translators, the recursiveness of semiosis helps answer a common question: why are new translations necessary? The answer lies in the semiotic nature of translation. Translations are signs, although very complex ones, and they are unstable and constantly call for improvement; or, in semiotic terms for more semiosis. We can illustrate this feature of semiosis with an example from a gospel text (Luke 12.5412.56). Jesus said also to the people: When you see a cloud coming up in the west, at once you say that it is going to rain and it does. And when you feel the south wind blowing you say that it is going to get hot and it does. Hypocrites! You can look at the earth and the sky and predict the weather; why, then, dont you know the meaning of this present time. (Luke 12.5512.56, Good News Bible)

In this passage Jesus sounds very much like a modern semiotician! In the popular meteorology of the time, he and his contemporaries treated

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clouds and winds as sign vehicles pointing in a cause-eect relationship to an object, namely, a weather event. We are dealing with an index. An ordinary interpretant would say that This sign means that rain is coming (in the case of the cloud) and that it will be hot (in the case of the wind). Jesus takes this set of weather-related indexes and their meaning (You can predict the weather by looking at the earth and sky) and treats it as a sign vehicle. But it is now a sign vehicle that points to an inability, not an ability. As the new interpretant, Jesus is not speaking in terms of meteorology but with respect to proclamation of the Kingdom. So he says that all the weather savvy of his audience points to their blindness and means that they cannot decipher who Jesus is. Implied in this scene is yet another act of semiosis. If only the audience would use their knowledge of weather signs (sign vehicle) to understand Jesus (object) they would see the meaning of Jesus deeds and words (interpretant). We can also point to the translational case of Ezra in Nehemia 8.18.12, one of the earliest, if not the earliest instance of translationalsemiosis in the Bible. In this passage, Ezra reads out loud in Hebrew the sacred text of Torah to the Jewish people who have just returned from exile. But Ezra a wise semiotician! knows about semiosis, or at least the ancient equivalent. He must supply an interpretant for the assembled people who no longer command enough Hebrew to understand the sacred text. And so in a public display of semiosis, a group of Levites translates the Hebrew text into an oral vernacular, most likely Aramaic. The sign of the cross is another example of the recursive side of semiosis. In the context of ancient Roman law, a gure in the shape of a cross would have pointed to an actual cross or even the process of crucixion, signifying punishment meted out to a criminal. But when early Christians adopted the sign of the cross, they gave the sign-vehicle (gure of the cross) a new object (the cross on which Jesus died) and a new, if not multiple interpretants, for example, based in soteriology, Christology and ecclesiology. Later Christian devotion and theology adopted the sign of the cross further, turning the sign-vehicle of Jesus cross into a gesture (sign-vehicle is now the physical touching of head, heart, and shoulders) that pointed to its object (physical death and material cross of Jesus). In turn, a new interpretant arose: the mystical union of believer with crucied and resurrected Christ (Dinkler 1960: cols. 4647). Semiosis is related to what is sometimes called intertextuality (Kristeva 1986) in a literary polysystem, namely the citing and reapplication of texts within a system of literature. The synoptic parallels in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and the Sayings Source are examples of

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intertextuality and recursive semiosis. One set of sign vehicle-objectinterpretant, say, The Parable of the Sower in Mark 4.14.9, becomes a sign vehicle in Matthew and Luke with its own object and interpretant e 2005). (Gorle

The logic of translation: Semiosis at work

When semioticians and translators look closely at how they each describe the making of meaning, they discover a lot in common. Above all, they see a special kind of logical process at work. Peirce called this process an abductive syllogism, by which he meant that we form hypotheses or informed guesses about what things mean, then test them out for validity. When a translator says that a text in one language means this or that in another language she or he is working with a semiotic triangle and making a kind of wager about what a source text means, what a target text will convey, and how an audience will understand the information. Schematically the wager looks like this: I bet that this source text element corresponds with this target text element and that an audience will understand it in this or that way:

Figure 6. The semiotic triangle and abductive reasoning

To think of abduction as a hypothesis has a real advantage. It claries the need to continually test and revise our conclusions since they are (in the case of rstness) a kind of intuition or feeling cast as a rule. In semiotic terms, it must be veried with other data, or even challenged or falsied. This observation explains why there is no single answer to any translational choice or decision; new data can verify but also falsify a choice. The gamble of abductive reasoning is even more apparent in media translation where every translational choice remains open to verication, falsication, and interpretation as the viewer brings her or his data

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and experience to bear on the hypotheses represented in the work. When we referred to the recursive nature of semiosis we already had in view the role of abductive reasoning in translation. Abductive reasoning does not have the same logical force as inductive and deductive reasoning. But the power of its logic creates new knowledge in the sciences and in the humanities. An abductive argument begins with a premise in the form of a rule, states a result or observation, and draws a conclusion or case, which may or may not be true but which in any case must be subjected to ongoing testing (semiosis). Following Peirce (CP: 2.623) A simple example will illustrate abduction: Rule: All the cars in the parking lot are Mercedes. Result: These cars are Mercedes. Case: (I hypothesize that) These cars are from the parking lot. If this abduction is true, then we have created new knowledge about the number of cars in a parking lot. In biblical terms we would have: Rule: All the statements in the Sermon on the Mount exhibit Jesus authority. Result: These statements exhibit Jesus authority Case: (I hypothesize that) these statements are from the Sermon on the Mount. The force of abductive syllogisms lies in the new possibilities they open up. A set of cars outside a parking lot are seen to be Mercedes and are hypothesized to belong to the cars in the parking lot all of which are Mercedes. A set of statements are seen to have the authority of Jesus and are hypothesized to belong to the Sermon on the Mount. We can see that each hypothesis may be true but each would have to be tested with further observation and experiments. In translational terms we would have: Rule: A in the source language means X Result: B in the target language means Y Case: (I hypothesize that) X is a similar, equivalent, or faithful representation of Y. Schematically, we can represent this abductive argument as a simple problem in algebra:

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Figure 7. The semiotic triangle and abductive reasoning

Figure 8. The semiotic triangle and abductive reasoning

In this case, A, X, B, Y may be single words, whole discourses or entire texts. But whatever their scope, the hypothesis will need testing, just as in the cases cited above. Whats more, we are dealing with signs. So that to say A in a source text means X may be to say that A stands for rstness, or secondness, or thirdness; or that A stands for a legi-sign, a single sign, a quality sign, an icon, an index, an symbol, etc. To take the example of the rstness of The Passion of the Christ lm: Rule: The Passion Narratives (PN) in the gospels mean Jesus died a violent death (case of rstness) Result: Film language can reconstruct the violence (rstness) of death Case: Passion of Christ lm is an equivalent set of signs for the rstness of Jesus death. To take another example: a translator of the Gospel of Mark, wanting to understand the overall scope of the Gospel, might reason: Rule: The Gospel of Mark presupposes the rstness of the Passion Narrative of Mark 1416 (A X).

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Result: Reference to suering in Mark 8.31 is an instance of rstness (B Y) Case: Mark 8:31 should be translated in light of the rstness of Mark 1416 (X Y). By contrast, deductive reasoning begins with a rule, states a specic case, and ends up with a conclusion: Rule: All the cars in the parking lot are Mercedes. Case: This car is from the parking lot. Result: This car is a Mercedes. In a translational context we could say: Rule: All the statements in the Sermon on the Mount exhibit Jesus authority. Case: This statement is from the Sermon on the Mount. Result: This statement exhibits Jesus authority. Deductive reasoning does not create new knowledge, but only amplies, applies and expands what we already know, bringing a general rule to bear on a specic case. Its conclusions are necessarily true. The premise or rule in a deductive syllogism, representing a generalizing statement, is an example of Thirdness. In semiotic terms we call such a generalizing statement a symbol of Thirdness. As such, the premise functions as a rule and convention that allows us to draw a necessary conclusion. In inductive reasoning, we go from a specic case, to a result, and nally to a general rule: Case: These cars come from the parking lot. Result: These cars are red. Rule: All the cars in the parking lot are red. Or in a translational context: Case: These statements come from the Sermon on the Mount Result: These statements exhibit Jesus authority. Rule: All statements from the Sermon on the Mount exhibit Jesus authority. Induction consists of a probable or statistical argument. It does not guarantee that the general rule follows necessarily from the specic case.

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But inductive reasoning has a pragmatic intent: it provides one of the chief paths along which we move to certainty and truth. Semiotics treats the case or premise of an inductive argument as a special kind of sign called an index pointing to its conclusion like a weather vane points to wind. Just as an index points to something else (the general rule), so the premise of an inductive argument points to Secondness.

Concluding thoughts: Semiosis and media translation

There are two Bibles, one visible, one invisible. We see the visible Bible rolled up in scrolls, sewn together in the pages of manuscripts; or, since the invention of moveable type and the printing press, bound up in the now familiar and canonical form of a printed book. We see the invisible Bible in over two millennia of media presentations drawings, illustrations, music, dances, dramas, pageants, sculptures, icons, mosaics, paintings, tapestries, rugs, and architecture elements such as stained glass, portals, and altarpieces. Today, radio, television, lm and the Internet broadcast the invisible Bible. Both the visible and the invisible Bible have a common ancestor, a now mostly sidelined oral tradition that secured and handed down biblical stories from generation to generation. True enough, this oral tradition has never fully vanished. It continues to exist, for instance, in education and worship. It is present in modern oral cultures that hear and share Bible stories. Still, over time, the power of the printed or visible Bible, along with the beauty and artistry of the invisible Bible, replaced oral tradition in the safekeeping and handing on of the Bible. We know well the outcome of this shift. Sacred writers and later copyists committed the sacred stories to papyrus, parchment, and paper. Artists sketched and painted biblical stories. Musicians, choreographers, and architects turned them into chant, dance, and decoration for chapel, church, and cathedral. From the point of view of translation Christians connect much of their identity and self-denition with the (translated) visible Bible. They dene themselves as people of the (translated) Book. They read (translated) Holy Writ. Both have a (translated) Scripture and a (translated) Good Book. Christians take less note of the invisible Bible because its stories, characters and themes do not reach us as (translated texts), but rather in a mediated way, as artistic texts. They encounter the invisible Bible disguised as works of art and expressions of popular culture. They gaze at van Goghs The Prodigal Son or Michaelangelos David. They listen to Bachs St. John Passion. They view Gibsons Passion of the Christ or Chapman and Hickners The Prince of Egypt. As they do so, they do not

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think of themselves as engaging the Bible but rather as appreciating art or simply entertaining themselves with popular culture. Despite the prevailing distance between the visible and invisible Bible we can sense something of their inner connection when we consider that we dene a key quality of both as inspired. Christians believe that the Bible is the inspired Word of God. Standing in front of a van Gogh painting they can just as easily say This is an inspired work of art. We can appreciate this inner connection even more by recalling the rather short history of literacy and general education, the primary requirement for reading the visible Bible. Prior to the nineteenth century, most Christians did not get their knowledge of the Bible from reading a book. Rather they received it aurally or visually, hearing it read from a pulpit or viewing representations of biblical stories and characters in their churches and cemeteries, markets and village squares, and roadside shrines and pilgrimage hostels. When we translate the Bible into non-print media, we are dealing with what Jakobson called inter-semiotic translation. To account for this act of es apt phrase (introduced in Gorle e 1994: semio-translation, to use Gorle e 2004), we must double our triangles to ac226 . and discussed in Gorle count for the addition of a second medium. Our source text has, semiotically speaking, gone through its three phases of semiosis described above. The outcome is a translation in a rst medium that must move to a second medium:

Figure 9. Semiotic triangle and media translation

To illustrate this process we can point to the American Bible Societys Life of Christ project,1 which was an instance of semio-translation. First, the Greek text of six Gospel narratives served at the starting point for the work. In the rst phase of semiosis, guidelines and principles were drafted, giving the team a rst interpretant. Those guidelines and principles, now a sign vehicle, led to a translation, the second intepretant. Finally the translation was turned over to a reader, a third interpretant. In this case the reader was the lm director and her production team.

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At that point the director and the production team began to transmediate the translation, that is to go from the triangle on the left (First Medium) to the one on the right (Second Medium). In semiotic terms, the nished video itself became a sign vehicle, capable of reaching out to an object and combining with an interpretant. For media translation of larger texts and discourse units in the Bible, semiotics is especially provocative and rich because it oers a high level analytic tool for classifying and identifying signs, ordering and prioritizing them, and ultimately deciding what signs a translation should transfer from one language and medium to another language and medium. In this decision-making process, genre often functions as a sign-vehicle, the gospel genre and the genre of the Passion Narratives, for instance. As a signvehicle, the gospel genre points in many peoples minds to the life of Jesus. If the interpretant is a scholar, then the result may be an historical-critical life of Jesus. If the interpretant is a lm producer, then the outcome is a movie. The Passion of the Christ is a good example. In this case, the lm itself is an instance of an ongoing semiosis that goes back through the whole history of Hollywood lms about Jesus and even beyond into the whole history of media representations of the Christ. It is also a sign vehicle, pointing to its object, the historical suering and death of Jesus. For an interpretant viewing the lm from the point of view of return on investment, theology, race relations, violence, or translation studies, the lm will represent a nancial bonanza, the vicarious suering and death of Jesus, a barrage of anti-Semitic barbs, a sea of gratuitous violence, or a brilliant cross-cultural eort in screen translation. The recent book-to-lm event centering on Dan Browns novel (2002) The Da Vinci Code illustrates the importance of genre in media translating. Disingenuously, the novel claims to write history about Jesus, Mary Magdalene, the Priory of Sion, Opus Dei, and a host of other events and institutions related to Christianity. Scholars can easily debunk these claims, recognizing an ancient literary device. But ordinary readers, translators, and lm producers take the claim of historicity serious, and come to the book and its lm translation with expectations based on historical representations of fact, not novelistic ones. Today, no serious translator of the Bible can ignore the vast resources of semiotics for production, evaluation, training, and research. This claim applies especially to the realm of media translation.

Note

1. See www.newmediabible.org.

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References Brown, D. (2003). The Da Vinci Code. New York: Doubleday. Dinkler, E. (1960). Kreuz in der christlichen Kunst. In Religion in der Geschichte und Gegenwart, vol. 3, cols. 4647. Tu bingen: Mohr. e, D. L. (1994). Semiotics and the Problem of Translation: With Special Reference to the Gorle Semiotics of Charles S. Peirce ( Approaches to Translation Studies 21). Amsterdam/ Atlanta: Rodopi. (2004). On Translating Signs: Exploring Text and Semio-Translation ( Approaches to Translation Studies 24). Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi. (2005). Singing on the breath of God: Preface to life and growth of translated hymnody. e (ed.), 17 In Song and Signicance: Virtues and Vices of Vocal Translation, D. L. Gorle 101. Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi. Jakobson, R. (1959). On linguistic aspects of translation. In On Translation, R. A. Brower (ed.), 232239. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kristeva, J. (1986). Word, dialogue and the novel. In The Kristeva Reader, T. Mopi (ed.), 3561. New York: Columbia University Press. Liddell, H. G. and Scott, R. (eds.) (1968). A Greek-English Lexicon. Oxford: Clarendon. Peirce, Charles S. (19311966). The Collected Papers of Charles S. Peirce, 8 vols., C. Hartshorne, P. Weiss, and A. W. Burks (eds.). Cambridge: Harvard University Press. [Reference to Peirces papers will be designated CP followed by volume and paragraph number.] (1992). Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, vol. 1 (18671893), N. Hauser and C. Kloesel (eds.). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. [Reference to vol. 1 of Essential Peirce will be designated EP 1.] Stecconi, U. (1999). Peirces semiotics for translation. In Fidelity and Translation: Communicating the Bible in New Media, P. A. Soukup and R. Hodgson (eds.), 249261. New York/Franklin, WI: American Bible Society/Sheed and Ward. (2004). A map of semiotics for translation studies. In Similarity and Dierence in Translation, S. Arduini and R. Hodgson (eds.), 153167. Rimini: Guaraldi. Robert Hodgson (b. 1943) is Dean of the Nida Institute for Biblical Scholarship at the American Bible Society 3RHodgson@americanbible.org4. His research interests include translation studies, biblical studies, media translation, and semiotics. His publications include From One Medium to Another. Basic Issues for Communicating the Scriptures in New Media (ed. with P. Soukup, 1997); Fidelity and Translation. Communicating the Bible in New Media (ed. with P. Soukup, 1999); and Similarity and Dierence in Translation (ed. with S. Arduini, 2004).

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