WAB: "Fragments" | The following contribution is an excerpt (pp. 87-114, «Wittgenstein, translation and semiotics») from Dinda L. Gorlée: Semiotics and the Problem of Translation: With Special Reference to the Semiotics of Charles S. Peirce, Approaches to Translation Studies 12, Rodopi: Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA 1994. Please go to Rodopi for further details or ordering. Publication on WAB's website with kind permission from the author and publisher (2007.2.28).

Dinda L. Gorlée: Wittgenstein, translation and semiotics

Dinda L. Gorlée (http://www.xs4all.nl/~gorlee/) directs a multilingual legal translation office in The Hague and is research associate of the Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Bergen. As semiotician and translation theoretician, Gorlée taught at the Universities of Groningen, Bergen, São Paulo, Innsbruck, Ouagadougou, and Helsinki; research fellow at Research Center for Language and Semiotic Studies of Indiana University in Bloomington, IN and Peirce Edition Project in Indianapolis, IN.

Gorlée wrote the books Semiotics and the Problem of Translation: With Special Reference to the Semiotics of Charles S. Peirce (1994), On Translating Signs: Exploring Text and Semio-Translation (2004), a special number of Semiotica (2007) discussing translation from a semiotic (Peircean) viewpoint; and (ed.) Song and Significance: Virtues and Vices of Vocal Translation (2005) about interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary semio-translation in the art of musicopoetic genres, such as opera, church hymn, art song, pop song, and folksong.

Gorlée has in press the book Wittgenstein in Translation: Exploring Semiotic Signatures (Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 2012): Apart from the Tractatus, Wittgenstein did not write whole manuscripts, but composed short fragments. The current volume reveals the depths of Wittgenstein's soul-searching writings - his "new" philosophy - by concentrating on ordinary language and using few technical terms. Wittgenstein followed St. Augustine (as translator) and Plato (as teacher). Wittgenstein is finally given the accolade of a neglected figure in the history of semiotics, when he moved from Saussure to Peirce and Jakobson. This volume provides an application of Wittgenstein's methodological tools to study the multilingual dialogue in philosophy, linguistics, theology, anthropology, and literature. Translation shows how the translator's signatures in English, French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, and Swedish can be in conflict with personal or stylistic choices in linguistic form, but also in cultural content. Wittgenstein in Translation: Exploring Semiotic Signatures undertakes the "impossible task" of uncovering the reasoning of Wittgenstein's original and translated texts in order to construct, instead of a paraphrase, the ideal of a terminological coherence of Wittgenstein's fragmentariness in philosophy.

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Last change: 2011.12.13 by ap