Applying Luhmann to Translation Studies by Tyulenev Sergey

Author:Tyulenev, Sergey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)
Published: 2012-02-26T16:00:00+00:00

4.7. METAMORPHOSES, CLUSTERS, AND RELATIONSHIPS

Media are loosely coupled elements which are tightened up by/in forms. Media can turn into forms and forms into media for other forms because what is a tight coupling of elements at one level may lend itself for a still tighter coupling at another level. Meaning may be said to be the Ur-medium for mediation as one of its forms which are without number. Mediation, further, constitutes the medium for translation. Translation becomes the medium for its forms, well studied in TS: written, oral, machine translation. These, in turn, become media for their respective forms, for example, written translation becomes the medium for literary, legal, medical, and many other forms of translation. The literary translation goes on to provide the medium for a variety of genre translations or translations of various ratios of the source- and target-cultures, with the so-called domesticated and foreignizing translations being the extreme cases. This chain of metamorphoses of media and forms may lead us all the way to individual styles of translation. The ‘medium/form’ relationship serves as the basis for systemic analyses of translation phenomena and provides a perspective, opening up new vistas of media and forms where forms never exhaust their media, but on the contrary, infinitely enrich them.

Forms may cluster elements of more than one medium. For example, theatrical translation uses the medium of translation and the medium of art and may even use elements of other media such as politics (Brisset 1996; Markov 1961). Forms may, thus, appear at the intersections of different media. For example, intralingual scientific translation (e.g., a term is explained by re-wording) uses language and science as its media. Language will, further, be represented by its oral or written form. An intersemiotic transfer of a painting into a musical piece (as is the case in Modest Mussorgsky’s Kartinki s vystavki [Pictures at an Exhibition]) clusters the media of painting and music. In this Mussorgsky’s piano suite, there is also language ‘clustered in’ (the paintings are entitled and provided with explanations or descriptions). A further complication is introduced when Mussorgsky’s original piano suite is transferred (translated) into an orchestration (e.g., by Maurice Ravel or Vladimir Ashkenazi): the piano original may be considered as the medium for orchestrations or this Mussorgsky’s original composition provides the medium for different timbre forms (the piano or orchestra instruments and their combinations). Moreover, the timbre as one of the three basic qualities of musical sound (together with pitch and rhythm) may be viewed as the medium for the piano and the orchestra, which become the media for different forms of this Mussorgsky’s suite. In the latter presentation the media of timbre are coupled with the medium of the suite to produce a variety of joint forms.

Forms of the medium interrelate and one can describe their relationships by applying different types of distinction criteria. These criteria may vary from the basic prescriptive criteria, e.g., ‘professional/unprofessional’, even ‘correct/incorrect’ (although further criteria should be provided in order to distinguish different forms of the

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