Jakobson and the mental phases of translation

Abstract

Roman Jakobson has written extensively about translation. His contributions can be found in many different papers. Some of his papers don't deal explicitly with translation, but can be interesting in that perspective, too. In this paper the notion of "inner speech", used in the 1930s by Lev Vygotsky and widely known among East European scholars but not as much in the West, is examined in the light of Peircean interpretant. On this basis, one can see that the so-called "interlinguistic translation" process, that is considered translation proper, actually consists of more than one intersemiotic translation process. Therefore, as the second part of the paper shows, writing and reading are intersemiotic processes as well. The mental component adds and subtracts to the prototext. The metatext by definition is different from the prototext since in the process the volatilization of the prototext passes through the translator's mind before being recoded in verbal terms. There is always semiotic noise in translation.