CAPTURING SIGNS FOR LIFE, LITERATURE AND LITERARY TRANSLATION

Abstract

Like life, literature is woven of signs, and perhaps unwittingly, we constantly struggle to read and comprehend these signs. Capturing signs is a psychic process, and it must be managed well in order to bring the quest for meaning to a conclusion. If the reader neither succeeds in picking up signs nor in endowing them with their legitimate sense, his communication ends in failure. The literary translator must be more competent in reading signs than any other reader, because literary texts are full of linguistic and semantic subtleties or surprises and traps. Faced with these dangers, the translator needs guidance, and semiotics, the theory of meaning and signification can help. The translator who follows the method of semiotic analysis feels secure in these distant lands where he has launched himself, and eliminates the risk of “designificative tendencies” within the limits of his competence. Semiotics of translation, launched by Sündüz Öztürk Kasar who applies the theories of Paris School Semiotics to the translation activity, constitute our theoretical approach. In this study, we examine Turkish and French translations of proper names in Animal Farm by George Orwell within the frame of “systematics of designificative tendencies” proposed by Sündüz Öztürk Kasar, who is inspired by Antoine Berman, French theorist of translation.