Deciphering Signs

Jeon Jong-seo (playing Haemi) pretends to peel an orange with her hands in the 2018 Korean psychological thriller “Burning”. She’s using a Korean word for orange, and she is moving her hands as if there was an orange present. Her words and her actions are signifiers, pointing toward a certain concept - an orange. (Still image from Burning © 2018 owned by Pine House Film.)

What do people really mean? What do they think about, psychologically, in their mind, when they say things?

There are many reasons why translation is difficult, but once very specific reason stands out: People assign different cultural objects different meaning.

This is a problem! Because sometimes it can be hard to know what people mean. Well, there is a solution. And it has one key component: Cultural decipherment.

Abovestanding still image from the film Burning has a woman pretending to peel an orange. An orange is a tangible object, and the world’s dictionaries generally define the word “orange“ the same way.

But what happens when we talk about more abstract concepts? And this is relevant both in strictly interlingual translation, as well as in a broader sense of intercultural interpretation. How do we translate abstract concepts interculturally?

Friend? Time? Honor? Faith? Work? Altruism? What connotations do various people assign to these words? Think about how differently an Englishman and a Chinese person would relate to these words. Or a wealthy CEO and a member of the labouring class? A soldier and a nun? These people would all assign different connotations to the same words.

Linguist and semiotician Ferdinand de Saussure described in Cours de linguistique générale (1916) the relationship between concepts and speech. He called this framework “signifié et signifiant”. These terms are often translated as signified and signifier.

The signifié refers to a concept (Saussure uses the French term concept). This is the abstract, mental image any person might have of an object, an idea or a concept. An example would be the idea of a tree.

The signifier refers to the concrete manifestation that represents the signifié. This is known as the sound pattern.(Saussure uses the term image acoustique). An example would be the English word “Tree“.

It’s important that there is not a connection between a thing and a name, but between a concept and a sound image.

If all the world’s things each had one, single name attached to it, which everyone agreed upon, then there would be no need for translators. In such a world, we could just look up everything in a dictionary. But the world is nuanced, and it is up to translators to decipher meaning from the source, and then produce signs which can in return be deciphered by the target audience.

The concept (signifié) and the sound image (signifiant). Photo copy from Cours de linguistique générale. 1916.

The concept of a “tree” (signifié) and the sound image “arbor“ (“Tree”) (signifiant). Photo copy from Cours de linguistique générale. 1916.

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Still image from Burning © 2018 owned by Pine House Film. Used under Fair Use for critical commentary and analysis on translatorslife.eu.

Saussure, Ferdinand de. Cours de linguistique générale. 1916.