n this talk I explain the position I take on translation, as part of a broader project on the semiotics of technology that I am undertaking at SHISU for three years (having recently started). The semiotic theory of technology that I develop aims to:
1.Contribute to philosophy and sociology of technology with a finer concept of agency, which is currently a controversial point of debate;
2.Construe reasoning as intermedial translation;
3.Bridge the cognitive concept of imagination with the sociotechnical concept of imaginary.
While in the current technological revolution the humanities and social sciences are becoming discourses on technology, semiotics, linguistics, discourse studies and, in general, studies of meaning fail to develop systematic approaches to technology. This results in the marginalization of these disciplines in the academe, at the cost of (more) STEM. I find this is due to the enduring polarization of form and content in this area of inquiry (Saussure 1959), which has fueled a positivist ideal of translation as maintaining content while changing form. This dichotomy results in construing discourse and technological infrastructure independently of each other, associating the former with content and the latter with form. In this view, society-culture and technology are construed as distinct domains that relate to each other, as implied through the view that (social) discourse undergoes technologization (Fairclough 2006 [1992]). Simply, discursive content molds in the form of technological infrastructures. This contradicts the trend in science and technology studies to bridge the epistemological bifurcation of culture and technology (Bijker, Law 1992; Latour 1990).
To approach technology from a semiotic perspective, I adopt Marais’ (2019, 2023) theory of translation as process of form, or energy transfer that involves interpretation (Marais 2023). I argue that that, in this view, like all reasoning, technology is a process of translating. Translation processes are implicit to thinking because thought is dialogical (Peirce CP 4.6, 7.630; Bakhtin 1981; Petrilli 2015). As such, communication systems need to be grounded in modeling systems (Torres‑Martínez 2024). This leads to studying all modal transformations under the banner of translation (Marais 2019; O’Halloran et al. 2016), and not only processes that involve a (human) language, either as source or target (e.g. Jakobson 2004). This leaves many types of modal transformations aside the scope of translation (Marais 2019
This supports the Mind-Technology Thesis, namely that technology is what the mind does (Clowes et al. 2020). In this conceptualization, language is one of the many means by which the mind extends (Clark, Chalmers 1998) onto new media and modalities. This thesis implies that all semiotic activity is technological, aligning with evolutionary and cognitive (Sebeok 1986; Reboul 2017) perspectives contending that spoken language does not render humans exceptional in the animal realm. Recent cognitive sciences (Paolucci 2021; Pietarinen, Beni 2021) point in this direction also through the argument that, being intertwined with perception, interpretation always supposes mediation. This contradicts the positivist construal on translation as change of form that maintains meaning unchanged. Rather than merely ‘mistakes’, mismatches in translation can be heuristic.
I conclude by unearthing how this view on translation as technological mediation aligns with the multimodality framework, which started as a theoretical criticism to the dichotomy of form and content (Kress, Leeuwen 2001), but still did not usher a theory of technology. Particularly, my argument supports the direction for discourse analysis indicated by Bouvier and Machin (2020; see Machin 2016) that content and form constrain each other through affordances.
