Peeter Torop

The institution of semiotics in Estonia

The article gives a historical overview of the institutional development of semiotics in Estonia during two centuries, and describes briefly its current status. The key characteristics of semiotics in Estonia include: (1) seminal role of two world-level classics of semiotics from the University of Tartu, Juri Lotman and Jakob von Uexkull; (2) the impact of Tartu–Moscow school of semiotics, with a series of summer schools in Kaariku in 1960s and the establishment of semiotic study of culture; (3) the publication of the international journal Sign Systems Studies, since 1964; (4) the development of biosemiotics, notably together with colleagues from Copenhagen; (5) teaching semiotics as a major in bachelor, master, and doctoral programs in the University of Tartu, since 1994; (6) a plurality of institutions — in addition to the Department of Semiotics in the University of Tartu, several supporting semiotic institutions have been established since 1990s; and (7) a wide scope of research in various branches of semiotics, including theoretical studies, empirical studies, and applied semiotics projects on governmental and other request.

Methodological remarks on the study of translation and translating

Abstract Disciplinary identity depends on how the disciplinary research object is conceived of. If translation studies is a discipline studying translation and translating, it is natural that it can define its identity at the intersection between translation and translating. This intersection is translation process. The need for an epistemological description of translation process arises form the need to make the process describable or to find a possibility of its optimum description. To do this translation studies needs an elementary model of translation process that would ensure the comparability of different translations and describability of translation culture. New interest in the evaluation of translation quality and in the linguistic nature of translation brings along the necessity to reconceptualize different trends in translation studies. Translation studies is on the verge of a new self-description, and the language and attitudes of this self-description should derive from a systemic understanding of the research object of translation studies.

Towards the semiotics of translation

Historically, the semiotics of translation is a part of both translation studies and semiotics. In the history of translation semiotics important positions have been taken by specific connections between semiotics (especially cultural semiotics) and translation studies, which have created premises to connect the application of semiotics in translation studies and prerequisites of interpreting translation activity in semiotics into a more homogeneous disciplinary whole. It is still too early to talk about an extensive interdisciplinary synthesis, but one can already notice a movement described by J. Lambert as paradoxical:

Transmediality of cultural autocommunication

In his studies of culture, Juri Lotman implicitly expressed several ideas that have been rendered explicit by the contemporary mediasphere. The aim of the current article is to explicate a link between Lotmanian cultural semiotics and transmediality as one of today’s more innovative communicative practices. Transmediality is hereby located in the context of cultural autocommunication as a mechanism serving both creative and mnemonic functions. Thus, the notion is related not only to the questions of textual construction but, even more importantly, to text’s processual existence in culture in diverse media languages and discourses over time. By explaining the roots and developments of Lotman’s concept of autocommunicativity, which is central to his understanding of culture as a whole, the article simultaneously indicates the areas of his cultural semiotic studies that we consider relevant and fruitful for contemporary research into transmediality.

Remembering and reinventing Juri Lotman for the digital age

This article introduces a special issue that is dedicated to the renowned Russian-Estonian scholar of semiotics and cultural theory – Juri Lotman (1922–93). The aim of the issue is not only to re-introduce Lotman’s work and his approach – the semiotics of culture – for the international community of cultural studies’ scholars, but also to demonstrate its ‘explosive’ potential and its contemporary momentum – its applicability and unique analytic affordances for interpreting the most modern phenomena of global digital cultures. In this introductory article we discuss Lotman’s original contribution regarding his conceptualizations of the evolutionary dynamics of culture and how his work could be potentially advancing the contemporary cultural studies.

Processual boundaries of translation : Semiotics and translation studies

Abstract Translation activity in culture cannot take place in isolation from experience of culture and technological environment. Underlying the diversity of communication processes is the progression from printed media towards hypermedia and new media. In this new situation, the peculiarity of translation activity consists in the actualization of intralingual and intersemiotic translation alongside interlingual translation: first, in synthetic form, combining all three types of translation (thus also interlinguistic translation can be regarded as comprising intralingual and intersemiotic translation as well); and second, in analytic form, that is, as three autonomous types of translation producing diverse types of texts. The widening of the boundaries of translation process results in the intensified search for appropriate methodologies. One indication of this is the repeated reconceptualization or further elaboration of Jakobsons typology of intralingual, interlingual, and intersemiotic translation at the intersection of semiotics, translation studies, analysis of culture, and communication. At the same time, translation studies show signs of methodological innovation, accompanied by semiotic steps. Semiotics, on the other hand, is at the same time undergoing an actualization of translation issues, and the concept of semiotranslation refers now to the possibilities of methodological synthesis between translation studies and semiotics.

The ideological aspect of intersemiotic translation and montage

The Estonian film The Last Relic offers an interesting case of ideological intersemiotic translation. At the same time, it is an innovative film from the point of view of text composition as well as combination of traditional montage with intersemiotic montage in which the speech of the heroes, the messages of the songs and repetition of visual and musical motifs are juxtaposed to create historical and ideological ambiguity. The specificity of this film is very close to later tendencies in using montage: the movement from a temporal understanding of montage to spatial montage in contemporary new media and 3D-movies. A new understanding of montage is also fruitful for the new interpretation of the chronotopical structure of narrative texts. The traditional theory of montage is rooted in classical literature, while new media experience opens up new possibilities for understanding mechanisms of montage. On a very general level, contemporary tendencies of montage can be analysed as chronotopical montage.

Semiotics of cultural history

The interpretation of cultural history in the context of cultural semiotics, especially interpretation of semiotics of cultural history as a semiotics of culture, and semiotics of culture as a semiotics of cultural history, gives us, first, a deeper understanding of the analysability of cultural history and, at the same time, of the importance of history and different aspects of temporality for the semiotics of culture. Second, the history of the semiotics of culture, especially the semiotics of culture of the Tartu-Moscow School of Semiotics, is an organic part of cultural history, while the self-presentation of the school via establishing explicit and implicit contacts with the heritage of Russian theory (the Formalist School, the Bakhtin circle, Vygotskij, Eisenstein etc) was already a semiotic activity and an object of the semiotics of cultural history. Third, the main research object of semiotics of culture is the hierarchy of the sign systems of culture and the existent as well as historical correlations between these sign systems. Such conceptualization of the research object of semiotics of culture turns the latter into a semiotics of cultural history. Emphasizing the semiotic aspect of cultural history can support the development of semiotics of culture in two ways. First, semiotics of culture has the potential of conducting more in-depth research of texts as mediators between the audience and the cultural tradition. Second, semiotics of culture as a semiotics of cultural history can be methodologically used for establishing a new (chronotopical) theory of culture.

Semiotics of mediation

Semiotics of mediation is based on comparative analysis of mediation processes, on typology of forms of mediation and on the subsequent complementary analysis of culture. Not only does cultural analysis that is based on semiotics of mediation proceed from communication processes, it also searches for possibilities of correlation between concepts of describability, analysability, translatability. Depending on the strategy of mediation semiotics it is possible to create an overview of the main parameters of cultural analysis and to specify the boundaries of semiotic analysis of culture. The main types of mediation are simultaneously parameters of cultural analysis. The main types include autocommunicative mediation, metalingual mediation, intertextual mediation, interdiscursive mediation, and inter- or transmedial mediation. Typology of mediation types facilitates the understanding of the autocommunicative aspect of culture and creates the basis for analysing communication processes not on the level of the immediate sender and receiver but as part of the culture’s communication with itself. Semiotics of mediation starts from semiotic mediation and ends with a culture of mediation in which one and the same cultural language or text operates as a means of dialogue with itself, as a means of communication with others, as part of some textual system or discourse, or as a transmedial phenomenon. Semiotics of mediation is a means of studying the correlation between implicit semiotic mediation and forms of explicit semiotic mediation, thus complementing cultural semiotic study of culture.