Yuri Lotman’s concepts of semiotic border, semiosphere, text and their potential for translation studies

The paper will present theoretical considerations within the discipline of translation studies (TS) and indicate how Yuri Lotman’s theory can broaden the understanding of the object of study without moving beyond the borders of the discipline. It is true that the potential of semiotics has been recognised by prominent scholars. However, it has not made much impact on the discipline (see e.g., Kaindl 2020), and has not helped to solve the struggles of TS. Structuralist binaries have been generally criticized and rejected (see e.g., Nergaard and Arduini 2011 or Blumczynski and Hassani 2019) and broader definitions of texts are not common unless discussed in a multimodal context. Despite the evident move towards the multimodal, audiovisual or plurisemiotic, TS still struggles with the narrow understanding of translation as transfer between linguistic signs. Meanwhile, the concept of the semiotic border, along with the understanding of the text and semiosphere, helps to underline the ontic conditions of linguistic translation. The border epitomizes three significant mechanisms: the one of difference, as it separates; the one of similarity, as it joins; and the one of mediation and dialogue, as it enables two semiotic spaces to come into contact. The understanding of a text as a structured semiotic composition highlights semiotic integrity, whereas the definition of semiosphere as a kind of semiotic continuum and organism helps to highlight the fact that translation happens in context in which linguistic signs are just a proportion of the meaning-making material. Thus, translation does not mean carrying meaning over the border from the ST to the TT, but rather mediating within and between sign spaces.