More than really translating material (in my narrowed sense), then, transducing material moves us between a source cultural system and a target one. In each system words and expressions are indexically anchored within entextualizationsin-context, and we attempt to move across these. But this leads us to consider that in transduction, operating as we do in the realm of culture more frankly, there is always the possibility of transformation of the [en]textual[ized] source material contextualized in specific ways into configurations of cultural semiosis of a sort substantially or completely different from those one has started with.

In one sense, transformation can be considered to result from a kind of misfire of intent with respect to translation and transduction. Recall the discussion above of "untranslated" cultural terms in ethnographies. Scientifically unsystematic practices of generations of anthropologists-as-ethnographic-"translators" have turned source-language/culture material willy-nilly into signs of the structures of power and influence of the professional and scholarly worlds in which the discourse of ethnography is carried on as a central social practice. But in another sense, we can think of determinately intentional aesthetic genre transformation, one of many types of transformation of [en]text[ualization]s defined by the semiotic axes along which it happens. It is the stuff of ever-evolving performance institutions in our own society's cultural life, as for example William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet becoming – being "translated" into – Leonard Bernstein's West Side Story; Victor Hugo's novel Les Misérables "adapted" – "translated" – to the musical stage by Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber and associates. These are wholesale exercises in transformation in our sense of the term.

From the point of view of semiotic transformation now, consider again the case of nontranslation of ethnographic words and expressions. If the effect is, as noted, to give the ethnographic author a kind of "ownership" over the scholarly term from "one's people," immediately this ownership becomes indexically convertible with one's name, one's fame as it were: the professional descriptive backing associated with the use of the proper name of the author is, then, the untranslated but cotextually transduced material, the label for the ineffable concept. This fits into the general scientific-scholarly notions of precedence of attributed or at least ascribed coinage for technical terminology of a field’s discourse – a sociocultural fact if ever there was one, complete with a durational interval of relevant half-life! But here the "coinages" are words from another language/culture. Kula? Bronislaw Malinowski. Gumlao? Edmund Leach. There is a kind of Hall of Fame principle organizing such a social system, in which the conceptual labels of other cultures, intendedly transduced so as to get their technical meaning from one’s target-language ethnographic text, become the trophies displayed (the ethnographic text being the pedestal) for those elected.

The point here is not to praise or condemn this other meaningfulness (that is, indexically manifested cultural value) that emerges for imported source-language terms in anthropological and wider discursive usages. The point is that the meaningfulness of the very terms that originate in some source language in source-culture usage has been transformed significantly in the target-language and especially target-cultural usage. For the culture of anthropologists renders us members of the academic and other professional institutional orders and endows originary technical terms – among them, exotic, “untranslated” words and expressions from ethnographic loci – with special kinds of meaningfulness. Part of this involves indexing identities and qualities of the terms' creators ("discoverers"), users (implicit "referencers" or explicit “citers”), etc., in their own stratified discursive regimes. So the overall co(n)textual meaning of such a term has been profoundly transformed.

Thus can practitioners of identity creation and management within disciplinary and more popular circles learn how to institutionalize such transformations of value in a highly deliberate manner. Because of the transformation of semiosis just described, carrying forward this style of "nontranslational practice" in ethnographic genres becomes centrally involved in social reproduction of a disciplinary line or category through the establishment of a canonical text site. Sometimes there is no way sufficiently to systematize and limit the transduction of verbal material across functionally intersecting pragmatic systems. Even trying to play it as safe as we can with the textual stuff with which, by hypothesis, we start, semiotic transformation then occurs. Of course, then, to the degree that thereTranslation, Transduction, Transformation is transduction beyond a translator’s intended limits, there is always something of the transformational in every attempted translation! Usually, the very organization of pragmatic systems that are involved in the source situation of usage cannot be duplicated in the target situation, as noted above. Sometimes it is possible selectively to reshape an organization of them so that the target verbal material appears in texts of very different functional characteristics, as different, while remaining language, as musical "text" and painting-as-"text," as it were. Even when a token of a word appears printed on a page in an expository prose text and when a token of it appears printed on a page of concrete poetry, these are at least in part transformations one of the other. For verbal, as for other semiotic material, the condition of emergence of meaning is textuality-in-context. Hence, transformation of source material, rather than transduction or translation of it, seems to occur as a risk (or license!) of starting from source entextualizations far from home that require radical reshaping in the "translational" attempt to domesticate them. The "translations" that result must perforce be shaped as discourse genres that license the effectiveness of target verbal forms in sociocultural ways highly different from the originary ones.