At the same time, we must remind ourselves, transformed material, emerging out of an [en]text[ualization]-in-context, can be put in correspondence with source material as IT occurs in [en]text[ualization]-in-context, yielding a relationship of transformation of a certain localized, hence graspable “tropic” appearance. Transformation is, of course, the very condition of trope, and, to the degree to which the source and target elements constitute parts of diagrammatic forms of each other in their respective cotexts, a higher-order notion of "translation-prime" is in a sense suggested. Think for example of transforming a schema of moral values into a color code, and rendering a painting according to the scheme. Think of allegorical embodiment of moral values, as in so much of Renaissance painting. So to the extent to which there is a concept of “tropic meaning” attached to the respective elements of source and target texts, the effects of trope-generating transformation come to play a role in any further stability of actual translation in our narrow sense – starting the cycle all over again!

It is clear now, I hope, that translation and its more fluid – as opposed to gelid – extensions, such as transduction and transformation, occur in a kind of nested set of relationships that emerge in the process of explicit interlingual glossing. I expect that for semiotic systems unlike human language, which thus operate without a true grammaticosemantic system of the Saussurean type to anchor them, transduction and transformation play the unrecognized – or at least untheorized! – major role in what is sometimes loosely termed “translation.” (And of course this is true as well for all those aspects of text-in-context itself that are not conformingly Saussurean.) Perhaps, then, the translation metaphor in these other realms – for that is what it is – does more harm than good, since it misconstrues the vast gulf that exists between language and these other systems in the way of manifestation of semiotic capacities. As well, it misplaces its interest at levels of abstraction and organization that are far from what can be "translated." "Cultures" as such cannot be (in our narrower sense) "translated," for example, insofar as most of their manifestations are in fact nonlinguistic. And even within a cultural tradition, we hardly treat a ballet (entextualization of tableaux of bodily movement) set to music (entextualization of pitches and tonal intensities in metered combination-and-sequence) in the same way as [= as homology of] how we treat a denotationally-centered "bilingual edition" of, say, Wittgenstein or a Greek or Latin author in the Loeb Classical Library, perhaps revealing the ineptness or just looseness of the metaphors invoked.

For the critical and inevitable point about "translating cultures" is that at beginning and end of these processes we are dealing with textual objects experienceable and intelligible only within – or as the mathematicians would say, "under"– a culture, and hence if we are to understand the nature of the three T's, we have to understand something of the nature of such textual objects in culture. Not, note, text-artifacts, which exist, even perdure, in some physical form and, circulating, mediate the entextualization/contextualization process between two or more people.

As a form of social action, language use in entextualizing/contextualizing events is endowed with all the dialectically emergent creativity (technically, indexical entailments) of any such cultural semiosis; the precipitated record of this is a text, of varying degrees of coherence. We are speaking here of texts, then, as contingencybound semiotic objects that arise as structures of informational or conceptual coherence in context. But it is with respect to texts that people mutually adjust one to another in realtime social interaction, only the explicit mediating "stuff" of which, things like linguistic forms and other traceable bodily signs, is available to us. (Even reading a – text-artifactual – book or looking at a – text-artifactual – painting are contingent acts that result, to the degree that something is communicated, in the generation of at least one text in this sense.)

And let us recall yet further critical points for "translation" within the domain of phenomenal language itself. Much of what looks like ‘language’ in a superficial, ideologically driven view of the continuous signals of denotational textuality is actually semiotically complex cultural material. Such material is defined not by its Saussurean-centered “denotationality,” but by its indexical characteristics and related modalities of meaningfulness that interweave with Saussurean-based denotational form. In this sense, culture penetrates into phenomenal language via indexicality and iconicity28 so that transduction and transformation, rather than translation, are of the essence, for such parts of a text.

The very forms of abstract language structure, in fact, can be distinguished by the concentrated cultural lumpiness they embody as an important functional aspect of their categorial differentiation. Such parts of language already inherently require different kinds of “translational” treatment. The very act of "translating" according to the intents of the usual, denotationally focused ethnotheory – wherein at least one text must be construed – is a process that thus cannot but be INHERENTLY TRANSFORMING of any such cultural material in the source text that has indexically entailing potential realized in context.

责任编辑：admin