Perception, Reading, Analysis, Interpretation

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Perception, Reading, Analysis, Interpretation

• Maria Eugenia Flamarique
• 8-783-712

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Essential Task Analyzis of translation phases.

• If we want to describe a process that often
  is beyond the translator's own consciousness, we
  are forced to divide the process into different
  phases that, in the everyday practice of
  translation, can reveal them into one another.
• The first phase of the translation process
  consists of reading the text.
• Reading, like translation, is, for the most
  part, an unconscious process.

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•  Simply reading a text is, in itself, an act of
  translation.
• When we read, we do not store the words we have
  read in our minds as happens with data entered by
  keyboard or scanner into a computer.
• After reading, we do not have the photographic or
  auditory recording in our minds of the text read.
  We have a set of impressions there, instead. We
  remember a few words or sentences precisely,
  while all the remaining text is translated from
  the verbal language into a language belonging to
  another sign system, one still mostly unknown
  the mental language.
• The first act in translating the translator must
  carry out is an intersemiotic, not interlingual
  activity. The words are transformed into mental
  material.

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• Even the first reading of a text involves a
  critical act. Characterized by a sudden and
  unware effort to guess or sense.
• The reader always makes succesive inference on
  what will be writen, and, steo by step arrives at
  a confirmation.

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• There are also problems when reading a text.
• However a translator tries to read a text with
  the intent of embodying the point of view of the
  most generic reader, the translator, as a human
  being, has many limitations and remains an
  individual, with individual tastes,
  idiosyncrasies, preferences, dislikes.
• The translator cannot deny her/his personality
  just because her reading is not for personal
  interest but as a prelude to the use of the text
  by a group of readers. Denial, as a defense, is
  useless and sometimes dangerous. It is much more
  sensible to take into account the subjective
  nature of reading acts.
• Reading is the first of a series of processes
  that transform the metatext into a subjective,
  fallible interpretation of the rototext.

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• Translators must avoid Ingenius Reading.
• In order to do that, they need to know every
  critical tool possible. ( including Knowledge in
  Linguistics, literary studies, humanistics,
  computer sciences.
• This will help translators to understand how it
  is possible to critically analyze a text to be
  translated in order to go beyond Ingenius
  Reading.

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Scanning and collection of information from the
environment
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• The act of reading is connected to the perception
  of the text, something similar to the perception
  of an object.
• The difference lies in the fact that the
  perception of a physical table is more immediate
  than that of the word "table.
• EXAMPLE The perceived object is not interpreted,
  but simply assimilated, because an object is what
  it is in the latter case, on the contrary, to
  the word "table" can be linked, in different
  mental materials, different interpretations.

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• But in semiotics a table is a sign as well, not
  simply an object the perception of a given table
  by a given person produces an interpretive chain
  of mental events, there is an analogous
  perception of the word "table". Also to the
  table, as an object, and to its image, are linked
  meanings of cultural and subjective types, as
  happens with verbal signs.
• The table is a sign then, though a
  non-verbal sign it belongs to another code and
  it has a different meaning according to the
  cultural background in which it is inserted.
• We could also say that when we perceive
  objects, or persons, we read.

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Calvino writes

• Ludmilla, now you are being read. Your body is
  being subjected to a systematic reading, through
  channels of tactile information, visual,
  olfactory, and not without some intervention of
  the taste buds. Hearing also has its role, alert
  to your gasps and your trills ... and all the
  signs that are on the frontier between you and
  usage and habits and memory and prehistory and
  fashion, all codes, all the poor alphabets by
  which one human being believes at certain moments
  that he is reading ... 2.

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Scanning

• Scanning interests us as a tool for the
  collection of surrounding information.The verb
  was used for many years before the existence of
  scanning devices. The two notions share many
  common points we scan our environment and
  receive perceptions about objects and about
  words. But the scanner connected to our PC also
  works this way - although it is much less
  specialized
• Scanning activity consists in observing parts of
  a sequence in succession, i.e. not
  simultaneously. As J. J. Gibson states in The
  Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems
• ... the human individual can visually scan a
  picture for its design, but what he is generally
  in search of is meaning. The esthete may practice
  discrimination and enjoy the structure of a
  painting or the composition of music, but this is
  a sort of perceptual luxury 3.

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• Human beings look for a meaning in the objects
  that surround him, and this is the main function
  of perception.
• But some experiments reported by Gibson lean
  toward thinking of perception as spanning both
  kinds of order, spatial and temporal through it,
  one can single out not only little fragments, but
  complete invariant elements.
• We can perceive a written utterance, recognize
  it, even if we have never seen it or even if the
  utterance is not complete, if there is a coffee
  stain on the page or printing is not perfect.
  This is because the whole of our
  retino-neuro-muscular system is attuned on
  invariant information and can perceive it.

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• The perceptual system distinguishes the known
  objects from new objects. Thanks to memory, the
  individual can create a diachronic series of the
  perceptions of objects (or utterances) that are
  apparently the same and, after a while, learn to
  make subtler, more refined distinctions.

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Collection of information.

• As it is possible to think without recalling, it
  is also possible to learn without remembering.
  Just as sensations are occasional and incidental
  symptoms of perceiving, "conscious remembering is
  an occasional and incidental symptom of learning"
  
• It is also possible to think without using
  conscious memories, taking for granted the
  automatic and unknowing use of associations and
  memories.

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• The same can be said about recognition as we can
  recognize a person we know we have already met
  and not know who is she or where we met, it is,
  therefore, possible to recognize a word without
  remembering anything else about it. This is
  another argument suggesting the disconnection of
  learning and conscious memory.

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Gibson's conclusion

• Selection is inevitable. But this does not imply
  that the verbal fixing of information distorts
  the perception of the world.
• Having perceived an object, the observer goes
  on and detects what Gibson calls affordances.
  Which means in his own words
• I have coined this word as a substitute for
  values, a term which carries an old burden of
  philosophical meaning. I mean simply what things
  furnish, for good or ill. What they afford the
  observer, after all, depends on their
  properties.

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Conclusion.

• Each act of reading, in which one reads the text
  and at the same time, oneself, is a more or less
  subjective interpretation. A notion we will
  return to repeatedly during this second part of
  the translation course dedicated to the
  perception of the text by the translator.