This general principle of interlinguistic difference between terms and semantic fields importantly also has to do with a basic issue of language and translation. In Russian, that would be tvarog and not syr. Thus, the Russian syr is not identical to the English cheese (or, for that matter, the Spanish queso, the German Käse, the Korean chijeu, etc.) since the Russian ‘code-unit’ does not include the concept of soft white curd cheese known in English as cottage cheese. He points out (1959/2012: 127) that ‘there is ordinarily no full equivalence between code-units’. Jakobson then moves on to consider the thorny problem of equivalence in meaning between words in different languages, part of Saussure’s parole. Examples he gives are ambrosia and nectar, words which modern readers will have read in Greek myths even if they have never come across the substances in real life this contrasts with cheese, which they almost certainly have encountered first-hand in some form. Jakobson also stresses that it is possible to understand what is signified by a word even if we have never seen or experienced the concept or thing in real life. Instead of cheese, the signifier could easily have been bread, soup, thingummyjigor any other word. Crucially, the sign is arbitrary or unmotivated (Saussure 1916/1983: 67–9). Thus, in English the word cheese is the acoustic signifier which ‘denotes’ the concept ‘food made of pressed curds’ (the signified). Central to his theory of langue, he differentiated between the ‘signifier’ (the spoken and written signal) and the ‘signified’ (the concept), which together create the linguistic ‘sign’. Saussure distinguished between the linguistic system ( langue) and specific individual utterances ( parole). Jakobson follows the theory of language proposed by the famous Swiss linguist Saussure (1857–1913). Jakobson goes on to examine key issues of this type of translation, notably linguistic meaning and equivalence. In Chapter 1 we saw how, in his paper ‘On linguistic aspects of translation’ (1959/2012), structuralist Roman Jakobson describes three kinds of translation: intralingual, interlingual and intersemiotic, with interlingual referring to translation between two different written sign systems. Roman Jakobson: the nature of linguistic meaning and equivalence
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