Perception, Reading, Analysis, Interpretation

1. Perception, Reading, Analysis, Interpretation Maria Eugenia Flamarique 8-783-712

2. 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.

3.  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.

4. 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.

5. 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.

6. 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”.

7. Scanning and collection of information from the environment

8. 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.

9. 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.

10. 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.”

11. 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.

12. 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.

13. 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.

14. 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.

15. 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.

16. 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.”

17. 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.