Roman Jakobson (1959), in Reuben A. Brower (ed.), On Translation, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press (Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature 23), pp. 232–239 — DOI-10.4159/harvard.9780674731615.c18
Key takeaways
- Three kinds of translation. Against Russell’s claim that knowing “cheese” needs nonlinguistic acquaintance, Jakobson holds that “there is no signatum without signum”: the meaning of a sign is its translation into a further sign “in which it is more fully developed” (after Peirce). A verbal sign can be translated into signs of the same language (intralingual translation, rewording), of another language (interlingual translation, translation proper) or of a nonverbal system (intersemiotic translation, transmutation).
- Messages, not code-units. Synonymy is not complete equivalence, and between languages there is “ordinarily no full equivalence between code-units” (English cheese is not Russian syr, which excludes cottage cheese). But messages can serve as adequate interpretations of alien code-units or messages. Translation is a kind of reported speech: “two equivalent messages in two different codes”. “Equivalence in difference is the cardinal problem of language and the pivotal concern of linguistics.”
- Against untranslatability. “All cognitive experience and its classification is conveyable in any existing language”: gaps are filled by loanwords, loan-translations, neologisms, semantic shifts and circumlocution, and a grammatical category a language lacks can be rendered lexically (a dual by “two brothers”).
- What must be conveyed. After Boas: “Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey.” To translate “I hired a worker” into Russian one must choose aspect and the worker’s sex; the Russian answers questions the English left open and leaves open others (tense, definiteness) the English answered. So a chain of translations of one sentence between the two languages “could entirely deprive such a message of its initial content” (Karcevski’s circular series of unfavourable currency exchanges), though “the richer the context of a message, the smaller the loss of information”.
- Where grammar carries meaning. In jest, dreams, magic, “everyday verbal mythology” and above all poetry, grammatical categories carry high semantic import (grammatical gender shapes personification: Russian weekdays, Repin’s puzzlement at a female Sin, Pasternak’s My Sister Life in Czech). In poetry, “phonemic similarity is sensed as semantic relationship”; poetry “by definition is untranslatable”, and only creative transposition, intralingual, interlingual or intersemiotic, is possible.
Standing in the record
Filed on 2026-10-09 from the manuscript bibliography of 2026-10-09 (work
what-survives-translation) at the owner’s request: the manuscript
considered it and dropped it from the final reference list. It is read here
on its own merits. See the curation entry of that day.
Read on 2026-10-09 (NOTE-614). The reading is the source of THEORY-170, the record’s statement of the obligatory-categories thesis and what it does not establish. The other translation-theory works of that batch, LIT-791 (Nida), LIT-789 (House), LIT-799 (Hatim and Mason) and LIT-829 (Nord), were filed, not read.