Broken signs: The architectonic translation of Peirce's fragments

Abstract

Peirce's writings are understood and translated in their interweaved fragments without final form. The broken and unbroken fragmentary items of language correspond to degrees of tone, token, and type as Peirce's building blocks of his three superlative categories. The collective and private meanings of Firsts, Seconds, and Thirds are embodied in vague bricolages and grounding paraphrases toward the (maybe idealized) whole manuscript version. Semio-translation, the process of reading and translating from one language into another, speaks about metaphrase, periphrase, and superphrase in order to construct the proposed verbal meaning, corresponding to the judgmental semiosis of Peirce's writings. The text of his entire manuscripts (in edited and unedited versions) give the readers (including translators as privileged readers) the opportunity of various degrees of justification and doubt of possible meanings, casted on what is the fragmentariness, elementariness, and holism of his oeuvre. Using the available translations of Peirce's English writings into German, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, Norwegian, and other languages, translation criticism perceives different upward and downward habits at work, creating acceptable and unacceptable solutions in the target language of philosophical and narrative genres. As practical examples of the degrees of formal and dynamical translations, interlingual and intralingual translations of Peirce's terms and sentences such as ‘lithium,’ ‘university,’ ‘apple pie,’ ‘musement,’ ‘decapitated frog,’ and the versions of the ‘pragmatic maxims’ — all of them fallibly (and sometimes fallaciously) translated into single and replicated fragments of scripture composed by various translators into various languages are discussed.