The black box of translation: A glassy essence

Abstract

The mental processes of the black box — what happens in the translator's mind — is not open to direct scrutiny and its study must remain empirical. The black box is called “black” because we cannot see inside the “box” or any closed department of the multilingual brain. We explain the information of looking at the input (source text) and output (target text) to look at what happens in the neurophysiological brain of the translator. Peirce discussed determinacy and indeterminacy of verbal signs: moving from a two-step to a three-step model. The neural activity of translating deals with the study of the immediate and dynamical objects in order to generate the immediate, dynamical, and final interpretants. The complexity of the black box is processed through the conceptual blending of the three signs of reasoning: abduction, induction, and deduction. The black box of the translating brain is understood as a translatability claim, construing a translated draft, and drawing a translated conclusion. Peirce's hypostatic abstraction transforms the quantity and quality of (in)determinacy into a new translated hypoicon in a different language.