Per Aage Brandt: The Cognitive Semiotics of Translation

1) The possibility of interlingual translation: is meaning language-dependent? The dynamic process of writing – reading – and translating. How to define the impossibles of translating.
2) The genres of translation: literary, philosophical, commercial, and linguistic. Translation as negotiation.
3) Text, not language; but: What is a text? The six levels of textual structure.
4) The ethics of translation. What not to translate.

José Miranda Justo: Traduzir o estilo em Filosofia: o caso Kierkegaard

O estilo em Filosofia merece uma atenção particular, se se levar em linha de conta que a Filosofia não se constrói apenas por conceitos, mas também pelos modos específicos da construção dos conceitos e das suas articulações. A estes modos específicos chamamos estilos do pensar. E, se é certo que esses estilos do pensar são muitas vezes próprios de determinados autores, existem também os casos em que, por razões que podem variar, somos levados a reconhecer no mesmo autor uma diversidade de estilos, como acontece em Hamann, em Nietzsche, em Kierkegaard ou em Heidegger. 
A diversidade dos estilos tem consequências evidentes – mas nem sempre levadas em conta – na tradução dos textos filosóficos em que ocorre, com incidências vocabulares, sintácticas, morfológicas, fraseológicas e outras.
O caso Kierkegaard constitui porventura o mais elevado expoente desta diversidade e da complexidade que lhe está associada. Ao longo da obra de Kierkegaard é possível reconhecer múltiplas opções estilísticas gerais, em várias obras e, por vezes, ao longo da mesma obra. Estas questões têm sido objecto de análise no seio do grupo de trabalho que leva a cabo a tradução de um conjunto de obras de Kierkegaard no âmbito de um Projecto financiado pela FCT e a decorrer sob a égide do Centro de Filosofia da Universidade de Lisboa. A presente comunicação procura fornecer uma visão geral desta problemática.

Teresa Seruya: To be or not to be… a translation… that is the question. Considerations on conceptual identity and transversality

This paper aims to assess the main arguments of the ongoing discussion about the concept of cultural translation, which is in itself a branch of the broader discussion about the metaphorical use of the word translation.
I will try to argue that the latter is not an advantage for the institutional recognition of Translation Studies; on the other hand "cultural translation" may be a useful tool for the study of recent literary phenomena such as the so called "intercultural literature".

Alexandra Lopes: Translatorship. An apology of translation as authorship

Translators are the shadow heroes of literature,
the often forgotten instruments that make it possible
for different cultures to talk to one another…
Paul Auster

In 1992, Lawrence Venuti proposed, in the wake of Friedrich Schleiermacher and Walter Benjamin, a view of translation that "emerges as an active reconstitution of the foreign text mediated by the irreducible linguistic, discursive, and ideological differences of the target-language culture" (1992: 10). This "translation hermeneutic" lays bare the notion of agency, which, while akin to all translatory activity, is conventionally silenced in order not to disturb the illusion of the translator's transparency. Traditionally translators are denied bodies — and voices, and (copy)rights — and histories, so that one of the major cultural deceptions remains unshattered: that of the absolute equivalence between translated texts and their "originals". And an originality that probably derives from the human yearning to be unique.
In this paper, I shall look into a handful of 20th-century texts and their purported translations, in order to showcase that, contrary to popular perception, every act of translation is, must needs be, an authored inscription in the text. I would like to argue that, while this renders the texts different, it does not amount to either betrayal or counterfeit. It is rather the expression of its utter humanity.

Isabel Casanova: Monolingual Dictionaries Anybody?

History has often shown us that the greatest and most epoch defining events very often become those that slip deepest into forgetfulness. I would suggest that history very much shows how much we underestimate and downplay the relevance of facets that mean so much to our daily realities: from telephones to televisions, food mixers, books, chairs, lamps to those doors that manage to open as we approach and not to mention cups, forks and napkins or whatever else enhances our lives.
Within this perspective, a person making recourse to a dictionary today has everything made quite perfectly clear.

Elżbieta Tabakowska: Translation of (literary) historical narrative – facts and interpretations, languages and cultures

The author is a cognitive linguist and a practising translator. She has translated for the Polish market numerous texts belonging to various genres, specializing in historical narrative. Her experience in translating historical books  is based mainly upon her work on the monumental volumes authored by the British historian Norman Davies – written in English and rendered into Polish. Excerpts from some of these books will be used to provide  the mini-corpus for the presentation, whose aim is to substantiate the claim that translating historical narrative makes the translator face problems of a more general nature, resulting mainly from the many aspects of subjectivity, inherent in every type of narration. Using Davies’s “historiographic meta-novels” as source material,  it will be shown that such phenomena as perspective, mental transfer, metonymic and metaphorical extensions or different cultural matrices can significantly influence the process of translation. It will also be claimed that – from the point of view of translation theory and practice – borders between genres are fuzzy, and objectivity is a myth.

Peter Hanenberg: Translating Europe across the Ages

This short presentation aims at introducing the conference and its subject. It will try to reach this aim in two steps. First we present some general considerations on the concepts of Translation, Culture, and Cognition and how they fit into the Research Line Translating Europe across the Ages which hosts this conference. In a second step we describe some of our research areas in relation to the concept of Translation and present briefly the concrete subjects and projects that we are going to discuss in the next two days.

Marília dos Santos Lopes: A tradução como fonte do saber

A tradução de relatos de viagens portugueses permitiu aos letrados europeus dos séculos XVI e XVII tomarem conhecimento da descoberta de um novo mundo geográfico e humano. Ao divulgarem informações indispensáveis e até agora desconhecidas, estas traduções tornar-se-iam uma fonte imprescindível para definirem e (re-)construirem uma nova imagem do globo.
A presente comunicação pretende, a partir de alguns exemplos, reflectir sobre o papel da tradução, e indirectamente do tradutor, na compreensão e transmissão de novas geografias e culturas, mormente identificar formas e estratégias de mediação, consideradas, por vezes, adulterações dos textos orginais, no contacto com o desconhecido, ou mesmo insólito.

Maria João Cordeiro: Across languages and cultures. Translation in a mobile world

Mobility practices are a major phenomenon in contemporary world. Flows of people, objects, information and images occur presently at an unprecedented scale and at an unimaginable velocity, contributing thus to a redefinition of proximity and distance and calling for a reflection on the generally overlooked issue of language phenomena and translation in a world thick with intercultural encounters and linguistic experiences.
The movements across languages and cultures, which are intrinsic both to human migrations and to the speedy circulation of representations around the globe, are of paramount importance. Being mobile in today’s world is being aware of its polyglossic nature; we live in a permanently translated world, in which not only do we permanently consume translation products, provided very often by an anonymous legion of translators working for frictionless communicative exchanges, but we are also, to a large extent, permanent translators, constantly on the move between cultural constructions, seeking meanings, equivalences and interpretations.
The present paper aims to reflect on the ubiquitous role of translation in today’s mobile and highly mediatised world. It will more especially draw on examples from tourism, one of the world’s allegedly most powerful forces influencing cultural processes today, which develops around multilingual settings and heavily relies on communication, cultural mediation and translation.

Ana Margarida Abrantes: Translation and Imagination

This presentation tackles the cognitive dimension of translation, by focusing on the particular role of imagination in this process: on the one hand, imagination as mental imagery, i.e. the way in which the mind unfolds visual, aural or other sensorial images from the original language, and integrates them into a Gestalt invested with a particular emotional tone; on the other hand, the informed creative imagination involved in construal, i.e. in the particular choice of presenting those mental images or conceptual representations in the target language, and the influence that the chosen expression has in the conceptual representation evoked in the mind of the final reader.

Landeg White: The Lusíads’ Opening Sentence as attempted by six different English translators

The Lusíads’ Opening Sentence as attempted by six different English translators, of varying ability, at different periods, and following contrasting translation fashions.
The translations considered are those of Richard Fanshawe 1655,William Mickle 1776, Richard Burton 1880, J.J. Aubertine 1884, William Atkinson 1952, and Landeg White 1997.  Copies of the texts will be distributed.

Maria Clotilde Almeida: Transcreation versus Transmigration: the cognitive semiotics of translation approach

Anchored on the “Architecture of Semantic Domains”, a fundamental issue in Cognitive Semiotics (Brandt 2004), the present work deals with two somehow conflicting conceptualisation framings involved in the craft of translation, namely transcreation and transmigration, in the era of unsettling globalizing forces.
On the one hand, transcreation framings in translation emerge from a shift in semantic domains occurring in the translation process. Taking Almeida (2011) as a point of departure, I argue that on translating Bossa Nova lyrics in Brazilian Portuguese into English D1-scenarios (“physis”) are artfully re-architectured onto D6 (“oikos”) scenarios.
On the other hand, transmigration framings account for the transplantation of text chunks that have travelled intact across time, such as mythological or literary narrative quotations where D7-scenarios (“hieron”) in the original texts are sacredly preserved as D7- scenarios (“hieron”) in the translated texts.
However, the fact that we are living in a global community clearly enhances the emergence of “glocalities” where D-7 scenarios (“hieron”) necessarily combine with D-6 scenarios (“oikos”) forming new aesthetic products, as in (D 9), thus blurring the conflict between transcreation and transmigration. 

Bibiana de Sousa: Domínios semânticos do futebol nos media alemães à luz da Semiótica Cognitiva


“Fussball ist mehr als nur Sport. Er ist immer auch Ausdruck kultureller, sozialer, wirtschaftlicher und politischer Rahmenbedingungen und steht stellverteretend für Verhältnisse, Zustände, Veränderungen und Entwicklungen in der Gesellschaft“ (Weiß, 2004:223).

Na senda de outros trabalhos de estudo das construções metafóricas e mescladas na imprensa desportiva portuguesa e alemã (Almeida, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006a, 2006b, 2010a, 2010b, 2011; Almeida/Orfão/Teixeira, 2009 e Almeida/Sousa, 2010), à luz do modelo das Redes de Espaços Mentais (Brandt 2004; Brandt/Brandt 2005), nas quais estruturas mescladas são construções semióticas que ocorrem no contexto da comunicação, a presente comunicação debruça-se sobre as ocorrências metafóricas elaboradas a partir dos mapeamentos dos diversos domínios-fonte da experiência para o domínio-alvo dos eventos futebolísticos, tendo por objectivo elencar o conjunto de imagens presentes nos textos jornalísticos alemães (Bild Zeitung, Kicker, Spiegel e Focus) e portugueses (A Bola, Record, O Jogo), com especial incidência nas suas versões on-line, durante os Campeonatos Europeus e Munidas de Futebol de 2004 a 2010.
Se é verdade que o futebol é mais do que um mero desporto, procuramos evidenciar, através do estudo comparativo das conceptualizações metafóricas do evento futebolístico alicerçadas nos diferentes domínios da experiência, em que medida as construções semióticas no discurso desportivo configuram e estruturam realidades sociais e culturais.

Paula Órfão: Translating Enterprise Identity: comparing American and German multinationals – a cognitive semiotic approach

This paper aims at presenting a comparative perspective of conceptual metaphors on the websites of several American and German multinationals, within a cognitive semantic framework. The symbolic representations in enterprise discourse are frequently of a metaphorical nature, displaying examples structured by a blending process, which demonstrates the innovative nature of the language used on the websites of the companies examined, since they are creative and dynamic phenomena. Furthermore, the communicational situation is crucial in analysing the structures underneath our instances, along with the relevance space, which is mainly of a spatial nature, and so cognitive semiotics complements conceptual metaphor theory in our analysis. The representations found are fundamentally anchored in the metaphoric blend of the company as a living organism, which displays several specifications that are given shape through several hyper-metaphorical blends. At the core of this work lies the identification, semantic analysis and cross-linguistic comparison of the dimensions of expression inherent in the representations found. This study also aims to assess the extent to which the construction of the identity of American and German companies is affected by the use of different sorts of metaphoric or blending constructions in online enterprise discourse, inasmuch as the dominating representations in each language will be compared with the least common representations in both English and German.

Rita Arantes: Arquitecturas Semânticas nos Sonetos Ingleses de Fernando Pessoa e Tradução à Luz da Semiótica Cognitiva

Tendo em vista que um texto poético se materializa em arquitecturas semânticas, a análise das imagens metafóricas presentes em alguns dos sonetos ingleses de Fernando Pessoa e nas respectivas traduções para Português Europeu visa a identificação das ancoragens imagéticas que lhe subjazem, com o propósito de determinar dimensões de convergência e de divergência, no plano interlinguístico.
      A análise semântica dos sonetos I, VIII e XXXV, e sequencialmente, das traduções, efectuadas respectivamente, por José Blanc de Portugal, Jorge de Sena e Adolfo Casais Monteiro e Sena, na publicação “Poemas Ingleses” da Ática, em 1974, com prefácio e notas de Jorge de Sena, foi realizada no âmbito da Semântica e Semiótica Cognitivas, sendo inspirada no modelo da Rede Semiótica de Espaços Mentais, desenvolvido por Brandt (2004, 2005) e Brandt / Brandt (2005, 2005a) para o estudo de textos poéticos.
         Nesta perspectiva cognitiva contrastiva, a análise semiótico-cognitiva de textos poéticos originais e das respectivas traduções por nós realizadas tem a particularidade de proporcionar uma desconstrução textual que, transcendendo os preâmbulos históricos e literários dos textos, nos permitem aquilatar nexos de convergência e de divergência no seio das arquitecturas semânticas.