Czułe membrany. Przekodowania terminologiczne jako problem translatorski

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to present the use of Juri Lotman’s semiotic tools to reflect on the process of translating scientific texts. The article focuses on a text of a special type – an ethnographic material by Eugeniusz Frankowski (1884–1962), a Polish ethnologist of the interwar period. The outbreak of World War I found him in Spain – during his time, he wrote several texts in Spanish, Portuguese and Basque, including the work La lucha entre el hombre y los espíritus malos por la posesión de la tierra y su usufructo (translated by the author into Polish as “Zmagania człowieka ze złymi duchami o posiadanie ziemi i jej użytkowanie”). Research fluctuations (both terminological and methodological) are evident in the very “texture” of the text, so translating La lucha… into Polish required sensitivity to the mechanisms occurring at the confluence of biographical and textual levels. Using semiotic tools, the author reveals a series of research, textual, and methodological uncertainties for the researcher, resulting from the need to use different scientific languages (Polish, Spanish, French, German, etc.) to describe the newly explored terrain. This is because the awareness of the existence of these uncertainties sensitizes the very work of the translator, who is both an archaeologist, fleshing out successive levels of meaning, and a creator, co-thinking with Lotman’s notion of text as a “generator of meanings”.