‘Many different practices, one name.’ A semasiological counterweight to an onomasiological approach in search for a fuller phenomenology of translation

Abstract

This article pursues two main aims. (1) In a broader sense, it contributes to the ongoing debate in translation studies about its core concepts, seeking to counterweight the traditional lingual bias. (2) This theoretical intervention is offered in response to Kobus Marais’s article published in Perspectives, in which he proposes a phenomenology of translation, drawing its main framework from his biosemiotic theory of translation. The main line of critique consists of identifying Marais’s approach as predominantly onomasiological, and demonstrating that a fuller phenomenological account of translation calls for a complementary semasiological approach. The theoretical-methodological argument is supported by a survey of expressly non-textual senses of the word translation designating material transfers (of church officials and sacred relics) to illustrate that a broad spectrum of insights historically formulated in translation studies in the course of the successive terms (cultural, material, social, post-colonial, outward, etc.), may be reached through a holistic approach that integrates semasiology and onomasiology.