The chronotopical aspect of translatability in intersemiotic space

Abstract

After being introduced in Mikhail Bakhtin’s works, chronotopical analysis became particularly relevant again connected with an interest in intersemiotic analysis. The universality of this kind of analysis consists in its independence from the material in the structuring of texts and in making them comparable. It is essential to distinguish between the textual and the intertextual aspects of (interdiscursive, intermedial) chronotopical analysis. The former presupposes the analysis of an individual text proceeding from its chronotopical levels, and the latter is the analysis of the imaginary text, the text’s cultural plurality. In a chronotopical analysis, it is best to distinguish between three levels. The topographical chronotope concerns the story, depicting an event or a succession of events. The psychological chronotope expresses the characters’ viewpoints, and the metaphysical chronotope determines the text’s conception through interrelating the different chronotopical levels. In (intersemiotic) translation, these chronotopical levels form an intersemiotic space where various translatability problems exist on each level. There is possible to distinguish implicit chronotopical translatability in a case of intralinguistic and interlinguistic translation and explicit translatability in a case of intersemiotic translation.