The logical and illogical unity of translation with a triadic approach was mediated by Peirce’s three-way semiotics of sign, object, and interpretant. Semio-translation creates a dynamic network of Peircean interpretants, which deal with artificial but alive signs progressively growing from undetermined (“bad”) versions to higher determined (“good”) translations. The three-way forms of translation were mentioned by Goethe. He imitated the old Persian poetry of Hafiz (14th Century) to compose his German paraphrase of West-östlicher Divan (1814–1819). To justify the liberties of (...) his own translation/paraphrase, Goethe furnished notes in Noten und Abhandlungen and Paralipomena (1818–1819). Through his critical glosses, he explained information, adaptation, and reproduction of the foreign culture and literature (old Persian written in Arabic script) to become transplanted into the “equivalent” in German 19th Century verse. As critical patron of translation and cultural agent, Goethe’s Divan notes are a parody mixing Orient and Occident. He built a (lack of) likeness, pointing in the pseudo-semiosis of translation to first and second degenerate types of object and sign. (shrink)

Pike addresses the current changing world, in which men are slipping their intellectual moorings. His first presupposition is the fundamental fact of human language. Another is the importance of the emic principle in understanding reality. In stating this principle, Pike says that persons understand persons, things, and events in relation to occurrence in structure, to class membership, and to social, physical, economic, psychological, and historical function and in relation to the control their frames of reference have over them.