Meaning

Abstract

© 2018 selection and editorial matter, Sue-Ann Harding and Ovidi Carbonell Cortés; individual chapters, the contributors.Meaning is a central concept for any translation theory. No matter what our understanding is about the nature of translation, it usually includes an assumed relationship of meaning correspondence-whether partial or complete, distant or even too close-between a translation and its original. For the purposes of translation and interpreting studies (henceforth, TIS), we can define meaning as any mental experience prompted by perceptual inputs associated with a stimulus, when such stimulus is conventionally expected to yield some information in a communication process. That is, meaning is what happens in our minds as we process signs that we perceive through the senses in any communicative intent. Meaning is thus not a thing, it is a process; and meaning happens in our heads, and only in our heads. It never leaves. Words have no meaning, books and libraries have no ideas, only people do (Reddy 1979, 309). That is why we invented natural languages and other communicative codes: we needed some tool to prompt other people to build meanings reasonably similar to the ones we have in our minds. When we do, we communicate. Etymologically, we share.