Czułe membrany. Przekodowania terminologiczne jako problem translatorski
Sensitive Membranes: Terminological Recoding as a Translation Problem

Summary/Abstract: The purpose of this article is to present the use of Juri Lotman’s semiotic tools to reflecton the process of translating scientific texts. The article focuses on a text of a specialtype – an ethnographic material by Eugeniusz Frankowski (1884–1962), a Polishethnologist 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, includingthe work La lucha entre el hombre y los espíritus malos por la posesión de la tierra y suusufructo (translated by the author into Polish as “Zmagania człowieka ze złymi duchamio posiadanie ziemi i jej użytkowanie”). Research fluctuations (both terminologicaland methodological) are evident in the very “texture” of the text, so translating Lalucha… into Polish required sensitivity to the mechanisms occurring at the confluenceof biographical and textual levels. Using semiotic tools, the author reveals a series ofresearch, textual, and methodological uncertainties for the researcher, resulting fromthe need to use different scientific languages (Polish, Spanish, French, German, etc.) todescribe the newly explored terrain. This is because the awareness of the existence ofthese 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 notionof text as a “generator of meanings”.

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