Glossemática nas entrelinhas: proposta de tradução de language (1970), de Louis Trolle Hjelmslev

Abstract

This work’s primary objective is to present a translation proposal to the English version of the book Language (1970 [1943]), by Louis Trolle Hjelmslev, into Brazilian Portuguese. To this end, we developed our translation process anchored in the methodological perspective of Berman (2013) to schematically formulate the processes of structuring the translation of Language. As we are dealing with a translation of an already translated text, we should not consider our translation process as the starting point, but rather take into account what has already been done. Therefore, we rely on the English translation by Francis Whitfield in addition to the translation in French by Michel Olsen (1966), in Spanish by María Catalina (1968b) and the Italian translation by Anna Woolf (1970) as support. Furthermore, without the intention of being exhaustive, we included excerpts in Danish (1973) from the original edition in our study. Parallel to this, our work hypothesizes that Language is built on a glossematics that does not want to be seen, or, at least, not because of its theoretical and metatheoretical contours. Thus, it is based on the absence of this basic term – glossematics – noted by Whitfield, as well as our observation of the (only) apparent absence of the minimum forms that the theory establishes in its explanatory basis, that we also formulate our translation proposal, which intends, in second instance, to analyze the construction of this glossematics intended for the inexperienced public. Based on the findings learned and the reflections provided by the translation exercise, we also propose the expansion of the formulæ developed by Hjelmslev by including examples of Brazilian Portuguese, in addition to other Portuguese-speaking manifestations, such as the Portuguese spoken in Angola. Thereby, by proposing the translation of a work that does not yet know the contours of our language, we open space for the expansion of Hjelmslevian studies and their developments. Lastly, in our final study, we also propose to analyze the discursive construction of the definition of immanence as present in the book Language in relation to the construction undertaken in the Prolegomena to a theory of language (2013), and observe how the argumentative and operational choices reveal the manifestation or discursive erasure of methodological and epistemological immanence and how this impacts the argumentation in each book.