The paper outlines a distinction between several allied notions related to intersemioticity, polysemioticity and translation, with examples pertaining to the indicated categories. It begins with an overview of how Roman Jakobson’s concept of intersemiotic translation has been re-interpreted and broadened to account for more types of transformations and for new modes of expression. Secondly, the non-identity of referentiality and transmutation is indicated. Next, the notion of intersemiotic complementation is proposed for instances that involve adding a new code to an existing work, rather than changing its code. A distinction is also drawn between intersemiotic translation and intersemiotic aspects orcontexts of interlingual translation (of a polysemiotic work or a verbal text which refers to non-discursive media). It is emphasized that it is this last category that deserves the attention of translation scholars, and some particular areas of interest are enumerated.

The article examines Catherine Anyango’s and David Zane Mairowitz’s graphic novel Heart of Darkness as an illustration of the differences between the unique possibilities of verbal and visual media. Conrad’s metaphor of Marlow’s story as a misty halo, interpreted here as an autotelic commentary on the text’s elusive meaning, is the starting point for a discussion of visual representations of indeterminacy, which Conrad conceptualizes in visual terms, equating understanding with seeing. Another issue raised is the place of the narrator in visual arts, made problematic by Conrad’s use of two narrators and the story-within-a-story device. It is also argued that the graphic novel, though a sequential medium, makes use of spatial juxtaposition of images, which is not only a source of metaphors, but also creates the effect of simultaneity unavailable to verbal arts.

This case study analyses the process of translation of a popular science (picture)book that originated from the Internet comic strip xkcd. It explores the obstacles resulting from the text-image interplay.

At the macroscale, while such institutions in Poland as the Book Institute or translator associations do develop standards and provide information on the book market and good (or actual) practices, they never explicitly mention comic books—the closest one can find is “illustrated books” or “others”. Additionally, popular science literature—which some might say is uninteresting—is much less discussed than artistic translation (with due allowance for comic books and graphic novels) despite having a tradition of using words and images together. Thing Explainer does seem to use “other” translatory techniques: firstly, because the author decided to use only the one thousand most common English words (a semantic dominant to be retained in Polish); and secondly, because the illustrations—from diagrammatic to extremely detailed—are an indispensable, though variably integrated with the verbal, medium of knowledge transfer. This paper focuses on the second aspect. Specifically, it discusses: the rigorous requirements for text volume and location (exacerbated by the said 1000-word list); technical issues (including choosing typefaces, formatting text, modifying graphics etc.); the overlapping responsibilities of the editors, the translator and the DTP artist; and the unusual text-image relations (e.g. the image helping a translator decode what he actually translates).

The paper deals with the relation between verbal expressions and mental images. As claimed by cognitive linguists, “understanding a verbal message” requires that two kinds of mental imagery be evoked: rich images, which are encoded in individual lexemes, and schematic images, conventionally related to grammatical structures. Based upon this principle, an analysis of a Polish poem and its English translation is carried out, in order to demonstrate that a complicated interplay between the two kinds of mental imagery underlies the texts and accounts for their interpretation.

The article deals with the complex issue of the interrelation of the elements of the linguistic texture with the elements of sense produced thanks to the decoding of the graphic layer. The departure point for the argument will be the concept of conceptual blending, deriving from cognitive linguistics. This concept describes the blending of two semiotic spaces, here the iconic space and the symbolic space, to create a new emergent space, which escapes unequivocal interpretation, especially if a given text intensifies the role of its graphic form. The analysis of such an emergent space will be understood as a typographic analysis of glyphs, their interdependencies, patterns and, ultimately, their relations with the meaning decoded in a given language. The interpretative act will proceed according to poststructuralist premises, based mainly on the philosophy of Jacques Derrida, who applies the term dissemination to describe the radically ambivalent character of sense production, not limited to semanticism, but taking into consideration all aspects of the textual tissue (graphic, phonetic, syntactic etc.). To describe the specific interpretative state of a reader/translator, who, faced with the totality of an experimental literary work, cannot prioritise various possible ways of interpretation, the study applies the term apophany, borrowed from the thought of the German psychologist Klaus Conrad, namely, a stage of development of schizophrenia, which entails a specific experience of abnormal meaningfulness. Examples of a translator’s apophany can be found in the analysis of the Polish translation of Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (clusters of letters, punctuation) and Finnegans Wake by James Joyce (the undecidables of the syntagmatic aspect of sentences).

Despite its title, Invisible Cities (1972) is the most visible book by Italo Calvino. Calvino included visibility in his literary testament, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, as one of the fundamental values of literary creation. He often emphasized the significance of visibility in his writings and pointed out its close connection with exactitude, another value that he felt important for the next millennium. Translated into Polish by Alina Kreisberg, the book was first published in 1975 and republished in 2005 and 2013. The translator, who considers the book a record of an inner journey “around one’s head”, openly admits to having modified various details of Calvino’s images, recognizing that certain terms would sound too exotic, encyclopaedic and elitist in Polish. Her translations of architectural and art historical terms are particularly noteworthy,  leading sometimes to a change in the style of buildings evoked by Calvino’s text. The translator’s decisions make the  images of Invisible Cities even more surrealistic and mythical.

The article focuses on descriptions of works of art in essays. It presents the form of ekphrasis and the method of inter-artistic analysis, and also emphasises the efficiency of the translatological perspective (e.g. intersemiotic translation) in the study of the phenomenon of ekphrasis. As a starting point for the analysis and interpretation of fragments of Herbert’s and Herling-Grudziński’s essays, the article presents Martini’s Guidoriccio da Fogliano at the Siege of Montemassi, from the perspective of art history. Next, it discusses the verbal accounts of the painting presented by Herbert and Herling- Grudziński, examining their contents and poetics and paying attention to the character of the descriptions they propose. The description may focus either on the object or on the viewer, either on the representation itself or on its connotations. Accordingly, it is suggested that the corresponding modes of ekphrasis should be labelled ‘denotative’ and ‘connotative’, respectively. The aim is to present concrete realizations of ekphrasis and characteristic modes of perceiving and writing about a work of art, as well as to show how the subjective perspective of the observer (describing, commenting, interpreting) and an idiomatic style of expression are manifested.

The author proposes a new critical model for translation analysis. The method is based on translation tropics, an idea presented by Douglas Robinson in The Translator’s Turn, which appears here in a much expanded and modified form. Five tropes (irony, metonymy, synecdoche, hyperbole and metalepsis) describe five types of translator and the respective affective motivations that inform decision-making in translation: the translator’s affect towards the Other of the source text and culture. One trope in particular (metonymy) is examined in more detail. The analytical part, which presents practical results achieved with this theoretical tool, is based on the alphabetical translations of Charles Bernstein’s poetry by Peter Waterhouse and his VERSATORIUM group.