Jakobson and Eco discuss in their essays concepts surrounding translation. Jakobson focuses on the difficulty (and eventually concludes, impossibility) of creating any equivalent text translated from one language to another. Eco expounds on Jakobson’s taxonomy of translation, creating a hierarchy that extends to a “genus” (interpretation) and the associated species identified by Jakobson. The two, I believe, are early investigations into semantics and cognitive linguistics that have helped shape the modern field with preliminary ideas towards the use of set theory in semantics. However, where Jakobson is perfunctory and develops his examples, Eco leaves many points unhinged and without support, instead choosing to bolster his text by dropping names, relationships he holds with celebrated Jakobson, and verbose paragraphs.
Jakobson identifies inequalities in language early on; he demonstrates that synonyms do not truly exist at the basest level, giving the pair “celibate” and “bachelor” as an example (233). Although he does not make the leap, the relationship that he defines here can be defined in modern semantics in terms of set theory. That is, there is a set of entities, all of which are labeled as “bachelor,” and a set of entities “celibates” which is a subset to the first set. Although I take problems with the choice of “celibate” for this example (that a woman can be a celibate invalidates the subset relation that “every celibate is a bachelor”), the idea holds if a proper example is chosen. Eco gives a better example, where he demonstrates that every instance of coffee in English is café in French, but not every instance of café in French is rendered as coffee in English (74-5). This, despite existing across language systems, can also be presented as a subset relationship, where coffee is a subset of café.
Jakobson’s text also provides numerous, developed examples for each phenomena that he attempts to outline; Eco’s text, on the other hand, feels unnecessarily contrite and Joycean in its constant references itself further along (“as we shall see” (68), “[a]s we shall see further on” (72)), without ever really reaching a “further on.” Eco also wastes an entire page to make it explicitly clear to the reader that he is in personal contact with Jakobson, and that Jakobson has given his blessing to Eco’s interpretation. Here he can provide an extended example of how his claims are supported but fails to do so when he must support any other idea in his text. He demonstrates fairly well that he is well versed in semiotics by giving what may be considered a drafted literature review of his contemporary field, but fails to provide a unique point of view with unique support.
Jakobson, on the other hand, provides interesting arguments with substantial support. His claim that “[l]anguages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey” (236) provides a foundation for a binary code when translating language, where the parameters under study are the two languages under discussion’s grammatical parameters. However, he further complicates this by demonstrating that, even when languages share a grammatical feature like gender, these genders may not deliver the same cognitive impact when placed into a context. For example, “sin” in German is grammatically feminine, and the Russian painter Repin “was baffled as to why Sin had been depicted as a woman” due to “sin” in Russian being grammatically masculine (237).
Where Jakobson fleshes out a thesis and delivers a final point to his text, while working to outline semiotics and translation, Eco fails to adequately explain in any conciseness or clearness what exactly he is arguing and why.