Title: "Translation as Meaning-Construction under Co-Textual and Contextual Constraints: A Model for a Material Approach to Translation" by Riku Haapaniemi
Overview
This article advocates for a materialist semiotic framework for translation studies (TS), emphasizing the importance of materiality, the physical and semiotic elements involved in meaning production, over traditional language-centric approaches. It reconceptualizes translation as a generalized semiotic process influenced by multiple dimensions, including visual, social, cognitive, and material factors.
Core Concepts and Theoretical Foundations
Materiality in Translation:
Defines translation as involving the interpretation and production of material texts, not purely linguistic entities, taking into account semiotic signs in their physical and social environments.
Theories incorporated include semiotics, textual theory, and multi-ontological models of texts, emphasizing the difference between text as a whole and its sign complex.
Textual and Semiotic Processes:
Semiosis is continuous; meaning is momentarily stabilized through active meaning-making under material constraints.
Text production involves compiling sign complexes, and reception involves identifying and interpreting these complexes within their material and semiotic milieus.
Translation as a Dual Role:
The translator acts as both meaning-taker (recipient of the source text) and meaning-maker (producer of the target text).
This dual role is fundamental to understanding meaning-construction as a process of material transfer and semiotic recontextualization (following Pym's concept of translation as material distribution).
Translation as Material Distribution (Anthony Pym)
Anthony Pym extends this dual-role understanding by conceptualizing translation as part of a broader process of material distribution rather than mere linguistic transfer. In this view, translation is one means of moving physical texts across space and time to reach new audiences and contexts.
Text as Material Object:
A text is not just a set of words but a physical entity, a book, document, or digital file, that circulates between cultures and temporal settings.
Purpose: Extending Reach:
The goal of translation is distribution, enabling a text to survive, travel, and find relevance among new readers and environments.
Translation as Adjustment:
When a text enters a new context, it often requires adaptation, for instance, a specialized report rewritten for general readers, or a literary work localized for another culture. Such adjustments preserve or expand the text’s accessibility.
Economic and Practical Logic:
Decisions about translation are shaped not only by linguistic or aesthetic considerations but also by economic and quantitative factors. If translation is too costly, organizations may choose alternatives, such as language training or localization, to maintain communicative efficiency (as seen in Pym’s Renault example).
Beyond Equivalence:
Pym shifts attention from achieving one-to-one linguistic equivalence to viewing translation as part of a continuous process of cultural and material movement, where meaning adapts to sustain the text’s function and circulation.
This material-distribution perspective deepens the understanding of translation as a dynamic, context-sensitive process, bridging linguistic transformation with the physical, economic, and cultural circulation of texts, a foundation that informs subsequent multimodal and multi-ontological models of translation.
Models and Frameworks
Multi-ontological and Multimodal Model:
A comprehensive model visualizes translation as interpreting a multimodal, material text, then reproducing a comparable sign complex suited to its specific co-textual and contextual environment.
Pettersson’s Cluster Conception:
Challenges the idea of texts as unitary entities, instead conceptualizing them as clusters of interconnected objects with ontologically distinct components, physical forms, signs, and interpretative meaning.
Translation as Semiotic, Material, and Contextual:
The process involves navigating and reconciling material constraints, semiotic sign complexes, and socio-cognitive factors.
Emphasizes asymmetry: interpreting the source's material multimodal signs and composing a target sign complex that fits into the recipient environment.
Co-Textual and Contextual Constraints
Co-text and Context:
The meaning in translation is heavily constrained and shaped by co-textual (immediate textual environment) and contextual (broader situational, cultural, and social) factors.
These constraints influence how signs are interpreted, stabilized, and reconstructed during translation.
Impact on Meaning Construction:
Meaning is constructed through an interaction of the material text, its semiotic sign complex, and environmental factors.
Recognizes the translation process as asymmetrical, emphasizing the importance of these constraints in shaping the final target output.
Implications and Future Directions
The approach offers a philosophically sustainable framework that connects traditional linguistic and cultural approaches with broader semiotic and material considerations.
Highlights the need for empirical case studies, especially in multimodal translation, digital environments, and cognitive approaches, stressing the relevance of extended cognition and materiality.
Calls for further research testing the concept of materiality in practical translation scenarios, including highly language-centric environments and multimodal contexts.
This article establishes materiality as a foundational principle for reconceptualizing translation as a general semiotic phenomenon, interplaying physical, semiotic, social, and cognitive factors, thus providing a broad and integrative framework applicable across diverse translation contexts and theories.
Summary
Riku Haapaniemi’s article proposes a material-semiotic model of translation, reframing it as a meaning-construction process shaped by co-textual and contextual constraints rather than a purely linguistic operation. Translation, in this view, involves the material interpretation and reproduction of semiotic sign complexes, textual, visual, and cognitive, embedded in social and physical environments. Drawing on semiotic theory, textual ontology, and multimodal frameworks, Haapaniemi positions the translator as both meaning-taker and meaning-maker, navigating asymmetrical processes of interpretation and recontextualization. Central to his argument is the idea that meaning emerges through the interplay of material forms, semiotic systems, and environmental factors, making translation an inherently situated, multimodal, and dynamic act of semiosis.
Critical Comments
Riku Haapaniemi’s article represents a significant step toward rethinking translation as a material-semiotic practice, moving decisively beyond the linguistic equivalence paradigm that has dominated Translation Studies for decades. His integration of semiotics, textual ontology, and multimodality situates translation within a wider ecology of meaning-making, one that acknowledges the interplay of physical, cognitive, and social dimensions in text production and reception. This shift aligns with recent “material turns” in the humanities, resonating with thinkers such as Latour, Kress, and Pym.
A major strength of the paper lies in its philosophical coherence: Haapaniemi successfully frames translation not as an isolated linguistic act but as an ongoing process of semiotic stabilization under material constraints. The translator’s dual role, as both meaning-taker and meaning-maker, is persuasively reinterpreted through this lens, highlighting translation’s inherent asymmetry and contextual dependency. By drawing on Pym’s notion of translation as material distribution, the article usefully extends theoretical discussions to the economic, spatial, and technological conditions that shape textual mobility.
However, the model’s abstract nature is also its principal limitation. While theoretically rich, it risks remaining under-empirical; Haapaniemi does not substantively demonstrate how the material-semiotic model might be operationalized in real translation settings, such as audiovisual, digital, or literary contexts. The lack of concrete case studies or textual analyses means the framework’s applicability is more suggested than proven. Furthermore, while the article gestures toward multimodality and extended cognition, these dimensions are treated conceptually rather than methodologically, leaving open questions about how translators actually negotiate material constraints in practice.
Another critical point concerns terminological density: terms like “sign complex,” “multi-ontological,” and “semiotic milieu,” though theoretically precise, may obscure rather than clarify the model for readers outside semiotic traditions. The article could benefit from clearer distinctions between materiality as ontology (the being of texts) and materiality as medium (their physical affordances).
Nonetheless, Haapaniemi’s contribution is undeniably original and ambitious. It broadens the epistemological scope of Translation Studies, encouraging scholars to consider translation as an ecological phenomenon, one that binds the textual, technological, and social worlds. In doing so, it offers fertile ground for future empirical inquiry into how translators mediate not only between languages, but between material realities.
From a researcher’s perspective, Haapaniemi’s model provides a compelling philosophical foundation for examining how meaning emerges under both co-textual and contextual pressures. My own work extends this discussion by exploring how materiality interacts with cultural specificity and pragmatic nuance, particularly in translating modal particles, idioms, and culturally embedded discourse markers. In this way, the material-semiotic model can be empirically grounded, connecting abstract theory with the lived realities of translators navigating multilingual and multimodal environments.
Postscript: Meanings are abstract or concrete?
In linguistics and translation studies, meanings are abstract, not concrete.
Here’s why, let me put it precisely:
Meaning is a conceptual or cognitive construct, it exists in the mind, not in the physical world.
What we perceive as meaning arises from the interpretation of signs (words, sounds, images, gestures) within a system, linguistic, social, or cultural.
The sign itself (a written word, spoken sound, or visual symbol) is concrete, it has physical form.
But the meaning it conveys, the mental concept or relation between signifier and signified, is abstract.
Example:
The word tree is a concrete written or spoken sign (you can see or hear it),
but the meaning “a perennial plant with a trunk and branches” is an abstract mental concept.
So, in short:
Signs are concrete; meanings are abstract.
Translation operates between these two dimensions, interpreting abstract meanings through concrete forms.
References
Haapaniemi, Riku. 2024. "Translation as Meaning-Construction under Co-Textual and Contextual Constraints: A Model for a Material Approach to Translation." Translation Studies, 17(1): 20–36. https://doi.org/10.1080/14781700.2022.2147988
Pym, A. (2003). The Moving Text. Localization, Translation, and Distribution. Benjamins Translation Library, 49.
