Vol. 5/2009 - Facultatea de Litere

Translation Studies: Retrospective and Prospective Views ISSN 2065-3514
(2009) Year II, Issue 5
Galaţi University Press
Editors: Elena Croitoru & Floriana Popescu
Proceedings of the 4th Conference Translation Studies: Retrospective and Prospective Views
8-9 October 2009, “Dunărea de Jos” University, Galaţi, ROMÂNIA
pp. 160-161
BOOK REVIEWS
Umberto Eco, O teorie a semioticii, translated from English by Cezar Radu and Costin
Popescu, ediţia a 2-a, revizuită, Bucureşti: Editura Trei, 2008, 498 p., ISBN 978-973-707-218-4
The Romanian now culture will benefit from a new translation of Eco’s contributions
presented in the volume entitled A Theory of Semiotics.
Eco’s evenly-balanced four-chapter work covers, in its Romanian version, almost five
hundred pages. A brief foreword describes about the author’s painstaking process of
thinking and, later on, re-making the book which had been planned to be written firstly in
Italian and eventually to be translated into English. The author actually points to the
difference between what he had in mind and what the final result was. A preliminary
version was written and published in 1967, under the title Appunti per una semiologia delle
comunicazioni visive, and one year later, a more theoretical one, with a longer epistemological
approach to structuralism, appeared as La struttura assente.
Beyond the work itself, our attention was drawn by Eco’s confessions, developed in
this forword, about the translational aspects of his endeavours. A two-year’s work on
French, German, Spanish and Swedish translated versions involving the restructuring,
augmentation and improvement of the Italian version resulted in a new work, mid-placed
between La struttura assente and something else, as the author himself states it. So, efforts
continued and in 1971 a collection of essays was published, Le forme del contenuto. The
unsuccessful attempts at translating this last volume into English led to the author’s decision
to write this work in English. Now that the book-making details were mentioned, its concise
portrait will be drawn in what follows.
The book opens with an introduction, “Introducere: Către o logică a culturii”, which
paves the way to the body proper. The presentation of the research aim is followed by a
narrowing of the theoretical background, with the rationale intended to find the right place
for semiotics: is it a field or an academic subject? A well-argued view will start, as the author
does it, from the discussion of communication limits, political and then natural ones (with
recourse to Saussure’s and Pierce’s linguistic distinctions and definitions, respectively).
Within the natural limits framework, the concept of inference, the (non-intentional) signs,
physical information, as well as epistemological limits are considered.
The first chapter, “Semnificare şi comunicare”, starts from practical examples intended
to create a background wherein the basic notions could be set. An elementary but
fundamental model of communication makes the object of the beginning of this chapter, also
focusing on systems and codes.
The second chapter, “Teoria codurilor”, is very consistent and develops fifteen
substructures in an attempt to accurately describe the theory of codes. The preamble,
“Funcţia-semn” emphasizes Eco’s thesis according to which there are no signs but signfunctions.
A double perspective in the next infrastructure of the chapter distinguishes
between denotation and connotation, message and text, content and referent, Sinn (i.e., a
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