1.
There are some thoughts in a mind. The thoughts are joined. The thoughts are joined into something meaningful. The meaning is not necessarily determinate. The mind represents the meaning in language. The mind represents it in words joined into sentences. The sentences are uttered. Now there are some words on paper. There are utterances on paper. There are utterances joined into text. The text is a representation of some thoughts in a mind.
The text is not an exact representation of the thoughts in the mind. The text does not fully encode the meaning. The words and the sentences are semantically underdetermined. They are not big enough on their own to contain all the meaning. They are blueprints for understanding. The utterances and the text may convey some or all or none of the intended meaning.
2.
There are some words on paper. There is a text. The text is an input to a decoding process. Decoding delivers a semantic template representing the encoded content of the words and sentences. The representation is a semantic representation that is underdetermined in relation to the meaning. It falls short of the meaning. The mind fills in the gaps by means of inference. The text means nothing without a mind to fill in the gaps.
The mind represents the text by combining the decoded semantic content with assumptions about the world and the possible intentions of the writer. It adds things up and works things out and makes informed guesses. The representations so delivered are contextually determined. They may bear some greater or lesser degree of resemblance to the writer’s intended meaning.
3.
They may bear some greater or lesser degree of resemblance to the writer’s intended meaning.
4.
The number of representations of the text is equal to the number of readers of the text.
5.
What am I translating? What am I not translating?
6.
I am translating my representations of the text. My representations of the text may bear some greater or lesser degree of resemblance to the writer’s intended meaning. I am striving to encode my representations of the text in another text. I am striving to encode my representations of the text in words and sentences whose encoded semantic content will provide an input to decoding and inference that is as similar as possible to that provided by the words and sentences in the original text. I am striving to encode my representations of the text in words and sentences that are stylistically as similar as possible to those in the original text.
7.
I am not trying to encode the thoughts in the writer’s mind. I have no direct access to the thoughts in the writer’s mind. The writer can only convey to me the nature of the thoughts in her mind by encoding her representations of those thoughts in language.
8.
I am doing my best to produce a text that provides just the right input to cognitive processing as will yield representations as similar as possible to my own representations of the original text.
9.
That’s it.
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