“Light Effect”: Translation as Reflection, Refraction and Diffraction of Meaning

Every translation experience reveals a very special phenomenon: the simultaneously unitary and differentiated character of meaning. One needs only leaf through a bilingual dictionary to realise that a 1: 1 (synonymic) relationship between the lexical apparatus of two languages is simply impossible. This means that the meaning of a word splits up, fractionates or differentiates into several meanings from one language to the other, or conversely, that many meanings are merged into one. I propose to consider this phenomenon by analogy with the effects of light – reflection, refraction, and diffraction –, and consequently translation as the experiment that reveals the simultaneously undulatory (continuous, unitary) and corpuscular (atomic, fractional) character of meaning.