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claims, "free from the formal contamination of the objects to which
they refer". (1964, p31) Nida's choice of the word
'contamination' is not a fortunate coincidence. It may have been
inspired by his too much preoccupation with Bible translating.
Nevertheless, he could have chosen a less poignant term. The
relationship between sign and signatum, word and thing, form and
object is a long-standing one. As signs are determiners of the
objects to which they refer, it is the object as an item of
external reality which inspires the word by which it is identified.
Objects exited in the external world long before their verbal
signs.
Linguistic symbols are context-free only when used in
isolation. This, however, does not mean that words in isolation
are meaningless or devoid of any signification. On the contrary, a
word is significant in so far as it refers to a specific, distinct
physical or non-physical object or entity. Only when words or
word-combinations are used in a certain context do they become
context-bound. Roman Jakobson, in his article "On Linguistic
Aspects of Translation" adds a semiotic dimension to the meaning of
the word. He distinguishes three ways of interpreting a verbal
sign, and moves therefrom to distinguish three types of
translation:
(1) "Intralingual translation, or re-wording, is an
interpretation of verbal signs by means of other signs of
the same langauge.
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