Translation from rags to riches in Jakobson
Translation from rags to riches in Jakobson

Summary/Abstract: Jakobson’s contribution to the science of translation is invaluable - and undervalued: citations from Jakobson tend to be drawn from the bestknown article, while the rest of his work is mostly ignored. Just think that, while “On linguistic aspects of translation” (Jakobson 1971c[1959]) was cited 5882 times, other seminal papers on which, for example, this paper is based were cited, on average, from 20 to 100 times less (Google Scholar 2020). His work on translation – and on sign systems in general that can be applied to translation as well - was mostly done in the last quarter of century of his life. Therefore, his first articles go back to the 1950s, a time when translation science - in the Western part of Europe and in Italy in particular - used to be considered a secondary branch of lexical linguistics, and semiotics was ignored by most researchers.

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