Translating friendship alternatively through disciplines, epochs, and cultures

Traditional notions of translation (TN or ‘narrow translation’) have had a primary focus on text translation and how meaning can be preserved. This chapter employs an alternative semiotic understanding of translation (TS or ‘semiotic translation’), as suggested by Kobus Marais, to demonstrate how it can be used to study inter-epoch changes in norm-directed practices and their conceptualizations, cross-cultural developments and interdisciplinary translations of concepts used to describe them. Friendship practices and their theoretical descriptions are used as a case to show the need for alternative understandings of translation processes. TS occurs not only when texts are taken as signs of complex phenomena but also when a mode of life and the sociolinguistic practice of one generation or culture is interpreted and changed by its inheritors. To develop TS as a general and theoretically more satisfying model, we investigate some of the processes involved in the inter-epoch conceptualizations and cross-cultural developments of friendship. Claiming that different friendship studies all contribute to knowledge of some aspects of ‘the same’ phenomenon demands the possibility of translations of ‘friendship’ as a word, concept, practice, interpersonal relationship, social bond, ideal, form of love, normative constraint, power relation or any other terms that have been used to characterize its phenomenology and dynamics. Analysing TS translations of friendship across epochs (from Confucius and Aristotle through the following eras, up to modernity), cultures (worldwide) and languages demonstrates how the perspective of TS helps us grasp ancient texts, their translations and cross-cultural friendship performances better without forcing upon the material our late-modern perspectives and norms. It is suggested that frames (from artificial intelligence and philosophy of science) can be an analytic tool for studying TS processes. Finally, some challenges to be resolved in further research are outlined.