Text Entropy as Dispersion of Meaning

Abstract

This article analyses the entropy of the language system in general and text entropy in particular. Based on the study of entropy in linguistics, the authors aim to substantiate the concept of text entropy and describe the process of chronotopic translation. Works viewing entropy as a measure of randomness, as a degree of disorder and as a measure of uncertainty were considered; an understanding of text entropy as a degree of dispersion of meaning is suggested. The scientific significance of the paper lies in turning to Jacques Derrida’s works and substantiating that chronotopic translation is a transition from the source language to the target language with an inevitable loss of the communicative-situational meaning of the source text. Language entropy determines a language’s ability to express the thoughts of native speakers, while speech entropy enables a person to achieve the cognitive goals of an utterance and can involve intentional and unintentional deviations from the norm. The authors believe that, today,
a translation should not be evaluated from the point of view of adequacy and equivalence due to the relativity of these concepts. Based on the research of leading scientists and using text interpretability, the authors introduce the concept of chronotopic translation as a possible way to overcome the dispersion of meaning as well as analyse the conditions resulting in the loss of meaning when translating temporal and spatial layers of the source texts. The paper concludes that when doing chronotopic translation, it is necessary to take into account the general context, the main tiers and grammatical features of the language and speech of the source and target texts, the traditions of written and oral speech and the entropy of the target text, which, in its turn, is a result of inevitable semantic, stylistic or cultural losses in the target text caused by chronotopic translation.