According to renowned linguist and semiotician Roman Jakobson, translation can be divided into three general categories: intralingual translation, interlingual translation, and intersemiotic translation/transmutation. Unlike the first two categories, intersemiotic transmutation lacks the usual isomorphism that exist between a source and its target, but that should not deter us from discovering an underlying universal process of two-step interpretation that is involved in transmuting painting as a nonverbal sign into art criticism which is mostly verbal. Put simply, painting as a special form of human communication relies heavily on iconicity between “representamen” and its “object,” but this is only the first step on our way toward the hidden meaning of a visual text. To achieve the latter goal, we also need – often, but not always, through indexical reasoning – to make connections between a painting and its sociohistorical context in the manner of logical abduction as proposed by Charles Sanders Peirce rather than structural differentiation as advocated by Ferdinand de Saussure. Compared with iconic correspondences, indexical relations are far more arbitrary and therefore extremely difficult to reconstruct.

中文翻译：

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改变绘画符号

著名语言学家和符号学家罗曼·雅各布森认为，翻译可以分为三大类：语内翻译、语间翻译和符号间翻译/嬗变。与前两个类别不同，符号间嬗变缺乏源与其目标之间通常存在的同构，但这不应阻止我们发现两步解释的潜在普遍过程，该过程涉及将绘画作为非语言符号转化为艺术批评大多是口头的。简而言之，绘画作​​为人类交流的一种特殊形式，很大程度上依赖于“代表”与其“对象”之间的象似性，但这只是我们走向视觉文本隐藏意义的第一步。为了实现后一个目标，我们还需要——通常但并非总是通过索引推理——以查尔斯·桑德斯·皮尔斯提出的逻辑溯因的方式，而不是费迪南德主张的结构分化的方式，在绘画与其社会历史背景之间建立联系。德·索绪尔.与图标对应相比，索引关系更加任意，因此极难重建。