Saussure and his Glj (general linguistics joker)

Abstract

The present article visits some of the major contributions given to Linguistics by Saussure based on the Course in General Linguistics (CLG) and to highlight to what extent his legacy influences nowadays the most varied areas of human knowledge. Hence the analogy made with the Joker which in some card games serves to complete any sequence of cards. For that, we speak, albeit briefly, on conceptual milestones of language, value and system present in the CLG trying to build a bridge between these concepts and the process of translation, thinking about how the translation could be reconfigured from a saussurian perspective of language and linguistic value. So, this article aims to put into dialogue the concepts present in the Course in General Linguistics, especially the concept of linguistic value, with the translation process, in which the apprehension of the linguistic values is fundamental to an adequate transposition of meaning from one language to the other. The importance of maintaining linguistic value in translation is illustrated by a brief analysis of excerpts from a chapter of the book Pollyanna by Eleanor Porter (2017). The reflections presented here indicate hoe limited it would be considering a translation uniquely as a sterile matching of terms or signs taken isolatedly, as a composition in themselves of signified (French Signifié) and signifier (French Signifiant), raising awareness about the need to respect the associative networks that configure the linguistic value of the sign in the moment of translation.