The paper first presents conceptual and textual motivations and then translation solutions that inform a new Slovene edition of Saussure's Cours de linguistique générale (1916). This scientific text ...not only influenced the main directions in modern linguistics, but affected analytical thought in all areas of the humanities and social sciences. In collaboration with the editorial team, Saša Jerele, the translator, paid particular attention to the analysis of terminological dichotomies, the core of Saussure's linguistic ideas. Following translation traditions, she considered the latest interpretations of this key text, which was condensed in the decade before the centennial of the original (2006-2016). The editor's and translator's reflections focus especially on the text's title as well as the elementary dialectics of theoretical relations between language (langue) and speech (parole), signifier and signified, synchrony and diachrony, and the crucial concepts of the linguistic sign and its arbitrariness.
Although efforts have been under way for the past two centuries to treat language scientifically, linguists and others who work with language, speech, or communication have not found an adequate ...scientific foundation in current linguistic theory. Many of the difficulties are caused by longstanding confusions between the logical domain of science and grammar and the physical domain of sound waves and the people who speak and understand.In this book, therefore, the last impediments of tradition, the ancient semiotic-grammatical foundations of linguistics, are set aside. We move into the physical domain, where theories and hypotheses can be tested against observations of the physical reality. Here new foundations are laid that are fully consonant with modern science as practiced in physics, chemistry, and biology.On these foundations is built a structure of testable specific dynamic causal laws of communicative behavior that provides support for treating previously recalcitrant context-dependent semantic, pragmatic, interactive, rhetorical, and literary phenomena. The central role of context in the foundations of the theory provides the insights of scientific lawfulness while still honoring the particularity of situations celebrated in the humanities.
