Page 59 - Decoding Culture

52 DECODING CULTURE

influential work (Cours de linguistique generale) and by the various
attempts to translate his key terms into English. The Cours was
first published in 1916, three years after Saussure's death, and was
based not on any manuscript that he left but on lecture notes taken
by his students. In consequence, there has been plenty of room for
Saussure scholars to argue that the editors of the Cours misrepre­
sented Saussure at key points, or presented his theories in an order
which would not have been embraced by the theorist himself. Such
argument has been fed by subsequent publication of some of the
lecture notes on which the original editors based their synthesis
(Saussure, 1993, 1996) , providing new opportunities for readers to
make their own critical reconstructions. However, since it is the
Cours as originally formulated which so influenced the rise of struc­
turalism, it will be on that version that I shall base my discussion.
The problem of translation is less easily resolved. Translators
and borrowers of Saussure's concepts have often struggled to find
acceptable English equivalents, most notably in relation to his piv­
otal use of the term langue and his account of the components of
the sign. In Roy Harris' translation (Saussure, 1983), which I shall
use here. langue is variably translated according to context, some­
times as 'the language' but more often as something like 'linguistic
structure' or 'language as a structured system'. One can readily
sympathize with Harris since the term itself is used variably in the
Cours and there is no direct equivalent in English. I shall resort to
the now common escape route of using langue untranslated. if nec­
essary quoting the original French from the Payot edition
(Saussure, 1969) . Notable differences are also found in transla­
tions of Saussure's terms signijie and signijiant. Harris uses
'signification' and 'signal' to translate these two, but since much of
the cultural studies literature has gravitated toward the more
clumsy 'signified' and 'signifier' I shall follow that practice. There
are also other issues of translation and usage. Les rapports

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