Internet Memes: A Cognitive Approach to the Issue of Semantic Translatability

The article concentrates on the issue of readability of Ukrainian memes revolving around the current war conflict. In the research, we verify the hypothesis that there is a range of cultural and arguably wider (exegetic and political) contextual factors that may hinder the perception of the semantic value rendered in the memes. The article discusses the procedure of pinpointing these factors via the directed associative experiment. As a theoretical prerequisite, we consider each meme a Barthian cluster of verbalized narratives that may or may not be read by the insider or an outsider of Ukrainian culture. A two‑staged experiment sheds light on the cognitive mechanism of forming the meme narratives by decomposing the process of their semiosis among both the insiders and the outsiders. Randomly culled from a corpus of 1,000 Ukrainian war memes,1 24 memes were first offered to 10 Ukrainian informants to edit a cluster of narratives, and then to 10 non‑Ukrainian respondents to confirm or decline the contextual elements of the suggested clusters. As a result, the following three basic samples of the memes have been singled out: semantically translatable memes, i.e. the memes, whose narrative contexts and clusters are detected by both groups; partially semantically translatable memes that suggest the narratives whose contexts have similar salience for the two groups of respondents; and semantically untranslatable memes, whose narratives have different salience for the two groups of informants. We pinpoint the tendencies in detecting different contexts by the insiders and outsiders of the culture that also influence semantic translatability of memes. Ultimately our study shows that even though they are shared online and may be accessed worldwide, some of the memes in our corpus are most likely to be misunderstood by outsiders, and would require additional explanation. To understand the impact of semantically untranslatable memes, we call for studies on the (un)availability of explanations in social networks.