Roland Barthes (1915-1980) has been a leading French semiotician, philosopher and cultural critics, along with Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida. Barthes began his academic career as a freelance-writer for Comba during the late 1940s and for Le Lettres nouvelles during the early 1950s in Paris. His early writings on various topics, based on his existentialism and Marxist critique, were collected in Mythologies (1957) and the publication of the book was the beginning of Barthes'semiological research. His early semiology in Mythologies exposes the process of ideological distortions in the meaning of the sign. He calls the distorted sign as "myth." All kinds of sign in modern capitalistic society became "myth" through the process of "a tri-dimensional pattern" in the interaction of the signifier, the signified and the sign. A newly-defined meaning of the sign becomes to function as a new signifier. When this new signifier is interrelated with the signified of the sign tautologically, it produces another "sign" which is called "myth." From the process of "a tri-dimensional pattern" in myth-making, we missiologists may learn some important semiological lessons from Barthes' scholarship. Missionary translators have the similar task in mission field when they want to translate the terms and concepts of Christian faith into the local languages. When they translate the Christian term, they experience the same process of myth-making: the newly-translated term becomes a new sign, to which new religious meanings are accumulating. The sign becomes a new signifier after missionaries' translation of the term. But the most important aspect that we may learn from Roland Barthes's semiology is that it is local people who relate or accumulate new religious meanings into the newly translated terms. Through their acceptance and/or rejection of the term as their religious term, the newly-translated term, i.e., a new Christian sign, begins to possess new Christian meanings.

• 김상근(연세대)