Online Lecture Series

ABSTRACTS

Translating Cosmovisions: Knowledges in Transformation

The epistemic dimension of translation: Identifying cosmovision factors

Rafael Schögler (University of Graz)

Starting from the premise that any translation is a form of knowledge-making and knowledge is power in the sense that it is “a capacity for action” (Stehr, 1994), we will reflect upon the connection of epistemic power and translation in general terms, before taking this reflection into the context of translation for/by indigenous peoples. Our input will draw on findings from the research project “Towards a Cosmovision Turn – Challenging Basic Translation Theory” to identify the “cosmovision factor” in translation. Starting from the definition of cosmovision by the Consejo Regional del Cauca (2004, 83) that describes cosmovisions as “diverging ways of perceiving world(s) and acting in them”, we will connect dimensions of knowledge-making and knowledge-transformation with forms of acting and agency. Identifying “cosmovision factors” in translation thus means to acknowledge difference in meaning-making, but also in forms of acting in world(s).

Interpreting the jaguar: Transgressing boundaries of knowledge through translation

Christina Korak (University of Graz)

Our analysis of an interpreting scene comprising the important Amazonian figure of the jaguar and the meñera (jaguar shaman of Ecuador’s Waorani people) provides a case in point for such an acknowledging of indigenous ontologies through translation. We base our contribution on perspectivist notions on translation as brought forward by Viveiros de Castro (1998) but link these to indigenous peoples’ current struggles for the respect for their collective rights. Thus, our analysis of how the Waorani people of Ecuador proceed to interpret a message of the jaguar, who had possessed the body of the meñera, from the indigenous language Waoterero into Spanish shows that identifying cosmovision factors in translation also bears important political ramifications. We argue that the effects of the jaguar’s message have to be contextualized within the Waorani’s struggle for an intact territory free from oil exploitation for both the contacted family groups and even more urgently for the groups who still remain in isolation. Shapeshifting in and through translation thus turns also into a political quest of acknowledging indigenous ontologies for translation theory-building as well as translation practices.

Rafael Schögler is Associate Professor of Translation Studies at the University of Graz, Austria. He studied translation studies and sociology and has spent time as a visiting researcher at both CenTras, London and CTIS, Manchester. His research deals with divergent aspects of knowledge translation ranging from questions of internationalization to the politics of book translation. In this context he published the edited volume Circulation of Academic Thought. Rethinking Translation in the Academic Field (2019) as well as the open access monograph Die Politik der Buchübersetzung. Entwicklungslinien in den Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaften nach 1945 (2023). Currently, he is involved in the project Towards a Cosmovision Turn. Challenging Basic Translation Theories that deals with translation in indigenous communities and its links to the development of translation theories in the context of missionary work.

Christina Korak works as interpreter for migrants and is PostDoc researcher at the Department of Translation Studies, University of Graz. In the project Towards a Cosmovision Turn - Challenging Basic Translation Theory, she explores to which extent study programmes and diplomas for interpreting and translating in indigenous languages in Peru, Mexico and Ecuador contribute to a decolonisation of translation theories. In-between worlds of capitalism, indigenous knowledge and cosmovisions were also the focus of her large field study on interpreting and translating between the Waorani hunters and gatherers of the Ecuadorian Amazon, oil companies, missionaries and NGO workers. In 2024, Promedia will publish her book Den Jaguar dolmetschen. Sprachgebrauch und Rechte der Waorani Ecuadors (Interpreting the Jaguar. Language use and Rights of Ecuador’s Waorani people).

Stabilizing Philosophical Categories as Interepistemic Translation

Douglas Robinson (Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen)

Xiaorui Sun (Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen)

The theme for this mini-conference is the interepistemic translationality of the way a certain kind of thinker or intellectual tradition imposes a false stability on philosophical complexity. The implicit (or sometimes explicit) context for that theme is the assumption that a lived/situated/embodied experience and/or attitude is better (more realistic, more useful) than a false stability/structure; sometimes stabilization is presented as a corrective to lived complexity, other times as bad theory that calls for retheorization in lived/situated/experienced complexity.

Doug Robinson’s paper explores these tensions in stabilizing readings of destabilized ordinary-language philosophy (Wittgenstein, Austin, and Grice), while Xiaorui Sun’s explores them in the “abnormal” or “dissident” strain of Western philosophy from Anaximēnēs through Spinoza and Nietzsche to Gilles Deleuze in terms of potential influence from ancient Chinese thought. In her paper the goal is both Chinese qi theory as an “original” complexity that later theorists have attempted to stabilize and Deleuze’s hysteria theory as a corrective complexity that seeks to restore something like qi theory to Western stabilizations.

Douglas Robinson is one of the world’s leading translation scholars, with two dozen monographs and five dozen journal articles and book chapters on translation theory—not to mention the world’s leading English-language anthology of translation theory readings, Western Translation Theory from Herodotus to Nietzsche, and the world’s leading English-language textbook for novice translators, Becoming a Translator. Even more important is the fact that almost every book he has ever written about translation is itself an interepistemic translation between translation studies and some other discipline: behavioral economics, Douglas Hofstadter’s strange loops, transgender studies, translational-medicine and the medical humanities, semiotics, rhetoric, etc. He translates literature from Finnish and is Professor of Translation Studies and Head of the Division of Intercultural Communication at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen.

Xiaorui Sun is a doctoral student at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and author of articles on translation published in the Journal of Translation Studies, Translation Matters, and Babel.

Cyber-Translation: Proposals for Studying Human-Machine Epistemic Translation

Marco Neves (University of NOVA, Lisbon/CETAPS)

The connection of artificial intelligence (AI) and digital media has transformed the landscape of knowledge production and dissemination in a way that is still to be fully understood. This lecture inaugurates the 'Cyber-Translation' strand within the EPISTRAN project, focusing on the intricate processes of (inter-)epistemic translation at the human-machine nexus. The lecture will map out a territory for exploration inside our project, presenting six lines of enquiry:

How scientific knowledge is reshaped within digital platforms: We could examine the transformations that occur as information traverses from traditional formats to digital media. The dynamics of collective knowledge formation will be analyzed, particularly the interplay between individual contributions and communal understanding through digital interactions such as comments, reactions and re-elaborations of digital items.
How 'epistemological bubbles' are created and destroyed in the digital realm: Here we could question whether digital communication fosters cross-epistemic engagement or perpetuates isolated discourses. Is digital discourse creating bubbles or simply making them more visible (and maybe more durable)?
The nature of machine-generated 'natural language': does this represent a form of 'domesticated machinese'—a translation of machine logic into human-readable formats. How can we deal with this reality?
The societal translation of AI: this might contrast communities that create and/or embrace AI technologies with those that resist, exploring strategies for effective communication across this divide, which is clearly epistemic in nature.
The potential of AI as an epistemic translator: Epistemic translation consists of processes that create knowledge through transformation. Can human knowledge be translated into more human knowledge using AI as the translator?
AI’s potential as an effective inter-epistemic translator: if we understand inter-epistemic translation as a process of transporting knowledge between different epistemes, can AI help bridge diverse human knowledge systems?

By integrating philosophical perspectives with practical considerations, this new strand aims to investigate AI's role in human epistemology and the complexities of human-machine interactions in the digital age inside a framework of (inter-)epistemic translation

Marco Neves has a PhD in Translation Studies and is Assistant Professor at NOVA FCSH and a researcher with CETAPS. He is one of the coordinators of the EPISTRAN project and part of the editorial board of Translation Matters. He has published books and articles on language and culture and is particularly interested in exploring connections between literary, linguistic and scientific knowledge, and the way humans interact with artificial intelligence.

Literary Translation in Cyberspace: Medium Theory and Epistemic Dimensions

Raluca Tanasescu

This presentation explores the positioning of literary translation in digital space, drawing on Lars Elleström’s medium-focused communication model (2018, 2023) to examine the spatial and sonic dimensions of literary translation within digitally mediated environments. It considers how platform relationality influences the communication model in literary translation and expands it to incorporate multimedial and multimodal approaches, highlighting the epistemic processes undergone by literary translation in navigating and adapting to digital formats. As we enter the second half of the digital revolution, the paper argues that literary translation scholarship must recognize the role of digital infrastructures—including platforms, tools, and algorithms—in shaping literary translators’ perceptions of modality and mediality.

The presentation will highlight the overlooked role of textuality in linking literary translation and digital spaces, challenging the tendency of current research to confine literary translation to print media (Tanasescu and Tanasescu 2022) and to treat digital platforms as mere paratextual novelties. Despite case studies on literary translation and the technoscape (Lee 2015), media convergence (Wang 2022, Tanasescu and Tanasescu 2019), and translators as agents of change (Desjardins, Larsonneur, and Lacour 2021), the material impact of digital infrastructures on translated literary texts remains underexplored. This paper calls for a more nuanced understanding of the communicative model underlying literary translation, urging the integration of medium-awareness and platform relationality. In the process of becoming a ‘digital trace’ (Latour 2014; Venturini et al. 2017), literary translation incorporates the modes of engagement and understanding that accompany the digital medium. As platforms and code mediate the transmission and reception of texts, they impose new epistemic structures on translation, shaping how texts are reconfigured and remediated in cyberspace.

Raluca Tanasescu earned her PhD from the University of Ottawa’s School of Translation and Interpretation, with a thesis on Romanian translations of contemporary North American poetry. She is currently a researcher in Translation and Global Media at the University of Galway, Ireland and currently serves as Chair of the Multilingualism and Multiculturalism Committee for the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations. She is interested in how digitality upholds intersemiotic and interepistemic translation processes, particularly the ways in which digital writing becomes a form of intersemiotic and interepistemic translation. Her research examines how digital media reshape not only the modes but also the meanings of translation, encouraging a dynamic interaction between texts, images, and sounds.

The Jesuits as inter-epistemic translators in the Americas

Karen Bennett (NOVA University of Lisbon / CETAPS)

This lecture looks at the Jesuits’ attempts to transplant European ideas to the Americas as a form of inter-epistemic translation and argues that this operated not only horizontally (across space) but also vertically (through time), in the sense that the new understandings that resulted from their linguistic experiments helped bring about a major philosophical shift that ultimately propelled Europe into the modern age.

When the Jesuits set out on their missions, in the early 16th century, they will have thought the Christian message they were going to transmit constituted an absolute, incontrovertible Truth that would be expressible in any language, no matter how primitive or pagan. However, the experience on the ground seems to have taught them otherwise. Their struggle to make European notions intelligible in languages that lacked the basic conceptual categories necessary for them to make sense seems to have shaken their inherited beliefs in universal grammar and sacred etymologies, and caused them to consider the possibility that meaning might instead be generated through usage in context (“communication theory avant la lettre”).

This lecture surveys the various strategies that the Jesuits used to transmit European ideas in the Americas, focusing not only on religious concepts but also on the scientific knowledge that they took over and how this was related to the indigenous knowledges that they found there. It concludes that, far from being the dogmatic purveyors of reactionary ideas, as they are often portrayed, the Jesuits were very sophisticated inter-epistemic translators who ultimately proved to be a progressive force in the development of human knowledge.

Karen Bennett has an MA and PhD in Translation Studies, and teaches Translation at Nova University, Lisbon, where she is Associate Professor and Coordinator of the Master’s programme in Translation. She also coordinates the Translationality strand at the research unit CETAPS (Centre for English, Translation and Anglo-Portuguese Studies) and the EPISTRAN project, and is general editor of the journal Translation Matters and member of the editorial board of the Brill series Approaches to Translation Studies.

The Mexican Cabinet of Natural History: Scientific (missed)translations of the natural world

Cristian M. Torres-Gutierrez (University of Oslo)

Impetus for exploration guided by scientific curiosity made use of imperial global networks in which the circulation of knowledge relied on new epistemic spaces within colonial systems of exchange. One example of this is the role of Cabinets of Natural History. Cabinets were instruments that attempted to create repositories of knowledge employing a scientific methodology that would index and classify the natural world. The collections featured in Cabinets served as technologies into which nature became a sedimented attestation of scientific theories. In this talk, I will explore the role of animal as objects within the Mexican Cabinet of Natural History (1790) as well as the transformations they underwent in order to be displayed. By exploring the processes of translation, taxidermy, and taxonomic classification, I will show how a dissociation in the mode of relating to animals emerged, which was enhanced by a process of epistemic-translation in which the encoding of experience occurred as bodies were transformed into animal-objects displayed and displaced from the endemic place of a natural habitat into an epistemic space for public instruction in natural history.

Cristian Torres is a PhD Researcher in Cultural History and Museology at the University of Oslo. His current PhD project titled, Memories still remain: Collecting and Archiving the Indigenous World in Colonial Mexico, explores the preservation and transformation of indigenous knowledge systems in the process of incorporating them as archivable records. Drawing insights from critical archival studies and cultural translation, the project considers the creation of an archive and a collection as reliant on the instrumentation of translation practices that achieve commensurability while emphasising difference. He was previously the Co-Investigator of an Imagining Futures commissioned project that created an archive in the Maya community of Sotuta, Yucatan in Mexico, which recorded contemporary practices stemming from following the foodpaths of the town, including those that pertain to nutrition, therapeutics, and sustainable agriculture. He received a joint MA in Crossways in Cultural Narratives from the Universities of St. Andrews in Scotland, Santiago de Compostela in Spain, and Bergamo in Italy, and a BA in English from the National Autonomous University of Mexico.

Tracing nomenclature in translation: how the antiphlogiston paradigm made its way into anglophone scientific discourse (and stayed there)

Jennifer Dobson (U. NOVA, Lisbon/CETAPS)

The chemical revolution in late eighteenth-century Europe represented a major shift in scientific understanding, notably the rejection of the phlogiston theory, which proposed phlogiston as a substance present in all flammable bodies, and released when these were burned. The French chemist Antoine Lavoisier led the charge against the theory with a group of French antiphlogiston chemists. The most prominent defenders of phlogiston were the Anglophone chemists Richard Kirwan and Joseph Priestley.

In 1787, the antiphlogiston group published a new method of chemical nomenclature (Lavoisier et al. 1787), one that removed all traces of phlogiston theory (and, incidentally, of alchemy) from chemical terminology. The method was translated into English for the first time in 1788, but the new system was not immediately adopted ubiquitously by the anglophone scientific community, although it ultimately went on to form the foundations of modern chemistry as it still exists today.

This paper will trace the translational processes by which the antiphlogiston paradigm was integrated into English scientific discourse. This tracing will involve textual analysis of translations into English of works by the French antiphlogiston chemists and works published in English by the anglophone chemists. These will include treatises, memoires and letters/communications published in English, for example submissions to Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society and Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy. The analysis will also pay particular attention to how the second translation of the method of nomenclature, published in 1794, affected the anglophone chemists’ use of the terminology.

Jennifer Dobson is a first-year PhD student in the Translation Studies programme at UCP and NOVA in Lisbon. She holds a BSc in Chemistry with French, and an MSc in Scientific, Technical and Medical translation. She has professional experience as a scientific and medical translator, and is particularly interested in research at the intersection of translation studies with these disciplines.

Francisco de Arruda Furtado: Epistemically translating Darwin in 19th Portuguese popularizations

Pedro Navarro (FFCLRP - University of São Paulo/CETAPS)

Departing from a ‘continuum model’ which holds science popularization as inseparable from science communication, this paper examines the popularization of science through the lens of interepistemic translation and translationality. The popularization of Darwinism in Portugal by the Azorean naturalist Francisco de Arruda Furtado (1854-1887) is presented as a case study. Darwin met a lot of public and scientific resistance to his ideas when he first published them in 1859. By the next decade, he himself noticed the change of atmosphere regarding the transformation of species. Evolutionism, Darwinian or not, was now the dominant view (Darwin 1872, pp. 1-2). Arruda Furtado thus popularized Darwin to a readership that was already much more familiar with these issues. However, he did so in a very different context: late 19th Portugal, which was a very Catholic, unstable and peripheral Empire governed by a semi-constitutional monarchy.

Building on my previous work on Brazilian popularizations by Augusto César de Miranda Azevedo (Navarro 2024), this talk emphasizes the importance of translation (interlingual and inter-epistemic) for the global circulation and reception of scientific knowledge.

Pedro Navarro is a biologist and biology teacher. Currently he is finishing his PhD in History of Biology at the University of São Paulo with a dissertation on the translations of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species and Descent of Man in Brazil and Portugal.

Bridging Knowledge: Exploring medical translation through translation studies and the cultural history of science

John Ødemark (University of Oslo)

We often tend to view translation in purely discursive terms; that is, as the act of carrying over and rendering one language into another. However, in fields like anthropology and the history and philosophy of science, questions about the commensurability of knowledge across different disciplines, places, and times have long been associated with the term “translation” — thus underscoring the inter-epistemic and intercultural aspects of translation. Over the past two decades, moreover, translation has also emerged as a key term in the natural sciences, particularly in medicine, where knowledge translation (KT) refers to a set of research activities united by the common goal of bridging the gap between science in laboratories and clinical practice. More generally, it involves putting research-based knowledge into practice within frameworks for evidence-based policy (EBP).

In this talk, I aim both to critique and make a positive contribution to KT by viewing it through lenses from translation studies and the cultural history of science. I maintain that the epistemological paradigm of KT has serious flaws, which also make it vulnerable to attacks from “populist relativism” and other “merchants of doubt.” The paradigm assumes that KT, as science, is a culturally neutral endeavour, whereas other epistemic cultures, including local and traditional knowledge, are considered “barriers” to integrating science into policy and practice. Moreover, the process of generating knowledge is construed as distinct from the translation process, where knowledge is “potted” as a finished product at the beginning of the translation process and then “implanted” in a new context. In contrast, I assume that science is not a universal enterprise to generate context-free facts to be translated intact to local contexts. Rather, both the production and the reception of science are characterized by diverse cultural and epistemic contexts, where both facts and values are regularly contested. Acknowledging this translational epistemology, I maintain, may actually increase the effectiveness of KT.

John Ødemark is Professor of Cultural History with an emphasis on cultural encounters. His main research theme is epistemic and cultural translation, early modern cultural encounters, medical humanities, and the history of the human sciences. He is PI of the research project Bodies in Translation: Science, Knowledge and Sustainability in Cultural Translation funded by the Research Council of Norway. He has published widely in both cultural history and medical humanities. His latest book is the coedited volume The Sociology of Translation and the Politics of Sustainability-Explorations Across Cultures and Natures (Routledge 2024).

Science translated into Literature: from Ian McEwan's novels to Richard Dawkins’ metaphors

Marco Neves (NOVA University of Lisbon/CETAPS)

This paper will present a reading of Ian McEwan’s novels and Richard Dawking’s popular science books as translations of scientific discourse (as source text/discourse) into literary discourse (as target text/discourse), contrasting this interdiscursive translation (a specific instance of epistemic translation) with mere use of science as a theme in other authors. Translation, in this analysis, will be used not as a simple metaphor for communication, but as a conceptualization of techniques applied by the authors to change and adapt source texts (which the article will identify) into target texts (McEwan’s novels and Dawkins’ essays). These epistemic translation techniques can be the same as interlingual translation techniques (explicitation, addition and omission) or specific to interdiscursive translation (e.g. metaphor, defamiliarization, provocation and contrast). The papers will look at both authors at the same time as a way of illuminating how epistemic translation can be found in both fiction and non-fiction and how specific techniques can be found in both authors. In this way, the paper will contribute to create a specific epistemic translation framework that can be applied to other authors.

Translating landscape into poetry and translating landscape poetry: the Scottish Gaelic poem Moladh Beinn Dòbhrain (“In Praise of Ben Dorain”), its eco-political interpretations and English (re)translations

Oliver Currie (University of Ljubljana)

Duncan Bàn MacIntyre’s long poem Moladh Beinn Dòbhrain (“Praise of Ben Dorain”), composed in the mid 18th century (MacIntyre 1978:196-225), is a classic of Scottish Gaelic and Scottish literature more literature more generally; it is regularly included in anthologies of Scottish poetry and has been translated into English no fewer than ten times in the past 150 years, including by Hugh MacDiarmid (1941:43-58), Iain Crichton Smith (1969) and most recently by Alan Riach (2013) and Garry Mackenzie (2019, 2021). Moladh Beinn Dòbhrain is celebrated above all as a virtuoso nature poem, a eulogy of a mountain (Beinn Dòbhrain) and the deer that inhabit it, seemingly from both from the deer’s and hunter’s perspective (Crichton Smith 1986:132-135). At the same time, Moladh Beinn Dòbhrain has been interpreted as a political poem, obliquely asserting the right of the people, symbolised by the deer, to live on their ancestral lands, from which they were soon to be evicted and replaced by sheep as part of the Highland Clearances (Gillies 1977; Black 2001:490-493). The basis for the political interpretation lies not in the text of the poem itself, but rather in its intertextuality and place in a wider Gaelic poetic and cultural tradition, including not only earlier Gaelic panegyric poetry, but also later poems by Duncan Bàn MacIntyre lamenting the lost communities and the changed landscape of Beinn Dòbhrain overrun by sheep (MacIntyre 1978:174-183, 386-391), as well as Sorley MacLean’s influential and explicitly anti-Clearance poem Hallaig (MacLean 1989:226-230).

This paper first explores how the landscape of the Scottish Highlands is translated into poetry as a form of eco-translation (Cronin 2017:6) in Moladh Beinn Dòbhrain, which not only records the mountain, its vegetation and wildlife in intricate detail but also humanises it, both revealing the human interaction with the landscape and in part anthropomorphising it. Then, the paper explores how the poem has been reinterpreted and (re)translated and linked in turn to contemporary political and ecological issues concerning people’s relationship to the land, such as environmental degradation and restoration, the Highland Clearances, land ownership and land reform as well as tenants’ rights. The translators of Moladh Beinn Dòbhrain have used very different and creative strategies to convey political or other interpretations of the poem, which blur the boundaries of translation, creative writing and literary criticism. These strategies include creative translation combined with creative criticism (MacKenzie 2019, 2021), composing original poems inspired by Moladh Beinn Dòbhrain (MacDiarmid 1941; Crichton Smith 2011) or writing critical articles (Riach 2016, 2015; Crichton Smith 1986) which also function as paratexts to the translations (Batchelor 2018:142) and as a new form of translated intertextuality in English complementing the Gaelic intertextuality in the original. Since much of the biodiversity of Beinn Dòbhrain as well as the Gaelic-speaking communities who lived around mountain have been lost since Duncan Bàn MacIntyre composed his poem, Moladh Beinn Dòbhrain stands as a unique ecological and cultural record, which, in addition to being translated into English poetry, has also been translated in the form of guidebooks to the landscape (Murray 2017:53-122; 2019).

Oliver Currie has a BA in Modern and Medieval Languages and an MPhil in Linguistics from the University of Cambridge and completed his PhD in Linguistics at the University of Ljubljana on the development of verb-initial word order in Early Modern Welsh. He is an assistant professor at the department of English and American Studies at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, where he teaches translation and historical linguistics. His research interests include: translation in the early modern period; translation to and from peripheral languages and the translation of folklore and oral literature; historical linguistics, sociolinguistics and language contact, with a focus on the Celtic languages (in particular Welsh), English and French.

Translation rights of the more-than-human

Şebnem Susam-Saraeva (University of Edinburgh)

The question “who has the right to translate whom?” has been a key debate in translation studies (see Translation Studies Forum, 2021). Translation of narratives based on experiential and corporeal knowledge, and those founded upon cultural formations that take ‘the body’ and its experiences as their starting point, such as narratives emerging from racial, ethnic and gender-based identities, has been a focal point of these debates. When it comes to the othered bodies of the more-than-human, the same question holds: “who may translate whom?”. Further questions also arise: Who gets the right to be translated and into whose language(s)? Who can avert being translated, and thus remain ‘unknowable’ and ‘uncollectable’? And what is allowed to become a ‘who’ in the first place?

By focusing on the case of cetacean communication systems and the current sustained efforts of decoding them, the proposed paper intends to look at interspecies communication through the perspectives of (eco)feminism, posthumanism and translation studies. It questions the seemingly perpetual oscillation between anthropomorphism and anthropodenial (both highly anthropocentric) in our relationship to non-human intelligence, cognition and communication. Tensions between the discourses of rights and of care will be elaborated on, as well as the (un)translatability of all communication systems, despite the unease this ‘both/and’ standpoint creates for extractivist, colonial, and hegemonic discourses.

Şebnem Susam-Saraeva holds a Personal Chair of Translation Studies at the University of Edinburgh. She has published on translation and ecofeminism (amongst other things), as well as (knowledge) translation in climate crisis discourse, and completed the Edinburgh Climate Research Leaders Programme in January-May 2024. She is the co-founder of the Eco-translation Network (with Michael Cronin) and has held a visiting fellowship at Trinity Long Room Hub, Trinity College Dublin for her work on translation and representation of cetacean communication in arts and music (February-March 2023). She is currently a Leverhulme International Fellow for her project Translation and cetacean communication systems: interactions and synergies (August-November 2024), with particular focus on marine mammal bioacoustics and behaviour studies, for which she is based at research stations and centres in marine ecology in Canada and the University ofS. She is also co-editing the inaugural special issue of the journal Feminist Translation Studies on feminism, gender and eco-translation (with Carolyn Shread).

Urban wildlife photography as activism: A visual translation of solastalgia

Helen-Mary Cawood and Xany Jansen van Vuuren (University of the Free State, South Africa)

This paper attempts to conceptualise urban wildlife photography as activism by reconceptualising the photographer as a visual translator who acts as “a mediator in an experiential process that allows the recipient (viewer, listener, reader or participant) to re-create the sense […] of the source artefact for him or herself” (Cultural Literacy in Europe, Bennett 2019, 3).

By focusing on the loss of place and belonging experienced by non-human animals in urban ecologies, in particular, this paper intends to explore the activist role of urban wildlife photographers as translators of experiences, specifically that of solastalgia. Originally defined as “distress that is produced by environmental change impacting on people while they are directly connected to their home environment” (Albrecht et al., 2007), solastalgia, we argue in this paper, should be extended to include the experience of the non-human as well. Photography, it is argued here, is an integral form of human communication in which this experience can be visually and critically depicted and translated to a human audience. By means of an interdisciplinary discussion between Translation Studies and Critical Theory, we attempt to explore the conceptual grounding of urban wildlife photography as a form of visual activism.

Helen-Mary Cawood is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy and Classics at the University of the Free State, South Africa. Her specialist areas of teaching and research focus on contemporary continental philosophical movements such as environmental and ecological philosophy, issues in critical social theory, the hilosophy of technology, feminism, and decolonial theory.

Xany Jansen van Vuuren obtained her Ph.D. from the University of the Free State, where she is also a lecturer in the Department of Linguistics and Language Practice, teaching interpreting and translation. She is also a member of the editorial board for Encounters in Translation. Her research interests include ecosemiotics, ecotranslation, knowledge translation, translation and art, and interspecies translation and interpreting. Her current research projects include work on the role and purpose of Translation Studies in the ecological crisis, and interspecies translation and semiosis.

The Nature of the Asemic: drawing on the more-than-human experience

Harriet Carter and Ricarda Vidal

In this paper we will present some ideas we’re developing around asemic nature writing and how this can be used as a tool to reconfigure the complex relationship between humans and nature, or humans and non-humans.

As a form of mark-making, asemic writing, i.e. writing without alphabet, has an established tradition as an artistic genre. As a text which looks like writing, but which cannot be read, it enables the artist and their audience to focus on gesture and form rather than content and to explore perception and materiality through a multisensorial lens. The focus on material perception is even tighter when it comes to asemic nature writing, where the artist either isolates or reassembles marks and patterns they find in nature. Examples for found asemic nature texts could be insect traces on an old log which look like writing, or a series of woodworm holes on bark which look like morse code. Examples for assembled asemic nature writing include the arrangement of twigs or thorns on paper as practiced by Cui Fai in her “Manuscript of Nature” or Yuchen Zhu’s Language of Bugs, an encyclopedia ‘written’ by the carefully arranged traces of insects.

We build our exploration on Cronin’s (2017) notion of the tradosphere, which describes the continuous circulation and translation of information between all living and non-living organisms. We agree with Cronin (2017, 71) that we must acknowledge “radical differences” and argue that, in order to avoid the trap of human exceptionalism, i.e. the idea that the human is somehow outside of or above nature, we need to find a common ground from which to communicate across difference. Further, we draw on Fraunhofer’s (2017, 48) description of ethical plant translation as a process based on experience and the senses embedded in an embodied conversation within a habitat.

Relying on practice-based methods within the fine arts, cultural and translation studies, our project also answers to calls for a new language which would allow us to “reweave the bond between people and the land” (Kimmerer, 2013, 237).

We want to suggest that asemic nature writing, both as something we actively create as well as something we find (and bring into being through our perception and interpretation), can be such a site of common ground where communication can occur in the form of an embodied and sensual experience which sidesteps the conventions of word-based language, and in particular scientific language and scientific writing.

Harriet Carter has a PhD in Fine Art from Birmingham City University and is a practising artist, who has had exhibitions around Britain and elsewhere.

Ricarda Vidal is Senior Lecturer in Cultural and Creative Industries at King’s College, London, and leader (with Madeleine Campbell) of the Experiential Translation Network. Her research focuses on an expanded notion of translation, communication and meaning-making across cultures and languages. Her most recent publications include The Experience of Translation: Materiality and Play in Experiential Translation (Routledge 2024) and The Translation of Experience: Cultural Artefacts in Experiential Translation (Routledge 2025).

Culture and thermodynamics: Revisiting Juri Lotman’s semiosphere

Kobus Marais (University of the Free State, Bloemfontein)

Yuri Lotman based a significant portion of his theory of culture on thermodynamic theory, in particular Prigogine’s complexity insights into thermodynamics. I delve into the origins of Lotman’s ideas in order to shed light on current debates concerning new materialism in both the sciences and humanities. In this paper, I explore Lotman’s work and commentary on his work in order to clarify this link. These insights will be used to develop my work on the thermodynamics of translation.

Kobus Marais is Professor of Translation Studies in the Department of Linguistics and Language Practice at the University of the Free State, Bloemfontein, South Africa. He has published three monographs, namely Translation Theory and Development Studies: A Complexity Theory Approach (2014), A (Bio)Semiotic Theory of Translation: The Emergence of Social-Cultural Reality (2018) and Trajectories of Translation: The Thermodynamics of Semiosis (June 2023) and an edited volume with the title Translation Beyond Translation Studies (2022), as well as a number of coedited volumes. His research interests are translation theory, complexity thinking, semiotics/biosemiotics and development studies.

Taking the measure of inhuman knowledge: Translation as a relational ontology

Matt Valler (Independent scholar)

This lecture revisits the concept of translation in the work of Bruno Latour and reads this through the New Materialist philosophy of Karen Barad, redefined as 'taking the measure'. It will be argued that this provides for a conception of translation that is at once philosophical and political, specifically as a theoretical ground for a more-than-human politics. Knowledge, in this framing, is a phenomenon that emerges from negotiation.

Arguing for a re-framed approach to 'translationality', as “the process by which worlds narrate and change themselves”, epistemic emergence is conceived in relation to world-making. Problematising the anthropos in anthropocentrism, an alternative 'inhuman' ontology is proposed as a way to think entangled knowledge as a fully material phenomenon.

In this view, the translational dynamics of epistemic emergence are considered less as a means to 'explain' conscious thought, or the construction of 'reality', and more as a process which invites, or even demands, our attention as negotiators in an uncertain future. It will be argued that co-existence, as the chief political challenge of our times, requires this translational sensibility.

Matt Valler recently completed a PhD in Translation Studies from Queen's University Belfast. His work is in the philosophy of translation, particularly in relation to New Materialism, and the materiality of narrative time in the context of environmental and ecological crises. His thesis was titled, 'Taking the measure of High Cross: translating the many worlds of Truro at the time of the Anthropocene'. He is the author, with Piotr Blumczynski, of 'Reassembling the Ruins: revisiting Latour’s concept of translation in Modernity’s growing aftermath.' The Translator, 30: 3. 334-351.

Epistemic translation in law and economics: a tentative typology

Fabrizio Esposito, NOVA School of Law and CEDIS, Lisbon.

The field called economic analysis of law or law and economics is an interesting case of epistemic translation, which illustrates well some of the difficulties involved and allows us to identify ways of performing it effectively. The economic analysis of law tends to irritate legal scholars, who complain that it disrespects legal discourses. The idea that this might be a form of translation has been invoked several times, in particular, to articulate the problem of how to transport knowledge from the realm of economics to law: how to make economic insights legally relevant. The following four techniques have been used to solve this interepistemic translation problem: implicit translation; regimentation; terminological approach; inferentialist approach. This article presents these techniques and examples of their application in the economic analysis of law, before going on to discuss their relationship with the conceptual foundations of the epistemic translation.

Fabrizio Esposito is a Bocconi and EUI alumnus and Associate Professor of Private Law at the NOVA School of Law (Lisbon). His 40+ publications combine doctrinal analysis, especially of EU consumer and regulatory law, with economics and other disciplines. His monograph, The Consumer Welfare Hypothesis in Law and Economics, opens a new path in ‘law and economics’. He has co-edited three volumes, including the forthcoming Cambridge Handbook on Algorithmic Price Personalization and the Law. Fabrizio sits on the Consulting Board of the European Review of Contract Law and acts as class representative in two class actions against Big Tech companies.

Translating economic thinking and behavioural insights into legal argument

Anne-Lise Sibony (Catholic University of Louvain):

Lawyers produce legal arguments. Often, they prepare them with only law and facts. Sometimes, they turn to other ingredients. In competition law litigation, for example, economic thinking is present in the conversation, and it is customary to use forms of economic reasoning. In consumer protection, the EU legislature increasingly resorts to behavioural studies to inform legislative choices. Starting from these examples, the presentation asks when, why, and how law turns to external inputs. It will dissect a few examples to show how economic thinking and behavioural insights are translated into legal arguments. It will also highlight how legal processes filter what can be translated.

Anne-Lise Sibony is a professor of European Law at the UCLouvain (Louvain-La-Neuve, Belgium). She is an École Normale Supérieure and LSE alumna. Her doctoral research was on how courts use economic reasoning in competition law cases. Her scholarship spans several areas of European law: competition law, internal market, and consumer law. Anne-Lise’s main research interest is how law incorporates insights from other social sciences (economics, behavioural science). At the moment, she focuses on EU consumer protection and EU behavioural lawmaking.

Myco-translation: fungi as inter-epistemic mediators

Jan Buts & Şebnem Susam-Saraeva (U. Edinburgh)

Translation studies scholarship increasingly attempts to chart the diverse communication systems that permeate the more-than-human world, often with reference to concepts such as eco-translation or biosemiotics (Cronin 2017, Marais 2019, Sealey 2019, Van Vuuren 2022). This novel disciplinary orientation is spurred by theoretical curiosity as well as by intense concern about the cascading global crises that accompany the collapse of complex ecosystems. Anthropogenic climate change has highlighted the need to question the perceptive, affective, and communicative biases that support anthropocentric extractivism, and thus to reconsider our entanglements with the organisms, objects, and processes that populate and constitute our world.

In this chapter, we focus on fungal communication. We accentuate the mediating role mycelium fulfils in a variety of settings and situations, and stress the inter-epistemic implications of complex networks of interspecies communication. We first discuss the transformative knowledge work fungi perform in the soil through mycorrhizal associations. This includes the facilitation of nutrition and communication networks between fungi, plants, and, bacteria, as well as mycoremediation processes, where fungi are engaged in the decontamination of environments polluted by materials ranging from metals to medicines. We then approach the role of mushrooms as mediators of minds, particularly focusing on parasitoid relationships between fungi and arthropods, and on the human consumption of psilocybin mushrooms, a cultural practice that can destabilize ossified notions of identity, animacy, agency, and presence.

We thus explore the highly sophisticated translational processes fungi have developed that can alter both the matter and the minds that make up our earthly assemblages. We argue that the study of fungi aids in conceptualizing the performance of non-anthropic purposeful communication, and that a focus on the role of mycelium as a mediating life form rather than a mute interlocutor makes it possible to avoid some of the trappings of anthropocentrism. Instead of attempting to translate the mushroom, we trace what it translates, and theorize accordingly.

James Kelly is Assistant Professor of Interpreting and Translation (Spanish) in the Department of Languages and Intercultural Studies at Heriot-Watt University. He gained his PhD in Translation Studies from the University of Edinburgh and is a fellow of Advance HE. Prior to joining Heriot-Watt, he worked as a translator from Spanish and French into English. His research interests include translation, language and ecology; the landscapes and indigenous peoples of Chile; and 20th- and 21st-century French philosophy.

Voice of the earth: Translating Pachamama in the Atacama Desert

James Kelly (Heriot-Watt University)

This presentation considers the translation of the pan-Andean concept of Pachamama from an ecotranslation perspective, doing so in the specific geographic context of Chile’s Atacama Desert. The concept is considered on three levels. The first is linguistic, reflecting on contemporary initiatives by local groups to translate the term into the Ckunsa language. The second is in terms of cosmovisions and examines two specific aspects of Pachamama –water and volcanoes– in terms of the local cosmovision of the Lickanantay people, showing how the contemporary understanding of the concept is the product of complex intercultural dynamics that have played out over centuries and arguing that consideration of this temporal evolution is essential to its understanding Pachamama in the Atacama Desert. The third relates to the earth and reflects on the agency of certain elements of the landscape –in this case volcanoes– and how they are perceived to mediate with other elements of the cosmos and are in turn interpreted by humans, giving a voice to these elements that then propagates through human communication. The presentation will close by arguing that considering the specificity of place allows for a richer understanding of this complex concept, in contrast to the inadequacy of traditionally reductive translations such as “Mother Nature”.

Weaving stories through the threads of translation

África Vidal

The starting point of this short talk is the idea that communication happens with/through words but also through other semiotic systems. We reach knowledge through the intellect but also through the senses. Following the anthropology of the senses and other disciplines, the body is seen today as a site of knowledge, as a space where all our senses interweave with memories, feelings, affects, emotions. We communicate through the sensorium. New forms of knowledge emerge through different non-intellectual, somatic channels, which are embodied in different ways.

And if this is so, we also translate through the sensorium. In line with this, many translation scholars have already expanded the definition of translation with a greater focus on its somatic dimensions. Douglas Robinson argues for a somatics of translation. Michael Cronin reminds us of the need to incorporate all sensory receptors and to enlarge what it means to communicate and to translate. Piotr Blumczynski describes translationality as something to be experienced and Madeleine Campbell and Ricarda Vidal state that translation takes place by perceiving and experiencing non-verbal media through visual, auditory and other sensory channels.

In order to put into practice these new ideas on translation as an embodied experience, I will concentrate on indigenous art. Particularly on textile indigenous art. My aim is to show that quipus and arpilleras are visual and tactile translations of cruel and unjust situations. They are political haptic rewritings which communicate through the materiality of textiles. They are tactile translations that offer possibilities for new sensory idioms. Quipus and arpilleras demonstrate how important the materiality of translation is. They show, as Karen Bennett says, that translation requires sensitivity towards the material carriers of meaning. They show how much matter does matter, to quote Anne Coldiron. Quipus and arpilleras are textile and tactile political translations which help to disseminate the stories of resistance beyond the context where the various forms of conflict originated.

Mª Carmen África Vidal Claramonte is Professor of Translation at the University of Salamanca, Spain. She has written extensively on the expansion of the concept of translation to include art, music and historiography, amongst other things. Her most relevant publications include: Translating Indigenous Knowledges: Towards a Sensuous Translation (London and New York: Routledge 2024); ‘Translation against epistemicide through contemporary art’, Translation Matters 6(1), 2024: 60-74; Translation and Contemporary Art: Transdisciplinary Encounters (London and New York: Routledge, 2022);La traducción y la(s) historia(s): nuevas vías para la investigación (Granada: Comares, 2018); “Dile que le he escrito un blues”: del texto como partitura a la partitura como traducción en la literatura latinoamericana (Frankfurt: Veurvert Iberoamericana, 2017); La traducción y los espacios (Granada: Comares, 2012); Traducción y asimetría (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2010)

Indigenous storytelling and (inter-)epistemic translation: The case of Oodgeroo Noonuccal’s Father Sky and Mother Earth (1981)

Margherita Zanoletti (Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan)

In dialogue with the emerging subfield of indigenous translation studies and collaborating with the First Nations peoples at the centre of this research, this paper aims to test new methodologies applicable to the assessment of Indigenous literatures, emphasizing translation not as much as an interlingual activity as a semiotic process of meaning-making and knowledge transmission as well as an epistemological paradigm for the study of Indigenous cultures (Marais 2019; Henitiuk and Maiheu 2021; Bennett 2023; Bennett and Neves 2024; Vidal Claramonte 2025).

To do so, the presentation will focus on Father Sky and Mother Earth (1981), a little-studied children's story by the poet, activist, educator and public speaker Oodgeroo Noonuccal (1920-1993), one of the heroes of the Australian Aboriginal struggle for justice in the 1960s, also acknowledged for her environmental commitment. Designed as an illustrated allegory carrying the message of the pressing needs of environmental preservation, Father Sky and Mother Earth presents itself like an exercise in (inter-)epistemic translation offering a multimodal alternative narration of the development of the Anthropocene, featuring characters from Aboriginal Creation stories as well as elements from the Australian natural ecosystem and references to the author’s socio-political commitment.

Oodgeroo’s work will be examined on three main levels: as a translation from embodied experience into literary form; as a diamesic resemioticisation of Aboriginal oral knowledge into written literature; and as an intersemiotic transformation of textual material into visual imagery (and vice versa) in a way that evokes the pictorial and performative aspects inherent in Aboriginal storytelling. As a whole, her work functions as an educational device that stimulates interaction, facilitates comprehension, and expands the audience globally, supporting Noonuccal in her endeavour to favour the comprehension of the diversity of other cultures as well as of other species and to bring the knowledges and stories of her people to the attention of the west.

Margherita Zanoletti holds a PhD in Translation Studies from the University of Sydney, with her main research interests being translation theory, intersemiotic translation, word and image studies, and literary translation, with a particular focus on Australian authors and works. From 2006-2009 she taught Italian language and translation at the University of Sydney and Macquarie University, and currently serves as Reference services specialist at Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore. She is also adjunct professor at Scuola Civica per Interpreti e Traduttori “Altiero Spinelli” in Milan.

InterReal: Exploring interreal translation in the media multiverse

Mattia Thibault (U. Tampere)

The InterReal research project (ERC-StG) investigates the ongoing emergence of a media multiverse. The media multiverse indicates the shape that our mediascape is acquiring and is comprised of all kinds of media-generated alternate realities integrated with and co-existing alongside the primary physical reality, ranging from immersive Virtual Reality (VR) and layers of Augmented Reality (AR) to the permanent worlds of digital games. Within the multiverse, different objects and subjects move across these realities thanks to forms of interreal translation. Interreal translation, in turn, refers to the semiotic mechanisms that permeate the multiverse: specific forms of intersemiotic translation that transfer objects, spaces, and subjects across physical and virtual realities and between analogue and digital forms. The goal of the InterReal project is to combine approaches from speculative research and translation studies (TS) to advance our empirical understanding of interreal translations, develop our methodological capacity to approach them, and create a theoretical framework to understand the media multiverse. TS can provide a detailed understanding of the inner mechanisms of interreal translations (in terms of participants, products, processes and contexts), while a speculative approach can offer a critical look at the present opportunities and future possibilities related to the development of the media multiverse. InterReal combines the two approaches into an innovative methodology that: 1) applies TS methods to a new object of study, and 2) imports the methodological approach of speculative design from human-computer interaction into the field of translation. InterReal therefore breaks new ground to expand the research field of TS and of affine disciplines (semiotics, media studies, and more), and of the digital humanities in general, towards multiversal research and its specific forms of analogue-to-digital and digital-to-analogue exchanges.

Dr Mattia Thibault is an Associate Professor in Translation in the Creative Industries at Tampere University and has a PhD in Semiotics and Media (Turin University). His research interests include semiotics and translation, extended realities, speculative research, and playfulness in the built environment (real and digital). He is the leader of the InterReality Research Group which focuses on the relations between different virtual spaces (and their inhabitants) and their connections with the “real” world. He is PI of the projects InterReal (ERC-StG), NEXR (Business Finland Co-Research) and Mobility Mindshift (funded by Net Zero Cities, EU).

Materiality in interreal translations

Riku Haapaniemi (U. Tampere)

The concept of interreal translation posits that all attempts to recreate real objects in virtual spaces, as well as attempts to visualise digital objects in the real world, can be understood as translation – at least in the form of a productive metaphor, as an epistemological lens to look at the semiotic working of such phenomena. However, this definition, and the research programme that follows it, is still in its infancy. Moving forward in this enterprise involves taking deeper look into interreal translations from the perspective of materiality. Materiality is a key factor in mediation and reception and therefore one of the foundational aspects of textual communication processes like translation. Interreal translations, despite their virtual trappings, are likewise characterised by a specific relationship to materiality. In discursive terms, framing digitisation as “dematerialisation” may be used to motivate the importance of conducting interreal translations (e.g. digital twins, which are argued to reduce environmental impact by virtue of their “immateriality”). In semiotic terms, the materiality of the infrastructures and interfaces that are necessary to experience different kinds of digital content (e.g. screens, glasses, goggles, headsets) is an unavoidable component of the production and reception processes of interreal translations. Adopting a post-digital stance allows us to illustrate how the material nature of the technologies utilised and of the spaces, objects and subjects involved affect how these translations are produced and what form they take. These discussions further strengthen and develop the connections between translation research and research on digital cultures and on the relationship between physical and virtual experiences.

Dr Riku Haapaniemi is a postdoctoral researcher in the InterReality Research Group at Tampere University, Finland. He works as a project coordinator for the InterReal research project. His PhD in the field of Translation Studies concerns the concept of materiality and its implications for translation research from the perspective of semiotics and textual theory.

Translating Source Code in Electronic Literature

Manuel Portela (U. Coimbra)

Electronic literature works are dependent upon specific assemblages of hardware and software. Given the continuous development of technical standards and interface conventions, the translation of electronic literature raises several challenges. This talk will address the following questions: What kind of processes are involved in the translation of these works? How can we translate the relation between language, source code and interface that defines the literary materiality of these works?

Manuel Portela is Full Professor of Literature at the Faculty of Letters, University of Coimbra, and coordinator of the "MATLIT LAB: Humanities Laboratory" (https://matlitlab.uc.pt/) with the Centre of Portuguese Literature, for which he edited the online journal MATLIT Materialities of Literature between 2013-2021. His many publications include the books Literary Simulation and the Digital Humanities: Reading, Editing, Writing (Bloomsbury, 2022) and Scripting Reading Motions: The Codex and the Computer as Self-Reflexive Machines (MIT Press, 2013).

Translation, transcreation, cocreation, for inclusive creative research practice

Maria Mencia (Kingston School of Art)

Abstract coming shortly

Maria Mencia is an artist-researcher in Media Arts and Digital Poetics, and Associate Professor at Kingston School of Art. Her doctorate was one of the firs to use practice-based research in the field of electronic poetry and language-art (2000-2003). Her research, which lies at the intersection of language, art and digital technology, explores the poetic /aesthetic space found in-between the visual, the aural and the semantic in multimodal textualities. Her practice has been exhibited worldwide, and is published in the Electronic Literature Collections ELC1 and ELC4, Anthology of Electronic Latin American Literature Lit(e)Lat and the ELMCIP Anthology of European Electronic Literature.

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Skilful Tupinambá: A Translational Epistemology of Colonial Encounters

Zsolt Györegy (U. Oslo)

In my talk, I propose a translational reading of landowner Gabriel Soares de Sousa’s Tratado descriptivo do Brasil (1587) and Jesuit missionary Fernão Cardim’s Tratados da terra e gente do Brasil (1580s) about the Tupinambá of coastal Brazil to reflect on the debates around epistemic exclusion concerning indigenous agencies in the archives and to make a case for cultural translation’s role in the production of ethnographic knowledge on indigenous peoples in historical accounts. Here, I understand cultural translation as the practice of commensuration between different cultural and epistemic systems. In my analysis, I would like to highlight the dynamic interaction between the ethnographic material on the one hand, and the generic conventions and conceptual frames of the authors on the other that shape the depiction of the Tupinambá as ingenious barbarians who could serve as ideal workforce in the newly emerging plantation economy. I argue that a translational lens is a productive means to interrogate accounts such as the two treatises which emerge from colonial encounters and which, due to their situatedness in such bidirectional, Iberian-Amerindian relations, enclose epistemic residues or traces of the Tupi of the Atlantic Forest. I contend that a translational approach to the treatises offers the potential to recognize indigenous agency within the archives and, consequently, work against earlier trends of epistemic marginalization in historiography. However, I argue that engaging with this type of source material only provides us with knowledge of a translational kind, and, therefore, I propose the introduction of a translational epistemology to the study of intercultural encounters in the colonial sphere.

Zsolt Györegy is a PhD research fellow in Cultural History at the Department of Culture, Religion, Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Oslo. Trained as a historian at the Central European University, his current project is an inquiry into cultural translation in early modern ethnographic writing on the Tupi-Guarani of Brazil and Paraguay to make a case for the central role translation plays in the production of knowledge.

Haunting and Attunement

Joshua Price (Toronto Metropolitan University):

I am haunted by phantoms from the colonial past. Ghosts represent a refusal of the past to be dead and buried. Rather than try to free myself and exorcise these ghosts, I, to the contrary, propose to attune myself to them. What can defiant ghosts teach us in the wake of the Conquest?

Novelist and linguist José María Arguedas (1911-1969) provides a framework for a theory and approach to translation that takes up Quechua cultural and linguistic defiance. Arguedas grew up with Quechua as the language that expressed the stirring of his soul and Spanish as the language of domination. Arguedas exemplifies in his writing some of the ways Quechua worldviews erupt through Spanish. Quechua “haunts” his Spanish. The “haunting” speaks to the unresolved social violence of ongoing colonialism. Before exploring the consequences of “haunting” for action, I describe José María Arguedas’ translational poetics and politics as a way into one facet of Indigenous defiance in the Americas. Arguedas’ Spanish reflects a forced poetics, to use Édouard Glissant’s term. I then show how my translating Arguedas’ work is based on attuning myself to that forced poetics.

Arguedas' essays, written between the 1930s and the 1960s hold significance for describing a defiant present. Translating his texts are a form of differential attunement: holding in focus his embodied and affectively rich way of theorizing translation, responding to his every gesture without merely copying those gestures. Through attuning to one another that we build social and material worlds.

Attuning oneself to the ghosts of a colonial present is thus not only a psychic and psychological state, but also calls for translation as a social practice. The social practice is a restitching or reweaving of the social. Put differently, translating can be a performative – doing something by saying something. In this case, by translating, I can aspire to join that intersubjective chain of social links, reseeding the ecology I live in, too. Translators in this view can be more than, or other than, faithful amanuenses or scribes. They (we) can contribute to building the worlds we live in, among and between.

Joshua Martin Price is an anthropologist and Professor of Socio-legal Studies and Criminology at Toronto Metropolitan University. He engages in ethnographic and participatory research on structural and institutional violence, race and gender violence, incarceration and life after incarceration. His most relevant publications include Translation and Epistemicide: Racialization of Language in the Americas (U Arizona Press, 2023); “Translating concepts from Latin American philosophy: Ontologies and aesthetics in the work of Rodolfo Kusch”, Encounters (2024); and “Translation as epistemicide: Conceptual limits and possibilities.” Palimpsestes: Revue de Traduction. 35, 2021. pp. 143-155.

The nature of the asemic: drawing on the more-than-human experience

Harriet Carter and Ricarda Vidal (King’s College, London)

Harriet Carter has a PhD in Fine Art from Birmingham City University and is a practising artist, who has had exhibitions around Britain and elsewhere.

Translating 'our' world through sound: the Sonic Paradigm as a fundamental episteme

Madeleine Campbell (U. Edinburgh)

In this talk I propose to revisit my previous analysis of the sonic artwork Earthquake Mass Re-Imagined: 2022 (Kathy Hinde) by exploring how a sonic epistemology might complement my initial framework for interpreting this immersive installation as a form of translation. This paper pertains to both Eco-translation and Epistemic Emergence, the former because the artwork under investigation is a form of eco-translation (in particular geo-translation), while a sonic epistemology arguably favours an understanding of the translation of experience as an emergent, ephemeral, Baradian embodiment of knowledge (as argued in the Campbell and Vidal’s ‘Cultural Artefacts and Experiential Translation’, 2025). I will first explore Stephen Kennedy's premises for a sonic paradigm in his 2015 Chaos and 2018 Future Sounds, which he later applies in relation to the arts in 'The Art That is Made Out of Time' (2021). I will then examine how the sonic paradigm (as applied by Kennedy to the digital world but also to the arts) can inform and extend a proposed framework for analyzing intersemiotic translation, where art can be understood as a form of translation and a way of (un)knowing the world. In particular, I consider how Kennedy's sonic paradigm could address epistemic gaps in my frame of reference, which initially built on functional linguistics (Halliday), affect-augmented social semiotics (Kress and van Leeuwen, Painter et al) and media theory (Elleström). These epistemic gaps include elements of affect but also relationality and temporality, as recently brought to our attention by Raluca Tanasescu during the EPISTRAN lecture series.

Born in Toronto, Madeleine Campbell lived in France before settling in Scotland, where she teaches at Edinburgh University. Her English translations of francophone Maghrebi poets and bilingual French/Occitan poet Aurélia Lassaque have appeared in magazines and anthologies including Diwan Ifrikya, Modern Poetry in Translation, Poems from the Edge of Extinction, Asymptote, and Europe in Poems. Her translation of Lassaque’s collection En quête d’un visage will be published by White Pine Press in 2025. Her transdisciplinary research Translating across Sensory and Linguistic Borders (2019), The Experience of Translation (2024) and The Translation of Experience (2025), co-edited with Ricarda Vidal, challenges traditional notions of literary translation through the experiential, intersemiotic perspective of artists and translators working in a range of media. She is Co-Investigator of the Experiential Translation Network funded by the AHRC.