Introduction

In the conclusion to his 2017 work Translationality, the translation scholar Douglas Robinson (2017:200-203) proposed to extend Jakobson’s (1959) famous tripartite division of translation[1]  with the introduction of a new category that he calls inter-epistemic translation. Defined as translation between different knowledge systems, it would focus on the transfer or transmission of knowledge between different ‘written genres (or semiotic worlds)’ in a process of narrative reframing ‘which is never a “cloning” of knowledge, of course, but always involves… “translationality”: adaptation, transformation’ (2017: 200). In the pages that followed, Robinson envisaged a whole series of different relations that could be studied under this rubric, ranging from the kinds of operations contemplated in translational medicine and the medical humanities, through the writing of popular science and representation of scientific issues in literary fiction to the study of how knowledges transform over time as epistemological paradigms wax and wane.

At the same time as Robinson was completing Translationality, the Portuguese sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos was refining his concept of ‘intercultural translation’ to describe a slightly different but related manoeuvre, namely the translation that could and does occur between ‘the knowledges or cultures of the global North (Eurocentric, Western-centric) and [those of] the global South, the east included’ (2018: 34).  Developed most fully in his 2016 work Epistemologies of the South: Justice against Epistemicide (2016: 212-236), ‘intercultural translation’ is assumed as part of an ethical mission to undo the ‘epistemicide’ resulting from the hegemony of western science, by working towards the ‘ecologies of knowledge’ necessary to achieve ‘cognitive justice’ (2016: 188-211).

At the core of ecology of knowledges is the idea that different types of knowledge are incomplete in different ways and that raising the consciousness of such reciprocal incompleteness /…/ will be a precondition for achieving cognitive justice. Intercultural translation is the alternative both to the abstract universalism that grounds Western-centric general theories and to the idea of incommensurability between cultures” (Santos 2016: 213).

The EPISTRAN project draws on both of these proposals by using concepts, methods and theories from the field of Translation Studies to investigate the semiotic processes (verbal and nonverbal) involved in the transfer of information between different ‘epistemic systems’. When it was launched in Spring 2023, its focus was on the transactions occurring between western science (the hegemonic knowledge of the globalized world, which purports to be objective, rational and universal)[2] and the various embedded, embodied and subjective forms of knowledge that have served as its Others in different times and places, including: humanistic learning, which once ‘manage[d] the western world’ (Snow 2012: 11), but is now decidedly the poor relation of the academy, starved of funding and status; the indigenous knowledges of the global south, which are not taken seriously as ‘knowledge’ at all and are systematically occluded in the name of ‘progress’; and the various premodern knowledges which were downgraded to myth or superstition following the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century. By examining the transformations that take place when information transits from one epistemic system to another, we sought to shed light not only on the cultural framework that generates those cognitive inequalities but also on the semiotic mechanisms that enact them. 

Since November 2024, however, the framework has been expanded to take account of new emerging areas of knowledge under investigation by scholars that have joined the team more recently. These include: eco-translation (bio-, geo- and terra-translation, and other eco-related themes); cyber-translation (human/machine communication, AI, analogue-digital translation of knowledge systems, and post-human epistemologies); and epistemic emergence (the translational mechanisms involved in the coming-into-being of new knowledge about the physical, human or post-human world). 

The project is predicated on the assumption that knowledges are essentially different modes of discourse, ‘neither of which is privileged except by the conventions of the cultures in which they are embedded’ (Levine 1987: 3).  In the case of science, this assumption is underpinned by the work of linguists Halliday & Martin (1993), who have shown how the scientific worldview was effectively constructed between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries through a series of linguistic transformations that crystallized processes into things through nominalization and rendered them autonomous of the observer through the development of impersonal verb structures (see below); and by scholars of academic discourse (e.g. Flowerdew 2002, Hyland 2009), who have highlighted the linguistic mechanisms underpinning the construction of ‘facts’ and expert identity. Humanistic texts, in contrast, privilege a discourse that is value-laden, person-oriented, aesthetically aware and culturally embedded (Roberts and Good 1993), while the informal knowledges of the global south tend to be much more embodied, performative, multimodal and oral.

As for the non-human and post-human knowledges represented by the Eco- and Cyber-Translation strands, these are as yet too new for any hard and fast conclusions to be drawn. However, it is to be expected that these too will be revealed to be modes of discourse, susceptible to interpretation and reformulation using tools developed in the field of Translation Studies.

Indeed, the potential of translation for transcending epistemological divides has already been signalled by a number of top-ranking translation scholars, such as Blumcynski (2017, 2023), Cronin (2017), Marais (2018, 2022), and Bassnett and Johnston (2019), in addition to Robinson (2017), mentioned above; indeed, Gentzler (2017), drawing upon an earlier prediction by Arduini and Nergaard (2011), goes as far as to announce the onset of a new transdisciplinary research paradigm with translation at its core. But outside the domain of translation studies, attempts to bridge the epistemic gap have also been made by anthropologists, like Abram (1996), Appiah (1993) and especially proponents of the ‘ontological turn’ (Viveiros de Campos 2004, Cadena 2010, Blaser 2013, Cadena and Blaser 2018);  ‘third culture’ proponents (e.g. Rabinow 1994, Brockman 1996, Shaffer 1998, Plotnitsky 2002, Carafoli et al 2009); scholars working at the interface of literature and science (e.g. Vlanakis et al 2014, Willis 2016, Halpin 2018, Holland 2019); biosemioticians (Kull & Torop 2021); physicists (Barad 2007); and even neuroscientists exploring the way the brain constructs the ‘reality’ we inhabit  (e.g. McGilchrist 2019, Damasio 2018, Gazzaniga 2012).

Thus, the project seeks to contribute to this new transdisciplinary research paradigm by investigating the mechanisms at work in six distinct areas:

A) Science in Transit – how specialist knowledge is transmitted across disciplines, reformulated for different audiences, and reworked into imaginative literature, audiovisual content or works of art;

B) Knowledges of the World – how forms of inter-epistemic translation can be used to interpret and explain traditional knowledges of the Global South and East, and convey Western know-how in the opposite direction

C) The Invention of Modern Science – the translational processes involved in the Early Modern transition to a scientific mode of inquiry

D) Eco-Translation – studies in bio-, geo- and terra-translation, and other eco-related themes

E) Cyber-Translation – human/machine communication, AI, analogue-digital translation of knowledge systems, and post-human epistemologies 

F) Epistemic Emergence – the translational mechanisms involved in the coming-into-being of new knowledge about the physical, human or post-human world

The research, which makes use of methods drawn from Translation Studies, supplemented with considerations from transmediality (e.g. Larström 2020) and other adjacent fields, is conducted by a transdisciplinary team with a shared interest in translation. In addition to the more focused outputs produced by individual team-members, it aims to yield new methodologies for use for the inter-epistemic translation practice and epistemic translation research, as well as making theoretical contributions to the new transdisciplinary research paradigm mentioned above.  Finally, there is also an ethical/emancipatory aim, in the sense that translation is being used to highlight the complementarity that exists between different discourses of knowledge (what Benjamin [1923] called the ‘kinship of languages’ and Santos [2016] calls the ‘ecology of knowledges’), thereby helping reduce epistemicide and furthering cognitive justice (Santos 2016).

[1] ‘1) intralingual translation or rewording is an interpretation of verbal signs by other signs of the same language; 2) interlingual translation or translation proper is an interpretation of verbal signs by means of some other language; 3) intersemiotic translation or transmutation is an interpretation of verbal signs by means of signs belonging to non-verbal systems’ (Jakobson, 2000, p. 114)

[2] For the purposes of the project, western science is defined as an intellectual and practical pursuit that uses empirical methods (observations and experimentation, complemented by mathematical calculation) to inquire into some aspect of the outside (extralingual) world.