Strands

A. Science in Transit

Involving a team of translation scholars with backgrounds in literary studies, linguistics and education, as well as specialists from other disciplinary backgrounds (philosophy, education, law), this strand looks at the translational processes involved in:

• educational science: textbooks, students’ notes, educational picturebooks on scientific and philosophical subjects

• the popularization of science: this includes not only non-fiction books for the general public, articles in magazines or on websites, adult picturebooks and television documentaries and films, but also historical popularizations

• the creation of literary works on scientific themes

• representations by scientists of humanistic knowledge (including religion, mythology, philosophy and the arts)

• translational medicine and science

• the medical humanities

• interdisciplinary communication

B. Knowledges of the World

This strand includes anthropologists, and translation scholars with specific interests in non-European epistemologies, who investigate the translational processes involved in:

• interpreting the epistemologies of the Global South and making them intelligible to scholars raised on Western epistemological traditions

• tracing some of the processes by means of which Eastern epistemologies (Buddhism, Dao, Yoga) have been introduced to the west

• bringing western know-how to other parts of the globe

C. The Invention of Modern Science

This historical strand looks at the translational processes involved in the Early Modern transition to a scientific mode of inquiry. Objects of study include:

• the translation of pre-scientific knowledges (such as alchemy, astrology, Aristotelian physics, logic, rhetoric) into the new rational/mechanical episteme

• shifting intersemiotic representations of worldview: cosmology, cosmography and cartography

• the Early Modern encounter with the knowledges of the East and Americas, and the various translational mechanisms used to process and absorb them

• the conceptual and linguistic reconstrual necessary to actually enable the scientific worldview to come about (Halliday & Martin 1993; Gaukroger 2006; Wootton 2015).

D. Eco-Translation

This strand explores what Michael Cronin (2017: 71) calls the ‘tradosphere’, namely “the ways in which information circulates between living and non-living organisms and is translated into a language or a code that can be processed or understood by the receiving entity”. It includes:

• biosemiotics: studies of animal and plant communication systems, inter-species communication, human-animal communication (Kull & Torop 2012; Kull 2023; Marais 2019);  

• geo-/terratranslation: studies of communication systems operating between and via non-organic elements of the environment (Cronin 2023: 7-9)

• historical attempts to read ‘the book of nature’ (Littau 2023) in different times and places

E. Cyber-Translation

This strand explores translational mechanisms involving machines

• human/machine communication and AI

• analogue-to-digital translation and vice versa: this includes not only computer languages but also systems such as morse code, and the various attempts to create a universal language of knowledge (such as those by Wilkins, Dalgarno, Liebnitz etc, see Eco 1995) by reproducing in verbal language the rigour of mathematics

• post-human epistemologies (Braidotti 2013, 2019)

F. Epistemic Emergence

This strand is concerned with the presence of translational mechanisms in the emergence of new knowledge (Marais 2019, 2023, 2024)

• the inextricable fusion of matter and meaning (Barad 2007, Marais 2023)

• the neurological processes involved in the construction of ‘reality’ (Robinson 2017: 1-46; McGilchrist (2019)