Translating beyond humans: translation as an ecological encounter between humans and non-humans (ACLA 2025)
Montreal
Organization: ACLA
Event: ACLA 2025
In the Anthropocene, human activities profoundly reshape the climate and environment, disrupting ecological balance and transforming humans into a potent geological force. Dominant strands of Western thought from Descartes to Heidegger have contributed to reinforcing this perceived superiority of humans over other beings, thereby calcifying a dichotomy between the human and the non-human. In the field of translation studies, this human-centered focus has historically been echoed through the discipline’s sustained attention to human languages and culture. However, posthumanism and post-anthropocentrism, which advocate the interconnectedness between humans and non-humans, have challenged the centrality of anthroposin translation.
Critiques of human exceptionalism and extractivism have prompted scholars to investigate the evolving role of translation, particularly regarding how it connects humans with the broader natural world from various perspectives (Hu 2013 and 2024; Cronin 2017, Marais 2018, Dasca and Cerarols 2024). Some translation studies scholars have begun to consider what it would mean to include non-human voices in the study of translation from the perspectives of literary translation, philosophy, biosemiotics and more. However, these studies have only begun the difficult work of establishing both theoretical and practical methods, such as the ontology of translation and interdisciplinary frameworks, leaving significant room for further contributions.
It is also crucial to signal that many Indigenous and First Nations communities have long understood human language to emerge through communion with the sounds of the land. In Pewma ull: El sueño del sonido, the Mapuche singer Soraya Maicoño observes, “In the forest, everything speaks: / the stone speaks / the water / the rain / the birds / the spiders speak / the ants, / every being / has its own language.” In the Mapuche cosmology, language (Mapudungun) is understood as the translation of the distinct languages of every living thing. Such understandings enrich and cast light upon the ostensibly “emerging” quality of these translational debates.
Alongside these approaches, the field of digital bioacoustics has begun to imagine the possibilities of inter-species translation, given that developments in digital technologies have allowed researchers to register the complex communication systems of plants and animals (Bakker 2022, Elephant Listening Project, The Earth Species Project). Translation emerges as a central framework in these studies for thinking about the "grammar of animacy" (Robin Wall Kimmerer 2017) and our relationship to the nonhuman world.
Considering ongoing ecological and intellectual transformations, this session aims to explore how translation can serve as a means of fostering solidarity with non-humans and of (re)imagining the complex interrelations between humans and the more-than-human world. Papers may take up one or more of the strands of research mentioned above or explore the relationship between translation and the natural world from another vantage point. In particular, this seminar seeks to emphasize the entanglement of theory and practice to ask: What does it mean to translate more than human languages, including the communications of other organic life? We invite papers that inquire into how to (re)conceptualize the relationship between humans and non-humans, the identity of humans (for example, is post-anthropocentric translation possible?), methods of translating non-human communications, the ethics of eco-translation and more.
https://www.acla.org/annual-meeting
Hongyang Ji