Swimming in translation

Translation has long haunted anthropological theory and practice. Despite the often-flaunted representation of anthropological work as a form of cross-cultural translation, practitioners’ attempts at producing systematic reflections on the topic have generally resulted in a series of conceptual bottlenecks and dead-end debates.Footnote ¹ As in “the fish in the water” parable made famous by David Foster Wallace (Reference Wallace1996), anthropologists have been immersed in a sea of translation metaphors, translation practices, and translation theories for too long to be capable, until recently, to make translation an object of direct inquiry.Footnote ²

Variously conceptualized as a core data-gathering method of the ethnographic craft (Conklin Reference Conklin1968, 12; Rubel and Rosman Reference Rubel and Rosman2003, 1), an epistemological pillar of the discipline (Hanks and Severi Reference Hanks, Severi, Servi and Hanks2015, 7–8), or a technology of colonial domination (Asad Reference Asad, Clifford and Marcus1987; Rafael Reference Rafael1993), translation is both a central metaphor and an elusive object of the anthropological imagination.Footnote ³ At once impossible and unavoidable, translation has been either under- or overtheorized, remaining somehow suspended between a narrow understanding of cross-linguistic glossing and a simultaneously expansive and fuzzy notion of interpretative negotiation across social worlds. If for linguists and language-oriented scholars, translation has long been conceptualized as a “mere heuristic” (Hanks and Severi Reference Hanks, Severi, Servi and Hanks2015, 2), remaining a (largely unproblematized) assemblage of methods (such as recording, transcribing, glossing, parsing, and so forth), for sociocultural anthropologists, translation has mainly constituted a hyper-metaphor of sorts. Driven by simplistic conflations between linguistic and cultural translation (Silverstein Reference Silverstein, Paula and Rosman2003, 94), sociocultural reflections have often revolved around highly speculative questions such as “is translation possible?” and “is translation ethical?” While the first question entails a cognitive and ontological examination of the relationship between words and world(s) and the relative (in)commensurability between different linguistic systems, the politico-moral debates foreground the power imbalances between languages.Footnote ⁴ In reminding us that translation has been often the terrain of “ethnocentric violence” (Venuti Reference Venuti1995, 20), this second line of enquiry has often resulted in the seemingly irreducible polarization between two main translation strategies (Rubel and Rosman Reference Rubel and Rosman2003, 7). The first strategy, commonly called “domestication,” seeks to minimize the exotic coefficient of the source text, assimilating it to the conventions of the target readers (Nida Reference Nida1964). The second, instead, is termed “resistive” and aims at foreignizing a text, by retaining something “of the foreignness of the original” (Shuttleworth and Cowie Reference Shuttleworth and Cowie2004, 59).

In this Special Issue, we take a different stance. Drawing on linguistic anthropology and allied fields of studies, the contributors to this collection focus on translation as an object of ethnographic investigation. They look at how translation is construed and how it works within specific political economies to unearth its material effects on people’s social lives and imagination. Today’s capitalism, as Anna Tsing (Reference Tsing2015, 133) has shown in her ethnography of matsutake mushrooms supply chain, has increasingly become a “translation machine.” Ensuing from the demise of industrial production and the crisis of the Fordist paradigm, the novel configuration of capitalist accumulation and valorization no longer revolves around factory work, as suggested, among others, by neo-workerist theorists (Marazzi Reference Marazzi2008; Berardi Reference Berardi2009; Fumagalli Reference Fumagalli, Fuchs and Fisher2015). Rather, contemporary capitalism relies on “acts of translation across varied social and political spaces” (Tsing Reference Tsing2015, 62).

This collection of articles is, thus, an invitation to examine more closely (and more literally) the specific acts and ideologies of translation underlying capitalist worldmaking. Our goal is to explore how equivalents are made or undone, how networks are forged or dismantled under contemporary forms of what Franco Berardi (Reference Berardi2009), following Baudrillard (Reference Baudrillard1999 [1970]), calls semiocapitalism. Namely, the progressive extension of the production process to activities that belong to the realm of social life, reproduction, and communication, and the increasing deployment of language and semiotic labor as primary tools for the production of value (see also Lazzarato Reference Lazzarato, Virno and Hardt1996; Negri Reference Negri1999, 83; Arvidsson Reference Arvidsson2006, 126; Agha Reference Agha2011). Putting linguistic and economic anthropology in dialogue with a variety of different scholarly traditions (Science and Technology Studies, neo-workerist theory, continental semiotics, and Sociology of Translation), the articles contained herein embrace a novel approach to “translation” and propose to use it as a lockpick to examine the role of language and semiosis within contemporary forms of capitalist governmentality, value extraction, and global circulation.

Translation beyond denotation and across semiotic fields

During the last two-plus decades, linguistic anthropologists have developed highly innovative and productive approaches to translation by questioning the “ideological focus on denotational textuality” underlying traditional European construals [of language] (Silverstein Reference Silverstein, Paula and Rosman2003, 75–76). In so doing, they have contributed to disentangle the concept of translation from age-old debates over its (im)possibility, opening new perspectives on three interrelated aspects of translation: its embeddedness within culturally and socio-historically specific ideologies of languages and humanity (Keane Reference Keane2007; Hanks Reference Hanks2012; Schieffelin Reference Schieffelin2014), its implication in the workings of political economy (Keane Reference Keane and Fred2000; Nakassis Reference Nakassis2013; Gal Reference Gal2015, Reference Gal, Duranti, George and Riner2023; Agha Reference Agha2017), its role as a semiotic infrastructure of circulation mediated by processes of entextualization and re-contextualization (Handman Reference Handman2018; Gal Reference Gal, Duranti, George and Riner2023).

Jakobson’s (Reference Jakobson and Brower1959) semiotic reformulation of translation along three different typologies has been key in backgrounding the narrow understanding of translation as a cross-linguistic form of semantic transfer, highlighting translation’s indexical and non-verbal dimensions.Footnote ⁵ Indeed, besides interlingual translation, or “translation proper [that is] the interpretation of verbal signs by means of some other language,” Jakobson’s classic tripartition identified two additional typologies. The former, which he termed “intralingual translation” occurs in any instance of paraphrasis, circumlocution, reported speech, or dictionary definition, and entails “the rewording or interpretation of verbal signs by other signs of the same language.” The latter (called “intersemiotic translation or transmutation”) concerns “the interpretation of verbal signs by signs of a non-verbal sign system” (Jakobson Reference Jakobson and Brower1959, 233, emphasis in the original). Seen in this perspective, translation is not a simple form of binary transcodification, but a complex and dynamic form of transformative action.Footnote ⁶

Silverstein (Reference Silverstein, Paula and Rosman2003, 83–84) aptly introduced the concept of “transduction” to simultaneously convey the creative potential and inevitable “slippage” underlying the indexical dimension of translation.Footnote ⁷ In the realm of physics, transducers are devices (such as hydroelectric generators; or dynamo hubs) that can be used to convert, not without some degree of dispersion, a kind of energy (e.g., mechanical) into another (e.g., electric). In a like fashion, processes of translation transcend the mere lexico-grammatical plane of interlinguistic denotational overlaps and entail transplanting complex systems of (linguistically and culturally bound) indexical signs into a different context of social indexicalities. While the denotational sense is translatable by means of finding an overlapping (albeit not identical) term, this is not the case for the “indexical penumbra” of words (Silverstein Reference Silverstein, Paula and Rosman2003, 89). Bluntly put, as does Gal (Reference Gal, Duranti, George and Riner2023, 181): “How should an American Southerner, talking to Northerners in a Civil War movie sound in Turkish dubbing? The stereotyped American identities and the speech registers that signal them would have to be reproduced by a different set of signs indicating (somewhat) analogous relationships in Turkish language-culture.” As we will see, in denial of the challenges of transductive mismatches and slippages, an important feature of the semiotic ideology of contemporary capitalism concerns the assumption of seamless translatability, complete interoperability of coding systems, and all-encompassing transduction to ensure maximally extensive circulation.

Since the millennium’s turn, a similar concern for the metasemiotic processes of calibration and gradual transformation unleashed by translation has infused debates within continental semiotics (Dusi and Nergaard Reference Dusi and Nergaard2000). Driven, at least in part, by Juri Lotman’s (Reference Lotman2005) theory of the semiosphere, understood as a continuum of semiotic systems, a broadened notion of translation and a renewed interest in the relations between different signifying systems have emerged among European semioticians (Fabbri Reference Fabbri2000; Eco Reference Eco2003). Also stemming from Jakobson’s (Reference Jakobson and Brower1959) triadic typology but proceeding without nearly any interlocution with the North American linguistic anthropological tradition, this literature has focused on intersemiotic translations/transductions, seen as “a transferral of content from a source text to a target text by means of (local) structures of stylistic equivalence” (Calabrese Reference Calabrese2000, 113–114).

Reflecting, with Jakobson (Reference Jakobson and Brower1959), on the conceptual boundaries of translation and its possible extension beyond the transfer of meaning across two allegedly independent natural languages, these scholars analyze transpositions between literary and audiovisual texts (Costa Reference Costa1993; Marrone Reference Marrone2009), cinema and theater (Helbo Reference Helbo1997), painting and cinema (Costa Reference Costa1991), thus exploring multifarious forms of translation across textual constructions. As Dusi (Reference Dusi2015, 181) points out, this scholarly field has been primarily concerned with determining to what extent intersemiotic processes can be considered full-fledged forms of translation or whether they should be more properly (and metaphorically) understood as forms of “adaptation” (Eco Reference Eco2000, Reference Eco2003, 158), “transposition” (Greimas Reference Greimas1966, 14; Fabbri Reference Fabbri2000), or “expressive equivalence” (Calabrese Reference Calabrese2000, 113–114).

These sophisticated analyses of the transposition of novels into films, sculptures into poems, paintings into photographs, etc., display, however, little or no interest for embedding intersemiotic translation into political economy. Continental scholarship on intersemiotic translation has, indeed, focused almost exclusively on aesthetic texts. To gain a perspective on translation as a field for the enactment of “trials of strength” (Latour Reference Latour1988, 201) and as an infrastructure for the extraction and circulation of value we need to turn to semiotically informed works in anthropology and sociology.

Translation as network and infrastructure of global circulation

In a memorable ethnographic study of a controversy about how to remedy the steep decline in the population of scallops (a highly valued delicatessen) in St. Brieuc Bay (Normandy coast), Michel Callon (Reference Callon1984) described the interactions between marine biologists, fishermen, and scallops as they negotiated different interpretations and definitions of the situation. In so doing, Callon (Reference Callon1984) outlined the basic principles of the Sociology of Translation, a novel paradigm which he defined as primarily concerned with the continuous making, remaking (and undoing) of networks of people, ideas, things, and resources around and through which translation processes are produced. Drawing on Michel Serres’s (Reference Serres1974) earlier philosophical formulation of translation as the process of making connections between two domains, or simply as establishing communication, Callon (Reference Callon, Knorr, Krohn and Whitley1980, 211) defined translation as a process which “creates convergences and homologies by relating things that were previously different.” Together with Latour, Callon developed a vastly expanded notion of translation, which similarly to the forms of transduction and intersemiotic equivalence discussed earlier extends far beyond the interlingual transfer of denotational meaning.

Translation, according to Callon and Latour (Reference Callon, Latour, Knorr-Cetina and Cicourel1981, 279), thus includes “all the negotiations, intrigues, calculations, acts of persuasion and violence, thanks to which an actor or force takes, or causes to be conferred on itself, authority to speak or act on the behalf of another actor or force.” Central to Callon and Latour’s conceptualization of translation is the notion of “trials of strength” (Callon Reference Callon1984; Latour Reference Latour1988), whereby actants strive to gain speaking authority and enroll others in networks that can be mobilized to impose their own interests and interpretation of reality. Since, as Latour (Reference Latour1988, 158) points out, ‘‘nothing is, by itself, either reducible or irreducible to anything else,” networks need to be established through equivalences forged through semiotic/material translations of entities aimed at enrolling allies.

In her ethnographic analysis of the matsutake mushroom trade, Anna Tsing (Reference Tsing2015, 315) has drawn on Callon and Latour’s insights on human and non-human networks emerged through semiotic and material processes of translation to foreground the role of translation as a main infrastructure for the rearticulation of contemporary capitalist modes of production based on control over inventory rather than labor.Footnote ⁸ If, as Latour (Reference Latour1988, 170) has claimed, in order to exist, markets require equivalents and equivalents are to be made through translation, “capitalism is a system of commensuration” (Tsing Reference Tsing2013, 39), which relies on translation for the extraction of value through chain-like sequences of product assessment aimed at purifying the commodity from the non-capitalist “gift-like social relations” (Tsing Reference Tsing2013, 23) that went into its production. While a longstanding tradition within anthropological theory has postulated a radical opposition between societies based on gifts and societies based on commodity exchange (see Arjun Reference Arjun and Appadurai1986, for a review and a critique of this literature), Tsing (Reference Tsing2013) proposes to recast this distinction not as an ontological divide between two different modes of sociality and value-production, but rather as a heuristics approach to capitalism’s modus operandi, for capitalism depends on transforming non-capitalist objects and social forms (i.e., natural resources, gifts, personal relations of obligation, affection, and reciprocity) into capitalist commodities and transactions.

As Gal (Reference Gal2015, 233) has noted, Latourian translation is imbued with power-laden dynamics of appropriation, incorporation, and subsumption (see Hull, this Special Issue). However, as Bauman and Briggs (Reference Bauman and Briggs2003, 4–10) have highlighted, Latour has paradoxically overlooked the role of language and its modern construction as an autonomous entity in the processes of translation he discussed. The articles in this special issue aim to supplement the Sociology of Translation with a closer examination of the role of specific acts and ideologies of translation within the production of forms of inequality, exclusion, and subsumption that underlie the capitalist production and circulation of value.

Translation and semiotic ideologies

Linguistic anthropology offers a fundamental contribution to further the understanding of the dynamics of power, authority, and legitimacy unfolding between source and target languages within colonial contexts and missionary settings (Duranti et al., Reference Duranti, Ochs and Ta’ase1995; Keane Reference Keane2007; Hanks Reference Hanks2012; Schieffelin Reference Schieffelin2014; Handman Reference Handman2018). These studies have revealed how translation is not a straightforward procedure of transcoding, but a culture specific and historically variable construct, entangled within specific semiotic and linguistic ideologies. Indeed, ideas and practices of translation and of (un-)translatability are connected to metalinguistic and ontological concepts of denotation and related models of humanity (Williams Reference Williams1977, 21).

Analyzing the encounter between Calvinist missionaries and ancestral ritualists in Sumba (eastern Indonesia), Webb Keane (Reference Keane2007) has showed how “semiotic ideology” (i.e., people’s cultural assumptions about what signs are and how they function) mediate different conceptualizations of morality, discursive genres, forms of social conduct, and modes of production. Bambi Schieffelin (Reference Schieffelin2014) has explored the encounter between Evangelical Protestant missionaries and Bosavi people dwelling in the highlands of Papua New Guinea, analyzing the moral and epistemological assumptions underlying the missionaries’ efforts at translating the Bible into Bosavi and the ensuing linguistic and cultural transformations. A similar focus on translation as a device of cultural and linguistic shift imbues the work by William Hanks (Reference Hanks2012, Reference Hanks, Servi and Hanks2015) on the XVIth century missionization of Yucatec people. Departing from the conventional focus on interlingual transfer whereby “authoritative texts in a dominant language are translated into a subordinated language,” Hanks (Reference Hanks, Servi and Hanks2015, 23) underscores the centrality of intralingual (and intracultural) translation, which, he argues, is always an underlying presupposition of any form of crosslinguistic translation.Footnote ⁹ According to Hanks (Reference Hanks, Servi and Hanks2015, 36), Franciscans’ translation of Spanish and Latin texts into Maya did not simply revolve around “a binary relation” between the languages of the missionaries and the missionized, rather it entailed, in a way similar to the Bosavi case described by Schieffelin (Reference Schieffelin2014), the production of Maya reducido, that is, a “neologistic register of Maya, purged and realigned to suit the needs of Christian practice, governance, and civility” (Hanks Reference Hanks2012, 450). Interestingly, Hanks (Reference Hanks, Servi and Hanks2015, 36) compares the neologized version of Maya with the semiotic function of money as a universal equivalent (Marx Reference Marx1976 [1867]): Maya reducido “has elements of both languages, and serves as a medium of exchange between them […], [functioning in a way] similar to a currency system into which value from incommensurable domains (say, labor and cattle, or Christianity and Post-Classic Maya religion) can be converted and hence compared.” The comparison between speech registers and currency systems points to a longstanding analogy between linguistic and economic exchange underlying the connection between translation and capitalism. According to Marx (Reference Marx1973 [1857-8], 93), “ideas […] have first to be translated out of their mother tongue into a foreign language in order to circulate, in order to become exchangeable.” In a like fashion, continues Marx (Reference Marx1973 [1857–8], 93), money functions as an inter-language, which provides a “third, objective entity which can be re-exchanged for everything without distinction.” Likewise, in a famous analogy, Saussure (Reference Saussure2006 [1916], 79), argued that both linguistics and economics “are concerned with a system for equating things of different orders – labor and wages in one and a signified and signifier in the other.”Footnote ¹⁰ The arbitrary connection between signifier and signified is thus compared with the notion of money as a universal equivalent, which depends on a socially established convention. In this perspective, translation is not only a technology of conversion entangled within specific ideologies of language and humanity, but also a key infrastructure for the circulation of texts (Handman Reference Handman2018, 154–155) and values, which pivots on contextually negotiated forms of intersemiotic translation (Latour Reference Latour1988; Keane Reference Keane and Fred2000; Agha Reference Agha2017).

In his semiotic analysis of currency as a form of “pecuniary media,” Asif Agha (Reference Agha2017, 295) has showed how sociohistorical forms of money (such as coins and currency bills, but also cowries and woodpecker scalps) are tied to culture specific activity routines and “socially recognized registers of conduct” (Agha Reference Agha2017, 293). In this way, we may better appreciate how the large-scale standardization of pecuniary media (Agha Reference Agha2017, 297) combined with semiotic ideologies of seamless inter-translatability pivoting on a Saussurean conception of the arbitrariness of signs (Keane Reference Keane and Fred2000, Reference Keane2007) have been conducive to the regimes of value, market rationality, and pecuniary culture underlying contemporary global capitalism.Footnote ¹¹

Translation, entextualization, and capitalist scalability

Translation plays a key role within the projects of material and linguistic scalability of our present moment. Endowed with the potential to extract and reframe signs, utterances, speech genres, registers, and semiotic activities of various kind, translation is a form of recontextualization (Gal Reference Gal, Duranti, George and Riner2023, 179–80) or a citational practice (Nakassis Reference Nakassis2013), which operates as a powerful infrastructure of scalability. A fundamental aspect of contemporary capitalism, scalability is the ability to expand without changing the business model (Mintz Reference Mintz1985, 47; Tsing Reference Tsing2015, 40). Epitomized by the colonial sugarcane plantation, scalability entails the dissemination of a standardized mode of production (and consumption) combined with the erasure of context-specific dynamics and interdependence relations (Donzelli this Special Issue). As Mintz (Reference Mintz1985) pointed out, colonial monocultural agriculture relied on a sugarcane plant anthropogenically modified for large-scale mass production. This domesticated cultivar is artificially propagated through the planting of cuttings from a parent plant – a process akin to cloning – which results in highly replaceable and genetically identical plants. Recontextualization and serial (re-)production and are thus key to scalability, which is “oblivious to the indeterminacies of encounter [… and] banishes meaningful diversity, that is, diversity that might change things” (Tsing Reference Tsing2015, 38). Linguistic anthropological analyses of capitalism’s translation machine inevitably require a close analysis of processes of entextualization and recontextualization (Bauman and Briggs Reference Bauman and Briggs1990; Kuipers Reference Kuipers1990; Silverstein and Urban Reference Silverstein and Urban1996). Indeed, the possibility of extracting discourse from its original context of production and recontextualize it in a discursive and chronotopic elsewhere through translation and similar procedures is a major technology of scalability.

This line of inquiry is connected to the recent interest in linguistic materialities and the notion of infrastructure along with the impulse to problematize entrenched distinctions between material and immaterial, tangible and intangible, and human and non-human (Cavanaugh and Shankar Reference Cavanaugh and Shankar2017; Handman Reference Handman2018; Schneider and Heyd Reference Schneider and Heyd2024; Keane Reference Keane2025). In the increasingly digitally encoded backdrop of our late capitalist world systems, the longstanding distinction between (material technoeconomic) base and (intangible linguistic) superstructure has become untenable. Indeed, long before the so-called infrastructural turn (Larkin Reference Larkin2013), Maurice Godelier (Reference Godelier1978, 763) called for a reformulation of the notion of infrastructure, which, he claimed, had to be expanded to include all aspects of relations of production – a point that closely resonates with linguistic anthropological analyses of semiotic activities as relations of production.

In this perspective, the articles in this collection aim to provide fine-grained analyses of the working of translation within capitalist production and reproduction. Our contemporary moment is imbued with a distinctive ideology of scale (Tsing Reference Tsing2000, 347) characterized by the aspiration to erase contextual differences and local systems of indexical practice, establish strategic equivalences between individuals and corporate persons (Hull, this Special Issue), enact the global circulation of apparently completely detachable bundles of texts and behaviors, and encode the world into numerical strings of 1s and 0s (Introna Reference Introna2011). Since the 1990s, transnational lending agencies such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank began to divest in the building of major infrastructures (roads, dams, bridges) and adopted a novel model of infrastructure building aimed at developing procedural protocols to foster transparency and accountability (Tania Murray Reference Tania Murray2007; Donzelli Reference Donzelli2019). In this light, the pragmatic standardization of discursive genres typical of contemporary audit cultures (Strathern Reference Strathern2000) is a core technology of scalability: it operates by translating centrifugal discursive practices into highly regimented protocols to enable the serial reproduction of replicable work templates that can be extended to greater scales, but also sabotaged, resisted, or simply missed or misunderstood (Donzelli Reference Donzelli2019, Reference Donzelli2023).

One of the defining features of contemporary capitalism is a specific form of pragmatic standardization and a specific metapragmatic attitude towards translation, one which seems to deny the existence of situated networks of indexical relations and aspires to establish regimes of perfect and seamless intertranslatability across codes, modalities, ontological orders to enact projects of extreme scalability, that is, the becoming bigger and bigger of a production unit. In this sense, we are increasingly confronted with institutional logics that operate through a “copycat paradigm” (Donzelli Reference Donzelli2023), that is, the borrowing of best practices protocols, processes of assessment and quality assurance (QA), which are tout-court transferred from one context to another, with deliberate indifference to different administrative arrangements, politico-economic conditions, and cultural contexts, as if the original context were irrelevant (Gershon Reference Gershon2011). Of course, as Nielsen (this Special Issue) demonstrates, these dreams of radical entextualization are confronted with a series of local readaptations, failed uptakes, and misunderstandings (see also Donzelli Reference Donzelli2019, Reference Donzelli2023). Linguistic and semiotic anthropologists are particularly well equipped to produce ethnographically nuanced critical analyses of the metastatic spread of neoliberal capitalism, of its successes and its failures or lack of grip.

Contributions to this special issue

The contributors to this Special Issue are linguistic and semiotic-oriented sociocultural anthropologists who have analyzed the making and unmaking of translation in disparate settings: rural practices in Central Italy (Donzelli), glass-making and fashion family firms in Venice and Mantua, Northern Italy (Perrino), New Delhi call centers (Nielsen), Paris city council and homelessness outreach programs (Del Percio and Vigouroux), the counterfactual elsewhere of Southeast Asian eco-cities (Luvaas and Chio), and the capitalist semiosphere (Hull). Despite the diversity of locales and phenomena analyzed, we share a commitment to embed translation into political economy. Going beyond the “prototypical case” of translation as the carrying over of meaning across self-contained codes (Gal Reference Gal2015, 226), we view translation as a metasemiotic infrastructure of capitalist valorization.

Our goal is to explore how apparently disparate processes of assessment, soft-skills training, city branding, municipal censual efforts, digital encoding, and commodity enregisterment all operate through forms of intersemiotic and crossmodal translation, which, by turning quality into quantity, experiences into algorithmic models, individuals into numbers, affects into empathy statements, feelings into architectural renderings, homelessness into infographics, are driven by similar projects of valorization. In so doing, we suggest that there is great analytic promise in the study of the actual operations, whereby capitalism extract value through various forms of translation. Historically driven by profit maximization, capitalism is an ever-changing dynamic system characterized by the continuous search for new ways to generate value. Its current configuration entails the increasing dematerialization of capital and labor, the blurring of the distinction between production and consumption, and the use of signs and information as main infrastructures of valorization (Irvine Reference Irvine1989; LiPuma and Lee Reference LiPuma and Lee2004; Arvidsson Reference Arvidsson2006; Manning Reference Manning2006, Reference Manning2010; Berardi Reference Berardi2009; Agha Reference Agha2011; Duchêne and Heller Reference Duchêne and Heller2012; Nakassis Reference Nakassis2013). The papers collected herein suggest that far from being a trite topic or a conceptually fuzzy lens, translation is both an essential device for capitalist value projects and a productive analytic prism for understanding our contemporary moment.

Drawing on fieldwork with small farmers and zero-mile food activists in Central Italy, Aurora Donzelli shows how semiotic interactions around indigenous food production and distribution hinge on performances of (un-)translatability and generate metalinguistic commentaries on two parallel processes: the encompassment of regional linguistic varieties within a national standard and the pragmatic regimentation of rural labor and ways of life. The article discusses how supply chains entail the conversion of vernacular codes into global languages to optimize agribusiness production and look at how the sensuous materiality of regional products may obstruct denotational translatability during sampling and tasting events.

Matthew S. Hull focuses on the semiotics of corporate persons on which pivots the organization of contemporary capitalism. Etymologically derived from the Latin verb corporare (“to form a body”), corporations rely on acts of translation that create unified legal actors and aim at erasing the differences between corporate and natural persons. Hull carefully dissects the juridico-political translations deployed in the making of corporate persons and in the production of strategic forms of incorporation and partitioning (into subsidiary companies) and shows how the semiotic production of equivalences between natural and corporate persons is never complete.

Analyzing the narrative production of regimes of uniqueness underlying the “Made in Italy” brand identity, Sabina Perrino entertains a different reflection on the semiotic production of equivalences between corporate persons and natural individuals. Her analysis shows how such equivalences are instrumental in associating a morally inflected sense of authenticity to the firms’ identity and to the commodities they produce. Perrino highlights how practices of intersemiotic translation and ideologies of untranslatability produce regimes of singularity and uniqueness (epitomized by the “cultural DNA” biological metaphor), repurposing scalability toward the production of intimacy and relatedness and hinting at alternative projects of scale-making.

In her ethnographic exploration of the processes of entextualization underlying the global service industry, Kristina Nielsen discusses the translation slippages and the semiotic frictions occurring within outsourcing processes to India. Her analysis of the standardization of empathy statements in soft skill training in New Delhi call centers highlights how translation is at once always generative and incomplete. Brent Luvaas and Jenny Chio discuss a different way in which feelings are translated into commodifiable qualities through novel technologies of architectural renderings. Their article focuses on the visual presentation of eco-city projects spreading in Southeast Asia (Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia) to analyze how somatic experiences, produced through eco-cities renderings, are deployed as virtual translational technologies for the commodification of sustainability, whereby climate anxieties are combined with “globalized middle-class lifestyle aspirations” and directed to real estate speculative projects.

Alfonso Del Percio and Cécil Vigouroux deal with an outcome of the structural inequalities and sociospatial reconfigurations ensuing from speculative urban renewal projects: homelessness. They examine a different case of crossmodal translation: the homeless census activities undertaken by Paris city council in collaboration with volunteers and show how counting and the “spectacularization of numbers” are a flexible technology of governmentality. Their article discusses the recent implementation of a homeless outreach program in Paris to examine how quantitative and statistical data translate social facts into municipal policies or national political propaganda.

In our diverse ethnographic endeavors, we ask what is considered (un)translatable and when are the semiotic metamarks of translation disguised or highlighted to produce unique prototypes, faithful copies, fraudulent imitations, and strategic subsidiaries. Indeed, in providing fine-grained ethnographic accounts of the work of translation, we also explore situations in which attempts at translation generate frictions and misunderstandings (Nielsen), as well as strategic claims of alleged untranslatability (Donzelli and Perrino). At the same time, we analyze the semiotic procedures whereby translational encompassment or intersemiotic and crossmodal translations are made inconspicuous (Hull) and neutrally unproblematic as in the futuristic aesthetics of sustainable affluence discussed by Luvaas and Chio or in the spectacularization of census described by Del Percio and Vigouroux. Our hope is that our analyses of the workings of the translation machine in which we are all caught may stimulate further explorations into the dreams and pitfalls of capitalist portability (Ong Reference Ong2007).