The dominance of English and a small number of European languages whose global reach is a consequence of their colonial history continues to perpetuate linguistic imperialism and contributes to cultural homogenization and the persistence of inequalities in global communication. Online data inherits these linguistic, cultural, and epistemological asymmetries in a self-perpetuating spiral and exacerbates them by feeding them into translation machines.
Scholarly on- and offline knowledge production does not escape this self-perpetuating spiral. Consumed by the race for a higher position in global rankings, many higher education and research institutions uncritically rely on research metrics that devalue locally relevant research, particularly when it is produced in languages other than English. The exponential growth in the number of papers published in English is a strain on non-English speaking scholars, who have to carry the logistical and financial burden of translation.
Given the scale of the problem and the pressure on academic labour, AI and machine translation may come across as a bargain: they can deliver large quantities of research data in multiple languages almost instantaneously, and at low cost compared to human labour. Behind the rhetoric of equity and diversity and the attendant freemium interfaces presented to the public and the scientific community, however, lies an unethical and extractive model of translation and authorship that has unprecedented environmental, labour, and cultural costs. Encounters in translation attempts to overcome some of these problems systematically, through long-term and sustainable solutions rather than erratically and piecemeal. It seeks to contribute to a richer and more humane alternative in scholarly communication by bypassing the uncritical reliance on humanly unchecked AI solutions and instead adopting a model of collaborative, multilingual, community-based translation.
Encounters sees translation as a new paradigm in transdisciplinary and translational endeavours to engage with, mediate, and integrate knowledge that has been compartmentalized in disciplinary and societal silos, and scattered across the linguistic centres and peripheries of the ecosystem of knowledge. It seeks to create a space where scholars with the requisite expertise can contribute actively to the debate on the politics and practice of translation in the context of knowledge production and circulation, irrespective of their race, ethnicity, religion, physical location, gender, sexuality, or migratory status.
Equitable and sustainable ecosystems of knowledge require participation and deliberation across as well as within disciplines. Translation studies has a key role to play in contributing to the transdisciplinary ecosystem of knowledge championed by the open science movement. But like other disciplines, it must begin by directing its critical gaze at its own modes of thinking and its location within the wider research landscape and the world at large. Its priorities and discourses have traditionally located it within dominant structures of power, perpetuating various blind spots and prejudices that have increasingly been noted by scholars such as Kotze (2021), Bush (2022), Price (2023), and Tachtiris (2024). The discipline has further invested in elaborating a foundational narrative which locates its own origins in ‘the West’; Baer (2020) dissects this narrative and refers to it as “the originary myth of translation studies” (p. 221). Its predominantly Western gaze continues to devalue racialized subjects and support a global dynamics of race that perpetuates the legacy of European imperialism, a legacy further exacerbated by the digital economy, and one that has largely been ignored or downplayed by scholars of translation.
Translation plays a major role in negotiating the way race and its intersection with language, gender, culture, and epistemes is understood, downplayed, suppressed, or mediated globally. And yet, there is little or no engagement in translation studies, or indeed in the various disciplines that make up critical race studies, with the role played by translation in this respect. At best, translation is treated in the latter body of literature as a trope, or metaphor, rather than a complex interlingual process that shapes the very norms by which knowledge is produced, circulated and (de)valued. At the same time, racialized and other marginalized and disenfranchised subjects continue to be given scant attention in translation research, and in actual translation practice. As Inghilleri (2020) rightly points out, now that we have come to recognize the role that translation has played historically, and continues to play today, in perpetuating inequality and suppressing the voices of the oppressed, it is “incumbent upon us to initiate and validate translation practices that have as their aim to counter the systems of containment and control that are applied to marginalized voices” (p. 98). These practices must also include creating infrastructures and modes of research and writing that enable traditionally marginalized scholars to speak in their own voice, to be heard, and to “have a seat at the table” (Kotze, 2021).
Encounters seeks to open up spaces for equitable and ethically responsible reflection on translation within various ecosystems of knowledge and society at large. Approaching the labour of writing, reviewing, publishing, reading, and translating through a political commitment to open science, but also to care, equity, and sustainability, is the alternative we are building to resist the compartmentalization of knowledge in academic and disciplinary silos; the corporate structures that support this process; the marginalization of scholars of colour and colleagues located in the Global South and in the internal South of the North; and AI-powered fully automated translation as the way forward in the twenty-first century academic publishing industry. We invite all scholars interested in the study and practice of translation and their role in knowledge production and construction to join us in this endeavour.
