I would like to acknowledge and thank the substantial comments and guidance provided by Mona Baker, Sue-Ann Harding and the two anonymous external reviewers, and by Moira Inghilleri in the first stages of this paper. This work reflects collective knowledge, processes, lessons and sharing across time (more than ten years), languages and borders with the indigenous and non-indigenous organizations and individuals mentioned here (some, anonymously). I especially thank them for reading a draft translation of this paper to be able to provide essential feedback. It is this type of process that makes this work possible. I also thank Encounters in Translation for giving me the necessary time to incorporate that feedback, and all their team–including the translators–for their patient and invaluable work. Any remaining errors are my own.
The study of the climate crisis and socio-environmental conflicts from cultural, linguistic, and translation-related perspectives has been on the rise in the last two decades. In addition, ‘knowledge translation’ has become one of the key notions in discussions that centre the need to make technical-scientific and health-related knowledge around climate change and its impacts available to the general public and, further, to turn scientific information into effective action. Scholars have argued that this notion, which often ignores inter-lingual translation and its intricacies, can benefit from a deeper engagement with linguistic and intercultural aspects relevant for the target audiences in order to overcome the standard unidirectional understanding of this process (Susam-Saraeva, 2024; Ødemark & Engebretsen, 2022). These important contributions have also stressed the need for transdisciplinary dialogues between translation studies scholars and researchers in other disciplines to better understand how climate change discourse travels the globe and how it is appropriated and used. For example, recent research has called for the need to “redirect the focus from the abstract notion of how translation should be carried out, to how specific actors and agents are already doing actual translation work on the ground” (Susam-Saraeva, 2024, para. 32). The role and characteristics of translation and translators involved in concrete processes within environmental conflicts and climate issues have yet to be examined in their full complexity in translation studies, the humanities, and social sciences in general. Disciplines interested in translational analyses can draw from a rich body of research carried out by translation scholars who have been examining translation in the context of conflict and violence, activism and social movements (Baker, 2019a; Boéri, 2023; Fernández, 2020; Gould & Tahmasebian, 2020; Inghilleri, 2008; Todorova & Ruiz Rosendo, 2021), all of which are also crucial for examining the translational aspects of the climate crisis.
This paper draws from my own long-term translation practice and ethnographic research in the context of a socio-environmental conflict in the Argentine Patagonia, namely fracking, to investigate intra- and inter-lingual co-production of knowledge and translation as a two-way process inserted in the larger resistance of organizations and local communities to extractivist projects that are at the heart of the climate crisis. The paper argues that translation, when articulated, understood, and practiced as part of knowledge co-production with affected communities and as embedded in the wider construction of liberatory alternatives, can help travel the path between research and resistance. Concrete examples of such process are provided in the context of knowledge production around fracking and its impacts in Argentina.
Here translation is understood as both a space for political action (Baker, 2013) and a social relation, without overlooking its linguistic materiality (Bielsa, 2023). My argument draws as much from the theoretical contributions of world-ecology (Moore, 2023), Latin American political ecology (Alimonda et al., 2017; Machado Aráoz, 2018; Svampa, 2019) and translational perspectives that examine conflict, social movements, and activism (Baker, 2019a, 2019b; Boéri, 2012; Doerr, 2018; Fernández, 2020), as from the experiences and practices of movements and organizations involved in the processes I describe here. It also stems from my ongoing participation in a space between languages and geographies that cannot be fully captured through the more usual online vs. offline description of translation ethnography and/or activist translation. I seek not only to broaden the current scholarly discussion around translation and the climate crisis, but to ground it in actual practices where translation is concerned with climate justice, environmental health, alternatives to dominant solutions as promoted by the Global North, and the narratives that accompany them.
I understand the climate crisis as a crisis of the capitalist world-system, rooted in more than five centuries of exploitation of human and non-human natures (with a qualitative shift occurring in 1850 with the changes brought about by the Industrial Revolution), an analysis that situates the responsibility of such crisis not on Humanity as an undifferentiated whole but on a specific way of organizing society, which some authors have preferred to call the Capitalocene, the Age of capital (Machado Aráoz, 2016; Moore, 2015). Resistance against the multiple manifestations of the crisis includes, as in the case I examine, actions aimed at the co-production of knowledge and alternative narratives in the service of a larger goal: the questioning and disruption of the material structures that underpin systems of oppression. This is where the translation practices described here are inserted.
Following Modonesi’s study of subalternity and antagonism (2006, 2013), resistance—a category as widely used as often undefined—is understood here as the terrain of construction of antagonism that is necessarily situated within the current relations of domination but that also transcends them. Between a more epistemological formulation of antagonism (like that of Laclau & Mouffe (1985)) and a purely structuralist one (which dominated 20th century Marxism), Modonesi (2006) proposes a dyad of subalternity/antagonism, within which resistance takes place. This dyad allows us to visualize “the two sides of every process of subjective construction in the context of a social conflict” (Modonesi, 2006, para. 47). For Modonesi, the “strong” sense of resistance (the political one, linked to antagonism) points to an actual possibility of changing the world that is glimpsed in the construction of antagonism during conflict. The author speaks about “subaltern resistance” (mostly fragmented, subjective, short-term, specific and defensive) and “antagonistic resistance” (sustained, long-term, offensive as well as defensive, and oriented toward significant and/or radical change), both in interrelation. As will be seen below, the organization which is the focus of this paper defines its goals as the construction of a movement. In this sense, resistance here refers to antagonistic resistance in Modonesi’s terms. From this we can infer that translation as a path from research to resistance points to its role in concrete processes that are part of wider movement-building efforts. It is not translation for the diffusion of global climate norms and frameworks that may ultimately secure the maintenance of the status quo.
The actors in these processes are those on the frontlines of the fight against the local, everyday incarnations of the climate crisis: they are the organizations calling for debt cancellation in the Global South as an issue inherently related to the crisis, participating from parallel summits such as the World Social Forums and protesting against free-trade agreements; the neighbours organizing in popular assemblies to understand, research, and respond to the most direct impacts of extractivist projects on their livelihoods; the unions articulating what a just energy transition must look like for the working-class; and the indigenous peoples reclaiming territories, revitalizing their languages, and reminding us that so called ‘progress’ and ‘development’ have been defined and sold to them for more than five hundred years.
In what follows I will first make explicit how this work understands the climate crisis via the theoretical contributions of world-ecology and Latin American political ecology. Then I will note the relevance of the concept and practice of translation for both a critical interpretation of the crisis and the search for alternative paths to addressing it. The way the crisis is understood is of utmost relevance to the methodological approach of this work. In the following section I provide specific examples of co-production of knowledge and translation in the context of the struggle against fracking in Argentina. Finally, the methodological discussion addresses how this activist/militant research and translation practice inform each other in a way that supports translation’s centrality in processes of knowledge co-production.
Translation in the world-ecological crisis, and the world-ecological crisis through translation
It is important to clarify how one understands the climate crisis and its origins in translational approaches, and also to unpack one’s grasp of translation when discussing the climate crisis and its language and narratives. When referring to the climate crisis, I do not seek to conjure first and foremost images of burning forests and scorching temperatures (urgent and undeniable as these realities are) but to point at a particular way of organizing natures (human and non-human) that has made the exploitation of nature and labour for profit possible in the first place (Moore, 2015), a logic that contains within itself the exhaustion of its own base of survival. That is, in the fulfilment of its own profit motive, capitalism needs to keep expanding its frontiers of resource extraction in a way that eventually degrades its own natural basis (O’Connor, 1998). I do not centre exclusively on fossil fuels either, but on the relations that made them a ‘resource’ in the first place, the very same relations that classified humans as civilized or savage, and rendered the latter disposable: those relations necessary to the Capitalocene and its goals, including its ecocidal and genocidal projects (Moore, 2023).1 The world-ecology conversation—which draws from the world-systems analysis of Immanuel Wallerstein (2004)—insists on understanding “humanity-in-nature as a world-historical process”; capitalism as world-ecology is not “the ecology of the world, but a patterned history of power, capital, and nature, dialectically joined” (Moore, 2015, pp. 3, 8). In addition, in dealing with the climate crisis in Latin America, where environmental protectors/activists are killed at the highest rate globally (Global Witness, 2024), this paper understands the crisis as inextricable from the violent extractivist regimes in the region (and the Global South in general) that have resulted in a situation where the countries that pollute the least suffer the highest costs for the consequences of climate change (Gutiérrez Ríos & Avilés, 2025; Hickel et al., 2022).
Equally important to bear in mind is that to interpret the crisis and build narratives that make sense of it, we engage in a process of ‘translating’ reality: we translate between languages, cultures, and worldviews (also within nation-states) perforce implicated in such a global phenomenon. But perhaps most relevant here, the crisis is translated-narrated for the wider non-specialized public. That discourse circulates in mainstream media and major global institutions through their norms, frameworks, and documents (Caimotto, 2022). Any discipline that discusses climate change is therefore dealing with translation and its various senses, directly or indirectly, although this is often seen as a transparent and agentless process. Of the myriad ways in which translation is relevant to a crisis of global proportions involving different languages, regions, cultures and cosmovisions, suffice it to point out for the purposes of this paper that inter-lingual translation not only provides access to crucial scientific information, it helps spread programmes and policies that may help or hinder communities’ ability to survive, and it has the potential to circulate alternative interpretations and solutions to the crisis beyond institutional and dominant Global North frameworks by communicating the actors producing grassroots knowledge and engaging in practices of resistance (Kothari et al., 2014). However, the uneven circulation of narratives explaining conflicts and crises is an element reinforcing existing power dynamics of the world-system and its hegemonic relations. The analysis of these discursive practices cannot overlook inter-lingual translation. Currently, the translations and narratives generally presented to the public are often limited to solutions that are either based on dominant frameworks of sustainability or green colonialism, not to mention climate denialism. The under- and non-translation of alternatives developed by critical actors in the Global South and also within the Global North results not only in the dominance of mainstream narratives but it also hinders translational research horizons in favour of ideas and frameworks that have already been questioned for decades by organizations, activists and local and international scholars in Latin America, Africa and beyond, due to their consequences on the ground (Escobar, 1995; Gudynas & Acosta, 2011; Machado Aráoz, 2021). An example is the considerable focus on the UN Sustainable Development Goals in translation research dealing with development and environmental concerns, whose consequences and discursive juggling have been amply criticized (Briant Carant, 2017; Hickel, 2015; Langan, 2018). Therefore, the inter-lingual translation of alternatives to hegemonic solutions to the crisis is an urgent task if we understand translation as building new conversations and relations in the target cultures, and if we seek to examine its role in wider processes of resistance.2 As movement scholar Marina Sitrin (2006) has pointed out, in these new experiences “[translation] is first and foremost a participatory political process. New movements put new demands and expectations on translators and editors. They demand participation. Language is one of the most delicate, and tricky, political tools” (p. vi).
Holding a “wider view of translation as a social relation that mobilizes and questions the linguistic materials that shape our conception of others and of ourselves” (Bielsa, 2023, p. 53) favours, across disciplines, a deeper understanding of the type of translational processes occurring with respect to the narrative imbalances mentioned above and within socio-environmental conflicts that are currently unfolding across the globe. “Translation and the climate crisis” as a topic of investigation calls for a situated and historical approach: for example, translation in the Latin American context (as in many others) takes place in a site of conflict, that of two dominant languages, English and Spanish, the latter imposed as product of the colonization of the Americas, where translation served the purpose of epistemicide (Price, 2023). While in the case I will describe here, English and Spanish are used counter-hegemonically within the struggles against extractive industries (Piñeiro, 2022a), the indigenous language spoken in the region, Mapuzugun, stands in an unequal relation with respect to both. While Mapuzugun is not the focus of this paper, it is a fundamental aspect in the research as it is necessary to understand how those unequal dynamics between the three languages play out on the ground when it comes to environmental discourse and narratives, so we can learn if and how translation can help redress them beyond the mere “inclusion” of indigenous languages and worldviews within dominant or widespread frameworks—regardless of whether these frameworks are national or international. This is where the concreteness and connectedness of research and translation with the praxes of peoples and their actual efforts to change relations of domination—especially those that shape the understanding of, and responses to, the crisis—come into place. Translation is a crucial element in this context and generally overlooked. Looking at how it is helping or obstructing both social exchanges across languages in concrete experiences of environmental conflict and the circulation and (re)production of environmental discourse becomes as relevant as ever. Therefore, in the context of translation and the climate crisis as an object of inquiry, both the critical contributions of world-ecology and the theorizations of Latin American political ecology can contribute to a situated analysis of translation as a social relation and as a space for political thought and action. I next present an empirical examination of such a process through my ethnography of translation in the context of the anti-fracking struggle in Argentina.
Translating with the territories: co-production of knowledge and of translation
According to studies focused on English language scholarly production, “knowledge co-production” in climate-related research has been gaining ground in the social sciences in the last decade (Bremer & Meisch, 2017). The concept has been associated in different ways with “research collaboration”, “participatory knowledge production” and similar approaches and methodologies that question dominant expertise and seek to empower all subjects involved in knowledge production (Carrera & Levidow, 2025). Its first academic use in the Anglosphere is attributed to Elinor Ostrom (1996). In the discipline of Science & Technology Studies (S&TS), recent discussions of co-production have been instrumental in challenging both social and technoscientific determinism, and in acknowledging that the making of science is political (Jasanoff, 2004). In Latin America, co-production of knowledge within and beyond academic spaces is usually traced back to the pioneer proposal of participatory action-research as formulated by the sociological school of Orlando Fals Borda in the 1970s (1973). Beyond institutional research, it also includes a dialogue of knowledges, and collaborative and community-engaged processes between universities and the wider public in the spirit of Paulo Freire’s approach (Freire, 1973; Santos et al., 2019). As Santos et al. (2019) point out, Latin America is rich in early examples of knowledge co-production between social movements and scholars and intellectuals, the most famous case being that of the Landless Peasant Movement in Brazil (MST). Notably, many current examples of research with communities and knowledge co-production in Latin America revolve around issues of extractivism and socio-environmental justice.
Such is the case of the research process described here, which began in 2015, initially with the intention of focusing on the environmental impacts of a new oil and gas extraction technique in my home country, Argentina, as part of a Master’s program in Latin American Studies at the University of San Martin (UNSAM). It transformed and developed after my first visit to the territory for pre-dissertation fieldwork in the province of Neuquén, when I became involved as an English-Spanish translator and interpreter, upon identifying the potential contributions of translation in such conflict. The decision to shift the focus of research was borne out of the discovery of a deficit of professional translation resources. The question thus became, what are the actors on the ground translating and how? A second, related question that emerged later is how my role as a translator affects existing translation efforts. Therefore, the research I present here is based on two joint processes: one, an ethnography of my own translation practice carried out on the ground as an interpreter (intersecting with fieldwork, as I explain below) and in an ongoing basis by way of translation; second, fieldwork carried out at different intervals during 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018 with a hiatus (only with respect to fieldwork) and a return to fieldwork in 2024. A total of 15 structured and semi-structured interviews were conducted in the first phase of research (2015-2018), which form the basis of this paper. These were carried out in person and virtually both with individuals and with groups. Participant observation included interpretation (a dual function within the methodology described in the following section), which took place in two visits (including multiple events). The study of what is translated, who the actors involved are, and how translations travel was developed through in-person and virtual exchanges and translation projects carried out in the last ten years. This occurred mainly with one organization introduced below but also includes the principal indigenous institution in the area (the Mapuce Confederation of Neuquén). The actors interviewed included members of indigenous communities in the capital of Neuquén and the locality of Añelo, local researchers, journalists, and activists/militants. Qualitative analysis of the interviews is aimed at identifying three elements: 1) relevant texts, events, and actors in the local production of knowledge on fracking and its resistance; 2) the presence of translations and the actors involved in their production; and 3) reflections by the interviewees around climate and environmental discourse in general. This research is ongoing, and I present here several aspects pertaining to knowledge co-production that do not cover the totality of themes and materials analysed in my dissertation.
The conflict in question has been unfolding in the Argentine Patagonia (mainly in the provinces of Neuquén and Río Negro) since 2009-2011 and can be placed in the wider context of (neo)extractive regimes in Latin America at the beginning of the 21st century (Svampa, 2019). Extractivism is a contested concept. I do not employ it here to simply denote systems of technological extraction of raw materials, but following Machado Aráoz (2015), I understand “extractivist regimes” as political-economic formations based on the over-exploitation of territories in the peripheries of the world-system and their natural goods. The term has also been widely adopted in Latin America by the organizations, assemblies, and different groups in the struggle against its brutal consequences. In Argentina, the depletion of conventional oil and gas reservoirs in the late 1990s, accompanied by technological and geopolitical developments in the fossil fuel landscape, led to the search for a ‘solution’ (OPSur, 2012; Riffo, 2018). After announcements by the US Energy Information Agency (EIA) that Argentina held the second-largest unconventional gas reserves in the world after China, and the fourth largest in shale oil (OPSur, 2014), the provincial and national governments launched the extraction of unconventional hydrocarbons through a technique known as hydraulic fracturing or ‘fracking’, which had first been deployed in the United States, and which needs to be understood within the local and global background detailed above (Riffo, 2018). Unconventional hydrocarbons are “trapped” in sedimentary rock formations called shale and tight. A technique called high-volume hydraulic fracturing or fracking is needed to release the oil and gas. Once a well is drilled vertically more than a mile below the surface to reach the bedrock, horizontal drilling is carried out through the rock formation; a mix of exorbitant amounts of water (scarce in the area), silica sand (known to cause silicosis), and toxic chemicals (proprietary and therefore largely undisclosed) are pumped into the ground to propel the release of these “resources” (OPSur, 2025). The socio-environmental, health and climate impacts of this technique—massively applied in the United States and often presented as a “green” alternative to coal and conventional oil—are well-documented (CHPNY, 2023). This technique led to a profound transformation in the fossil fuels landscape, the main drivers of climate change.
In the Argentine Patagonia, fracked lands are former colonized indigenous lands where both indigenous and non-indigenous communities are living on top of oil and gas fields, often without access to basic services like, precisely, gas and electricity. It is no surprise that this megaproject, known as Vaca Muerta (Dead Cow),3 and promoted by the United States, local governments, and transnational corporations, comes hand in hand with a renewed narrative of the domestic enemy, portraying the indigenous Mapuce communities and the activists who denounce it as blocking the path to “development” and “progress” and leading to an increased criminalization of the indigenous population (Diario Río Negro, 2024) and of protest. No socio-environmental analysis in or about Latin America can ignore either the historical class, gender and racial structures and dynamics of extraction nor the language employed to justify it and how it circulates.
Argentine molecular biologist Andrés Carrasco (2011) once wrote that “the adoption of [certain] technologies is as powerful and uninnocent as the colonial sword”. These new and experimental technologies still aiding extractivist regimes in Latin America ‘speak’ English, the lingua franca of technology, but also of scientific research and dissemination. Given that they play a decisive role in extractivist industries, both English and technical-scientific language become a barrier for communities who seek to understand the risks of those projects and organize against them. Therefore, both intra-lingual knowledge translation and inter-lingual translation began to take place. In 2011, when the first news about fracking was reaching communities in Neuquén, Googling “fracking” in Spanish produced hits that were overwhelmingly in English. On my first fieldwork visit in 2015 a young Mapuce spokesperson of the Mapuce Confederation of Neuquén (CMN) told me:
We found out [about fracking] through what happened in Gelay Ko [where the first well was fracked]. The rumors were that it was hydrofracking… What is hydrofracking?… The logko [authority] told the youngest of us in a meeting what was going on. He gave us the task of researching and becoming informed so that we could take a stance in the face of what was going on. Back in 2011 there were almost no materials in Spanish about hydrofracking, except maybe from Cantabria (Spain), and a few from France, where they were discussing it. But most of the information, for and against, was from the United States. We the young ones organized workshops to search for information and summarize it. (NM, personal communication, 2015)4
This testimony speaks of research carried out by the very communities being affected. In this instance, intra-lingual knowledge translation and inter-lingual translation are carried out by non-scientists or experts in articulation with organizations like the one that will be described below. As a technical & scientific translator, it was this discovery—that information in Spanish was scarce and that the communities were trying to translate—that informed my work from then on, and does to this day, as needs evolve and change, new techniques appear, and new extraction frontiers are pushed.
Another vital actor in this conflict is the Observatorio Petrolero Sur (OPSur). Due to its salient role in researching, translating, and producing materials on the issue of oil and gas exploitation in the region, I will focus here on this particular organization. OPSur, with offices in Neuquén (the province where most of the fracking activities are carried out) and Buenos Aires, was founded in 2008 with the main goal of fighting for just and democratic energy production and consumption. For OPSur, “communication, training, research and public policy interventions are in the service of the articulation and creation of a social movement” (my emphasis, OPSur, n.d.). They take on the task of translating both people’s experience of the impacts of fracking and expert and scientific knowledge that, together with the former, build “people’s knowledge” from below. That is, this is not a top-down or unidirectional provision of translated knowledge (significantly, intra- and/or inter-lingual) but can be described as co-production with diverse local communities. Therefore, it is not possible to understand the organization’s focus and approach without this entrenchment to the territory.
Initially, the organization had translated materials from English into Spanish through bilingual members and other collaborators, but was not working professionally with any particular translator, agency or translators’ group, nor was translation a significant part of their production or considered as part of specific projects. Initial lack of funding and trust were mentioned as important factors in the process of commissioning translations. During the first stages of this new technique called fracking, they relied on members of the group and researchers who could read English and produce translations or write articles and disseminate information on the basis of source texts. One of their members reflects:
With the launching of fracking [in Argentina] came the first wave of information we were able to get, precisely from the United States. Even the testimonies were coming from the US. This is very evident with experimental techniques, that is, when a new technique emerges and revolutionizes a whole sector, and those who do a close examination of these innovations need to have access [to the English language]. (ES, personal communication, 2021, my emphasis)
When reflecting on the importance of having a member of the organization who could understand English and produce texts in Spanish in the earlier days of fracking, the OPSur member further explains that they did it “To anticipate… nothing, because [fracking] was already in full preparation, but it did allow us to have a more thorough understanding of what was coming, so that we wouldn’t be caught by surprise once everything was already told” (ES personal communication, 2018, my emphasis). The reference to something being “already told” is key, as it signals not just the organizations’ need to access information but the relevance of this translation in challenging a narrative dominance that prevents communities and organizations from telling their own story about these industries and their supposed benefits. Communities and grassroots organizations telling their story is not just about completing the picture, it is key to the epistemological veracity of the impacts of this type of technologies. If knowledge is to be co-produced, the affect and reality of the communities needs to be told and translated to show that dominant narratives present only one or select aspects of the problem or even completely distort reality (Baker, 2019a; Bohman, 1999). Here, the co-production of knowledge serves both to provide access to information and to dispute one-sided narratives.
In Jasanoff’s (2004) edited volume on the co-production of science and social order, Rabeharisoa and Callon describe patient-scientist collaboration in the case of muscular dystrophy research:
The case of the SMA group is, from this point of view, an excellent example. The leaders of the group, all volunteers – patients or their family members – scan the international literature, translate articles considered to be important, and write syntheses. These they update every six months, give to specialists to read through during meetings which sometimes last a whole day, and then disseminate among families with whom they organize work sessions to answer questions. (Rabeharisoa & Callon, 2004, p. 190, added emphasis)
In our case, in research carried out in co-production with the Mapuce Confederation of Neuquen, OPSur, and other local organizations, the US grassroots organization Earthworks carried out community monitoring and field measurements of methane emissions in Vaca Muerta,5 given that the communities cannot access such technology, as well as visits to indigenous communal lands, and meetings with neighbours affected by induced seismicity (earthquakes caused by fracking). As the organizations’ international analyst and advocate explains: “The findings of this investigation challenge prevailing narratives often repeated by government leaders by visually documenting industry’s harmful impact on local communities and the environment” and adds, “The conclusions of our investigation […] suggest the best ways forward should start from within these communities up” (Earthworks, 2023b, para. 3, my emphasis). The resulting report and accompanying video (I encourage readers interested in translation and the climate crisis to watch it) are available in English, Spanish, and Portuguese, all translated by Earthworks. Mapuzugun is not one of the languages of translation, partly due to the reasons explained above. In this process, meetings with community members included informal consecutive interpretation through the help of bilingual journalists. OPSur states once again the hope that “this can be disclosed at the national level and, if possible, at the international level as well” (Earthworks, 2023a, min. 1:32). In line with the approach of local organizations, Earthworks (n. d.) “has long supported social movements in Latin America, advocating for issues such as territorial rights, food sovereignty, and challenging corporate dominance. We aim to collaborate with frontline communities and advocates and help raise awareness about the pollution — and its harms –that we document”. In this example, it is the close collaboration—and the incorporation of local knowledge—that allows for the articulation of the technical capacities of the foreign organization with the local need to have reliable data that confirms the lived experience in the territories.
As the earlier testimony from an OPSur member shows, the United States, where the technique has been implemented on a massive scale, serves as a mirror of what might come for Argentina. In this sense, OPSur identifies an important milestone in their translation activities. In 2016, scientists from New York State visited Neuquén and presented an early Spanish version of a Fracking Compendium, a document compiling peer-reviewed and journalistic articles documenting the risks and harms of fracking, mainly in the US. Published by Concerned Health Professionals of New York (CHPNY), its editions (so far nine, and the last one with over 600 pages) have been used and cited worldwide, referenced in the European Union, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and Australia in discussions around the technique, and has been instrumental in obtaining a ban on fracking in the state of New York in 2014 (CHPNY, 2023; Steingraber, 2015). The third edition had been translated into Spanish by the Mexico, Central America and Caribbean Office of the Heinrich Böll Stiftung organization (CHPNY, n.d.). Scientists visited fracking sites in Vaca Muerta and presented that edition to different audiences in Neuquén (where the affected territories are) and Buenos Aires, including the National Congress, the provincial Legislature and Neuquén’s main hospital, the ruka (communal gathering space) of the Mapuce Confederation of Neuquén, at the Tourism School of the National University of Comahue (Neuquen) and the School of Medicine of the University of Buenos Aires (Buenos Aires province) (Diario Río Negro, 2016; OPSur, 2016). That is, the cross-sectoral traveling of this text to different venues—all of them involving relevant actors like governments, neighbours, indigenous community, doctors, students and the media—is part of knowledge co-production efforts and of the social life of the translation. The conversations, input, and experiences of these diverse actors, as shared in such events, are taken in by OPSur in their effort to build movement. In these instances, I was able to observe as the organization’s members carefully listened to and took note of people’s input. An OPSur member explains:
I insist on the importance of the Compendium because it allowed us to reach other sectors, it was the scientific source about the impacts of fracking; it wasn’t only a group of small local NGOs denouncing this. (ES, personal communication, 2021, original emphasis)
In addition to reaching powerful sectors considered to have a legitimate voice in the debate, such as governments, the Compendium and other relevant materials in turn become sources of information for books, booklets, and maps discussed with and disseminated among teachers’ unions, schools, universities, public libraries, in interviews and webinars (OPSur, 2024b). OPSur’s presentations of these materials are spaces for debate and construction of people’s knowledge, a model for a more horizontal construction than unidirectional top-down knowledge translation and intra-lingual translation. I participated in some of these events as an interpreter in a role that also allows me to be a witness to how society at large received translation and interpretation. Thus, those observations feed into the research. The double ethnographic process—of the translator’s practice and of translation on the ground—gives way to new translation strategies, which in turn inform research. This is a cycle of participatory action-research that in the sphere of translation acquires its own characteristics.
Eight years later, in 2024, the translation collective I am part of translated the latest version of the Compendium (every year, new research prompts its updating). In the introduction to this new translation, which was possible thanks to the efforts of international NGOs and was sponsored by more than 20 Latin American organizations and popular assemblies, OPSur (2024a) explains:
We at Observatorio Petrolero Sur have anticipated the socioenvironmental impacts of the exploitation of Vaca Muerta through fracking […] Our work draws from the reality of the territories but also from studies coming from the United States, the most fractured country in the world, and the one registering the biggest impacts. Throughout this decade we have confirmed that the North American experience repeats itself in Argentina sometime later on […] Argentina lacks research on the implications of fracking for the health of its populations, which is why the Compendium becomes a fundamental tool […] (p. 6, my emphasis)
In the paratext of the latest Spanish version, we see a paragraph describing the translators collective’s work, which was included in the publication by OPSur’s request, together with paragraphs describing the rest of the organizations involved in the publication of the translation. Later on, in March of 2025, the Compendium was presented in an international webinar organized by the Collaborative for Health and Environment with the participation of OPSur, myself as member of the collective in charge of the translation, and a member of CHPNY. I took the opportunity to speak of language justice and access in environmental struggles, and the role of translation to a wide audience including organizations, scientists, and public officers (a rare opportunity). While the translating culture (Argentina) determines the choice, time, and actors involved in the translation process, here the ongoing connections with the actors in the source culture implies an active participation of the agents in both cultures, bringing both contexts into conversation. OPSur also uses online translation tools for their everyday communication needs, as they are “useful to have a basic understanding” (ES, personal communication, 2018). However, they value quality for important sources and rely on professional translation for their published materials and technical information whenever possible, as mentioned above, citing trust as a main factor (OPSur, personal communication, 2020). Local scholar Lorena Riffo (2018) analyses strategies of information that lead to counter-information actions and materials as a fundamental axis of counter-hegemonic disputes in the process of fighting hydraulic fracturing in the region. While the importance of the US case is mentioned, translation efforts and their complexities are often overlooked. In the webinar, under the title of “Translation: Research and Resistance”, OPSur explained the importance of translating this resource and of translation in general. The main reasons included: lack of independent research on fracking’s health impacts in Argentina; lack of political will to conduct them; dominant social consensus around oil and gas extraction; lack of scientific interest due to links between universities and corporations; high cost of this type of research in a context of serious economic crisis. They added, “The [translation of the] Compendium becomes an essential tool to understand and address the risks” (Collaborative for Health and Environment, 2025).
Interestingly, technical translation and its role in building and communicating science for the people is not detached from the political goals on the ground, neither for the organizations nor for myself as a translator involved in this process. Often unexplored as part of activist translation, technical-scientific translation in this context contributes to challenging discourses where fracking is presented as a “sustainable” alternative and, more broadly, narratives of “progress” and “development” to which these techniques are attached. The phenomenon of extractivism is vast: from data centres’ territorial transformations to lithium extraction, large-scale mining, and monocultures. In highly technical & scientific texts, the intervention of the translator lies more in the political and social context of production of the translation, its paratexts, its motive and target use, and the relations it builds, than in the lexical choices they might make. What materials or sections of a body of work are relevant to translate next or should be privileged (depending on the local context’s needs) are examples of seemingly minor aspects of intervention through joint decision-making. Moreover, in certain organizations where members speak little or no English, translators specializing in the relevant topics can facilitate information and intervene in these spaces by finding and suggesting materials to be translated, making international connections and coordination possible, sharing knowledge, and even writing their own pieces on those topics, particularly with an international focus.6
However, the possibilities of counting on specialized translation for these types of organizations is highly dependent on cost. This poses several challenges: on the one hand, the material conditions of translators in countries like Argentina, with multiple and recurrent crises, means that their availability for volunteer work or at solidarity fees might be severely restricted. On the other hand, it is undeniable that the existing status quo in professional translation (reflected in some of its codes of ethics) fosters the alienation of the translator with respect to the political impacts of their labour. Boéri’s (2023) observations with respect to interpretation and her vast experience in the World Social Forums is also valid for translation:
[The field’s] uncritical ties with the conference interpreting elites has marginalised the communities of professionals and/or activists at the margins of the field and of the polity, and in so doing, their views, their practical difficulties in enacting them, and the experiential knowledge they construct across languages, cultures, and contexts, about interpreting politics and logistics. (p. 225)
A third element is the relative lack of awareness or familiarity with translation in grassroots organizations, which can influence the view of the translator as a mere service provider or a linguist whose work is limited to the transfer of linguistic signs.7 There is much to be studied in this regard within translation in socio-environmental conflicts and climate emergencies.
So far, I have highlighted translation processes into the target culture’s language, of mostly technical nature. However, translation of non-technical texts, such as opinion pieces, in-depth analysis and other materials where the organization’s participation in the global debate around climate issues occurs as well, from Spanish into English. Here OPSur brings the territorial experience and co-production of knowledge with affected communities to the international public. One such publication is the report Just Transition: Latin American debates for the energy future, which includes a section of interviews with workers, and which explains:
The idea of a Just Transition was elaborated by unions in dialogue with diverse sectors such as the socio-environmental, indigenous and peasant movements. From its origin in the Global North, this notion spread throughout the world and is currently opening deep debates that seek to give it a proper direction. Latin America is not an exception… In the new millennium, the concept acquired a global reach, becoming part of the agenda of global governance bodies, as well as a recurrent topic in meetings such as the United Nations Climate Change Conferences (COP). However, this higher reach implied the loss of its original specificity, and so different groups assign it different meanings according to their own backgrounds and needs. (Nuñez, 2020, p. 5, my emphasis)
Thus, OPSur traces and critiques the path of this concept: from its emergence in the labour movement in the US to its mainstream use in the Global North to the need for an elaboration and communication of its specificities in the Global South according to its particular realities. The document puts forth a view for a transición justa popular (a grassroots or popular just transition), where “the energy transition is only possible if the social relations of production as a whole are put into question” (Nuñez, 2020, p. 6) and ends by offering English-speaking readers interviews to local energy workers, researchers, and militants. The just transition debate is an interesting example, among others, of conceptual travelling and appropriation through translation. Interestingly, just and popular energy transition debates in Argentina have not yet entered into significant conversations with lesser-known proposals within the United States, such as The Red Deal or different Indigenous Just Transition programs (Indigenous Environmental Network, n. d.; Laboucan-Massimo et al., 2023; The Red Nation, 2021), radical proposals critical of capitalist solutions, with several common points with the Latin American Ecosocial Pact of the South (Pantilimon, 2023). One reason for this may well be the fact that these proposals have not been translated; the under-circulation of such programs built by grassroots organizations and indigenous peoples in the Global North responds partly to the US own dynamics of mainstream media dominance and suppression of alternative discourses. Again, translators situated in the Global North could facilitate connections between such alternatives, but it is only in contact with realities on the ground that this is possible.
I have focused here on one of the most relevant organizations in Argentina in terms of the socio-environmental debate related to energy, perhaps the most important arena—together with our food production systems—when it comes to the climate crisis. Examples abound of collectives, assemblies, grassroots organizations and other cross-sectoral groups in Latin America and other Global South regions who have put forth alternatives to the “false solutions” to the climate crisis disseminated in mainstream media and—with varying degrees of critical assessment—in international organizations such as the UN. It is in these other spaces and struggles that, as we have seen, translation can play a significant role in: 1) providing access to key technical and scientific information; 2) redressing the uneven circulation of climate discourses, and 3) becoming part of broader, organizational efforts at the local level that require and benefit from access to foreign language materials as part of narrative dispute and counter-information strategies. Thus, the co-production of knowledge of which translation is a part serves the epistemological goal of achieving as adequate a grasp of the reality of the climate crisis in the territories as we are able.
Beyond inter-lingual translation, the role of the translator within these efforts also includes facilitating access to information in the foreign language, participating in research initiatives and sharing information in virtual groups. In addition, and while not the focus of this paper, it should be noted that inter-lingual translation also takes place in environmental conflicts in the Global North, one example being the US anti-fracking struggle itself. Environmental justice processes in the Global North also require the participation of non-English Spanish speakers or of community members with limited English proficiency. Translators exercising a politically engaged practice and research can become useful actors facilitating access to, and co-producing, knowledge with and for the struggles (Piñeiro, 2024a; 2025).
Anti-extractive research for anti-extractivist knowledge co-production
Framing translation as a space for political action (Baker, 2013) and a social relation (Bielsa, 2023)—with attention to its material linguistic realities—and occurring in a particular world-system8 needs a methodology that understands research more broadly as a “site of struggle”, to borrow from indigenous scholar Linda Smith (2012). For a Latin American scholar whose research praxis is situated within and beyond academia and who writes “between” and across borders (both physical and linguistic) but always from the standpoint of the periphery, such an awareness informs not only a theoretical perspective, but most importantly the very practice of research and its goals. It also questions what science is needed for social change. This type of methodology has a long tradition in Latin American academia (Jaumont & Versiani, 2016; Rappaport, 2020) and part of its scientific community, as discussed earlier in reference to knowledge co-production.
This tradition stands in tension with standard ideals of social-scientific inquiry. The concept of extraction can be mapped onto models of social science that borrow from natural scientific ideals that value neutrality, observation independence and seek cause and effect explanations that are supposedly apolitical (Leyva & Speed, 2008). Thus, extractive research sees subjects mainly as informants and providers of data, is devoid of any reciprocity and, in failing to question its ultimate goals, becomes part of the conquestual habitus of the Capitalocene (Machado Aráoz, 2022). Therefore, the long tradition of committed research in Latin America asks a set of overarching questions guiding the methodology and practice: whose interest does it serve? Who benefits? In short, science for what and for whom? In this vein, the methodology here centres knowledge and translation co-production for truly sustainable futures and moves forward with those questions in mind. Additionally, it goes against the assumption that participant observation is inherently committed and questions the belief that researching translation and the climate crisis/environmental issues and/or helping disseminate so-called “sustainable” frameworks is beneficial per se. It also interrogates the assumption that mere access to information and to “culturally sensitive” translation leads to effective climate action and that volunteeristic approaches to translation and the climate crisis that lack contact with, or knowledge of, specific sites of struggle are intrinsically beneficial.9
In opposition to such modalities, what some have called “militant research”10 is “a practice capable of articulating involvement and thought. (…) militant research involves participation by conviction, where researchers play a role in actions and share the goals, strategies, and experience (…) not simply because this conduct is an expedient way to get their data” (Bookchin et al., 2013, p. 9). This type of practice requires a toolbox of methods contingent upon the milieu in which the researcher/militant is an active participant in various ways (Russell, 2015). The variety of ways in which activist research in translation and activist translation unfold together, and its particularities, have yet to be explored in depth so as not to subsume them a priori to the characteristics of other types of militancy. But as Fernández (2020) and Boéri (2010, 2023) have shown through their involvement in the 15M movement in Spain and the World Social Forum respectively, and as other instances of political and activist translation research illuminate (Baker, 2015, 2019a; Gould & Tahmasebian, 2020), it is with those in the midst of conflict and struggle that such phenomena and translation’s role in them can be better grasped.
In the ten years since this research began, my institutional affiliations and geographical locations have changed. These changes have undoubtedly affected some aspects of research while strengthening others, but the goal has been to sustain research and praxis for social change. Connections built and knowledge gained of similar struggles in a translator’s new location can be brought together and into dialogue with the long-term relationships at the sites of conflict (in my case, the United States and Argentina). As Marin-Lacarta & Yu (2023) explain, in translation studies, the advantages of ethnography include “the fact that it recognises the importance of both text and context, highlights the roles of various agents in the translation process, and promotes (self-) reflexivity and dialogue among translation researchers and practitioners” (p. 150). However, reflexivity, as Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992) clarify, is not merely “reflection of the subject on the subject” and their research practice only, rather “the subject of reflexivity must ultimately be the social scientific field in toto” (p. 40). Activist/militant research lends itself to such deeper reflection on and questioning of the status quo of academic research in the crises of our time.
In the case of an activist/militant ethnography that includes the two processes mentioned above—an ethnography of the translator’s own practice and of the co-production of knowledge and translation with those on the frontlines—the inquiry encompasses the translator and her locations as well. This is why descriptions of “online vs. offline ethnography” (Boéri, 2023; Marin-Lacarta & Yu, 2023) might not be sufficient as they pivot ethnography around the virtual/non-virtual dualism. In contrast, I seek to centre connection with concrete struggles and peoples. Particularly in the context of the climate crisis—the impacts of which are already affecting ever greater portions of the planet—centring research and practice with relation to a territory and not only to the “online” or “offline” nature of the translator’s activity or the research can provide new avenues for exploring the complexities of translators’ engagement and their networks. In contemporary ethnographic research, “offline” and “online” has been used to describe the digital and physical field space. Today, however, we rarely engage with only one of them, and the introduction of virtual spaces in everyday life has required a new set of skills to analyse both digital and physical interactions. As Przybylski (2021) explains, “In hybrid fieldwork, like physical and online work from which it germinates, the researcher engages in cultural practices as a participant while simultaneously observing the field with critical ears and eyes […].” (p. 5)
While my research is also carried out and observes both field spaces, I would like to stress here the concept of ‘the territory’. The latter has a rather specific connotation in English, one often associated to jurisdiction and governmental boundaries, but in the language of Latin American popular movements and struggles it is closely linked to cultural, political, subjective, and symbolic aspects, and to the production of non-hegemonic social relations (Mason-Deese et al., 2019; Zibechi, 2008/2012). For example,
community radio stations in Puebla and Buenos Aires create relational, common territorialities for Indigenous youth and migrants in a fragmented urban landscape, affording often geographically dispersed and isolated individuals a sense of community and solidarity over the airwaves […] Territorial organizing thus starts from the need to produce a territory by building new social relations. (Mason-Deese et al., 2019, pp. 153, 157, my emphasis)
In a similar way, we could pose that activist/militant translators through their diverse networks and initiatives, whether they make communication possible across borders in an online or offline space, are producing a “territory of resistance” both within the profession—those in the margin, as Boéri (2023) put it—and with those involved in the struggles, having a concrete location and at the same time transcending it. This does not mean that these hybrid territories of resistance made up by geographically dispersed people (so common in the world of translators) equal or replace the struggles of those currently on the frontlines of the climate crisis, but rather they constitute necessary complements. Because translation in our case study happens in this hybrid space, but most importantly travels through the territory of fracked communities through knowledge co-production, it is key to look at what cross-border “productions of (hybrid) territory” translation is facilitating. This constitutes another aspect to be considered in social movement studies and any discipline looking at transnational processes such as climate justice movements. If we think, with Bielsa, of translation as a social relation, the former becomes even more meaningful. As I have examined in the examples provided above, the “involvement and thought” and the “toolbox of methods” implicated in this type of ethnographic research and activist translation practice may prove an important point of focus to better grasp the role of translation (broadly understood) in the climate crisis. In addition, long-term commitment, knowledge of the territories of resistance and the co-production of knowledge and translation as part of wider efforts within current struggles that aim at building social movement may bring new insights to translation research that looks at the climate crisis beyond major global institutions and actors, and to organizations, society at large, experts, and other researchers that seek to better grasp translational processes in this global crisis.
Conclusion
Sometime after moving to New York for pursuing a PhD in Sociology and continuing to study the conflict that this paper focuses on, I found out I lived not far from one of the most fracked regions in the country, and close to a liquefied natural gas (LNG) facility, located in a community that is fighting against its expansion (most of the natural gas is extracted via fracking). As we toured the outer limits of the facility to observe the giant LNG tanks and learn about the site, its contamination, and ongoing impacts, we were followed by three police vans, from the moment we arrived and up to three blocks away as we started leaving the area. I could not help but think back to the time when I toured Vaca Muerta with the scientists from New York, equally followed by police protecting the oil companies’ “property”. Upon returning home from the LNG tour, I started taking notes with regards to this experience and the comparison of both contexts: Are there any Spanish-speakers in this New York community where the tanks are located? How do they access relevant information in their own language? It is this situated translational and transnational lens that can be fertile in thinking beyond what major organizations and actors translate or request to translate in the wide spectrum of what is called “the climate crisis”.
The transnational nature and the geographical distribution of the networks made up by translators has been an advantage in the circulation of counter-hegemonic ideas throughout history. Cases like the translators of Anarchism between Europe and Argentina (Migueláñez Martínez, 2024) or those who facilitated the circulation of radical ideas in the revolutionary period of 1789-1815 between Britain, France, and Italy (Perovic, 2024) are just two examples. In the case I present here, translators and non-translators work in tandem in a larger context of resistance to extractivism that seeks to build alternatives to both fossil fuel dominance and corporate “green” transitions for a present where sacrifice zones are not the norm and a future where the people themselves can decide for what and for whom energy is used and who will it benefit from it, much as we can ask for what and for whom is science used. Translation is one element in these efforts and is guided by the needs of the local populations and their political situation—which is never isolated from the geopolitical dynamics of the world-system—and by the translator’s accumulated knowledge of the conflict through long-term engagement and ethnographic work with respect to her own practice and to the specific conflict under study. It is this combination that can offer new insights into translation research in the climate crisis.
Reducing the impact of translation in climate change as depending on either culturally nuanced, localized translations of major climate policies or “sustainable development” frameworks misses the rich variety of strategies adopted by translators, communities, and grassroots organizations. In the case of conflicts related to extractivist industries as the one described here, intra-lingual knowledge translation is a fundamental process toward the democratization of knowledge and the access to energy; within these efforts, translation into Spanish of highly technical and scientific materials for the purpose of documenting impacts of fracking becomes a political act; such materials—rarely considered to have counter-hegemonic potential in translation efforts—also serve as sources that feed derivative texts co-produced in combination with local knowledge and inputs. These are employed in trainings and exchanges with teachers’ unions, neighbourhood assemblies, indigenous communities, and society at large.
In this way, the textual is tied to the territory, given its uses and dissemination. The events themselves, the exchanges with those directly affected also feed into other materials and translations. Due to the nature of a fossil-resource extraction conflict, the translation needs are determined by a combination of local and global features. Most importantly, the goals and nature of the organization’s work and presence in the region mean it prioritizes this type of knowledge co-production. Hence the importance of looking at specific examples, as Susam-Saraeva suggests (2024). In this paper I have sought to illuminate one of them, where translation is articulated, understood, and practiced as part of knowledge co-production with affected communities whose fight in the context of the climate crisis is aimed at the construction of liberatory alternatives. From these situated experiences, scholars from different disciplines—and social movement scholars in particular—can look at how intra- and inter-lingual communication intersect in a crisis of global proportions. Here translation is part of knowledge co-production and serves efforts at traveling the path between research and resistance.
