This synopsis is based on the full paper available here: paper.
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, 2019; 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 around an oil and gas extraction technique called 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.
This conflict 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. Here it is not employed simply to denote systems of technological extraction of raw materials, but following Machado Aráoz (2015), as “extractivist regimes”: political-economic formations based on the over-exploitation of territories in the peripheries of the world-system and their natural goods.
I begin by explaining the importance of clarifying how one understands the climate crisis and its origins in translational approaches, and of unpacking one’s grasp of translation when discussing the climate crisis and its language and narratives. Thus, first the climate crisis is characterized as a crisis of the Capitalocene, the Age of Capital, through the theoretical contributions of world-ecology and Latin American political ecology (Machado Aráoz, 2016; Moore, 2015). Translation, for its part, is understood as both a space for political action and reflection (Baker, 2013) and a social relation, without overlooking its linguistic materiality (Bielsa, 2023) nor the fact that it takes place in a specific world-system. 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.
Drawing from ongoing ethnographic work, this paper provides concrete examples of knowledge co-production through inter- and intra-lingual translation, which shows that reducing the impact of translation to 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 as a first step is a fundamental process toward the democratization of knowledge and the access to energy as a human right. Translation between languages aids in that process. Both translations into Spanish documenting environmental and health impacts of fracking, and of diverse documents and reports engaging in climate-related debates, become a political act. In turn, they 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 and its needs. Further, 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.
The type of methodology employed in this research 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 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 activism.
Through these situated and engaged experiences and methodologies, scholars from different disciplines—including in the area of environmental health and social movements—can look at how intra- and inter-lingual communication intersect in a socio-environmental conflict, understanding the relations surrounding—and facilitated by—human translation and its potential in a crisis of global proportions.
