For a number of decades now, extended notions of translation that go beyond understanding it strictly as a process of interlinguistic transfer have become central to a variety of theoretical frameworks and approaches across the humanities and social sciences—from the classical vision of anthropology as a process of cultural translation (Pálsson, 1993, p. 1–2; Sturge, 2007, pp. 5–6) to the more recent engagement with the concept of knowledge translation as a key element in medicine and the medical humanities (Holm et al., 2015, pp. 86–87; Engebretsen et al., 2020). Translation is now also a common concept in sociology (Callon, 1986; Bielsa, 2022), philosophy (Serres, 1974; Ricœur, 2006), communication studies (Conway, 2020), and literary theory (Bertacco, 2014, p. 146), among other disciplines. This process of extending the concept of translation beyond its traditional confines has been so widespread and intense that Bachmann-Medick (2009), among others, has argued that many disciplines are experiencing a “translational turn”.

Against this background, it is striking that the fields of politics and political theory have rarely been taken into account in discussions of extended understandings of translation. Despite the rich corpus of this tradition—featuring highly influential thinkers such as Antonio Gramsci (Boothman, 2010; Lacorte, 2010), Judith Butler (2000), Jacques Rancière (2008) and Antonio Negri (Negri and Hardt, 2009, 2017)—and the recent surge and popularization of the concept of translation in activist circles (Baker, 2016, p. 3; Fernández, 2018), the use of translation in political theory and social movement studies has received little attention in translation studies. Even Kobus Marais’s wide-ranging collection Translation Beyond Translation Studies (2022), which deals with how a wide range of disciplines conceptualize translation, fails to address either politics or political theory.1

In what follows I aim to address this gap by analyzing two extended conceptualizations of translation that have gained prominence in the discourse and intellectual practice of the Spanish radical left after the movement known as “15M”, or “indignados”. I propose to refer to these different conceptualizations as hierarchical and horizontal translation and will argue that it is important to distinguish between them in order to understand the political contradictions that have plagued this movement and its political aftermath. The distinction is also particularly useful in terms of allowing us to examine the different conceptions of expertise that have characterized this political period and the narratives associated with them.2 As will become clear from the discussion that follows, the concept of translation itself became a tool for the elaboration of counter-narratives that challenge official discourses, thus playing an important role in undermining the narrative foundations of mainstream politics while offering alternative explanations and arguments for a society in crisis.

The complex history of the 15M and the role of translation in the political ‘climate’

The 15M movement owes its name to the date (15 May 2011) that saw the beginning of a series of occupations of squares and public spaces across Spain to protest the consequences and management of the economic crisis. Inspired by the many uprisings and revolutions that had taken place across Arab countries, the 15M played an important role in the evolution of the so-called movement of the squares, becoming its first European and Western “cluster” (Gerbaudo, 2017, p. 31). As in the case of other occupations, these improvised camps attracted citizens from various social strata who engaged in open discussions on social, political, and economic issues at popular assemblies and committees (Della Porta, 2015, pp. 1–2). The squares became sites where a political practice typical of new social movements and known as prefiguration (Maeckelbergh, 2011) unfolded: instead of deferring the construction of their envisaged society to the future, protesters aimed to construct it there and then, in the temporary setting of the squares. In line with this political culture, assemblies rejected representative, party-based democracy and came to function as an experiment in direct democracy (Sitrin and Azzellini, 2014, p. 121–150; Della Porta, 2015, pp. 157–210), where every person was encouraged to speak and to contribute to the discussion, irrespective of their cultural or professional background, and of their level of expertise in a given subject.

Although occupations only lasted a few weeks, the 15M made a profound imprint on Spanish society, destabilizing the political configuration of the country and bringing new debates to the fore. In this sense, it quickly went beyond the strict notion of a movement to become what philosopher and activist Amador Fernández-Savater (2012) proposed calling a “climate” (clima) that impregnated political debates throughout the country. At the same time, the initial reluctance of the movement to engage in traditional politics soon became an issue of contention, with some social sectors feeling increasingly frustrated with the limitations of popular protest (Rendueles and Sola, 2015). The movement as a whole thus began to face what some referred to as its “glass ceiling” (Rodríguez 2016, pp. 69–72; Fernández-Savater, 2019, p. 29), meaning that while activists could clearly see their goals, the mainstream institutions and the establishment prevented them from achieving success. This eventually led to the emergence of a variety of political platforms, among which Podemos (created in late 2014) became both the most successful and the most controversial. While it is true that the party achieved unprecedented political visibility for a radical left-wing project, becoming a minor partner in a coalition government with the social-democrat PSOE in 2020 and leading several key ministries, it has also been criticized for co-opting the movement, streamlining, and taming it, and demobilizing citizens (López, 2016, 2019; Rodríguez, 2020). Indeed, many of the founding members of Podemos have since left the party, which has gradually lost most of its local and regional power. At the national level, it has not fared much better: while five national deputies were elected at the 2023 general election, its numerous conflicts with other left-wing parties prevented Podemos from joining the new cabinet, led again by the PSOE, and it has subsequently moved from being a member of the ruling coalition to playing the role of the opposition.

As I have demonstrated elsewhere at greater lengths (Fernández, 2018; 2020a; 2020b), translation has been a central feature of Spanish culture and politics since the 15M, and key to the global critique of Spanish society and history developed by the movement and its successors. After the end of the Francoist dictatorship, Spain lived through a period (1980s to early 2000s) that privileged political consensus and the avoidance of subjects considered controversial for the new democratic system; in the cultural and artistic field, this led to political disengagement (Echevarría, 2012). As a consequence of this long process of depoliticization, participants in the 15M movement were faced with a pressing need to search for alternative models, references and ideas, as earlier ones were no longer valid. In this context, translation came to play a central role within the 15M climate, as has frequently been the case at other historical “turning points” or during “crises”, according to Even-Zohar (1990, p. 47).

The centrality of translation in the 15M climate is evident in three main areas, discussed in more detail in Fernández (2020a). First, translation featured prominently in the catalogues of the vast majority of politically committed publishers. Similar in their political stance to the Anglo-American ‘radical publishers’ and the French ‘éditeurs engagés’, these publishers gained popularity since the beginning of the 2011 economic crisis. In most cases, translated books constituted more than 50% of volumes in series focusing on economics, politics, political theory, and related fields (Fernández, 2020a, pp. 40–43). At the same time, these translations have been perceived as an important political tool, with a variety of activists and politicians involved in their dissemination and/or in the production of their paratexts (Fernández, 2020a, pp. 43–46). A second and related area concerns the enhanced visibility of translated authors such as Judith Butler (Cabré, 2015), Slavoj Žižek (Público, 2017), Angela Davis (Gutiérrez and Borraz, 2018) and Silvia Federici (Martínez, 2018), among others, who attracted major attention and spoke to large audiences on visits to Spain, with long queues at the entrance of the venues forcing organizers to provide additional spaces. Such translated authors filled an important gap in the absence of local and national intellectuals of a similar stature. Finally, the 15M climate has also been characterized by the adoption of key political concepts such as commons (communes) and care (cuidados), which have been shaped through complex processes of translation (Fernández, 2020a, pp. 49–89). As Fernández-Savater (2019) has noted, the 15M did not possess “languages, maps or compasses” (lenguajes, mapas ni brújulas) of its own (p. 29), a situation which generated a need for constructing new ones through translation and adaptation3.

Another relevant factor in this context of transformation concerns the incorporation of translation as a political concept in the discourse of a number of activists and political representatives from the new leftist organizations (notably Podemos). As I attempt to demonstrate later in this article, uses of translation as a key concept in this context are diverse and have very different political implications. Nevertheless, they share a similar point of departure: a realization that the language of mainstream politics and the language of the common people are so strongly and profoundly disconnected that any meaningful interaction between them must inevitably rely on practices of translation. During my fieldwork, I examined how left-wing politicians, activists, and citizens in post-15M Spain frequently resort to a broad notion of translation to highlight the divide between institutional politics—and other key sites of power, such as financial institutions and the media—and general citizens, while also defending the need to foster new attitudes towards, and channels for, mutual communication. Translation thus takes place intralingually (i.e., within the same language), but the criticism obtains its political strength from the practice of interlingual translation: unlike the shift between natural languages such as Spanish and English, ‘political’ languages should not provoke the kind of misunderstanding and incomprehension that require the intervention of a translator—yet they do, as activists and citizens claim.

Furthermore, some of these practices involve what I call ‘political exposure’: the person who translates the official message does not merely aim to highlight the divide between the mainstream institutions and the average citizen, but also to expose a hidden ideological reality that the original message is assumed to be concealing. In this case, the speaker (or translator) does not only argue that there is a problem of communication, but also engages in denouncing and exposing the ways in which such official languages deliberately misrepresent reality. The text being translated might be an announcement from a government official, an advertisement circulated by a bank, or a piece of news from a media outlet. Whatever the nature and source of the text, the speaker engages in an act of translation that allows them to show both their understanding of, and their disagreement with, the official message. These translators thus acquire what Nicole Doerr (2018), in her approach to “political translation”, has called “a disruptive third position within political deliberation” (p. 4; emphasis in original). Since they can understand both languages—the language of the elite and that of the average citizen—, these translators also have the capacity to challenge privileges and asymmetries.4

These practices are epistemologically relevant for at least two main reasons. First, they imply that political intervention requires the possession of a certain knowledge—in this case, familiarity with the different languages of power and their ‘doublespeak’. In other words, they emphasize the importance of knowledge as a political tool and its centrality within the democratic project. Second, they reveal that translation is decisively enmeshed within structures of power, with the act of decoding and recoding positioning translators clearly as political actors, either as mediators between institutions and citizens or as dissenters who set out to challenge messages circulated by these institutions. The specific forms of political translation that emerge from this encounter recall Baker’s (2006) discussion of the centrality of narratives to the functioning of all societies (p. 3). Like all narratives, those that are mediated by political translators in contexts such as the 15M provide part of the ideological infrastructure that holds societies together. Importantly, these narratives are dynamic, which means that at any given time there will be “a variety of divergent, criss-crossing, often vacillating narratives” (Baker, 2006, p. 3) that coexist and/or compete with each other. And since narratives are fundamental to maintaining the legitimacy of the status quo, changing a given social and political reality primarily involves challenging “the stories that sustain [it]” by articulating “alternative stories” (Baker, 2006, p. 3). In the context of the 15M movement, as elsewhere, translation—in all its varieties—served to introduce counternarratives that question and undermine official and mainstream narratives.

A political signifier in the 15M climate: Hierarchical vs. horizontal translation

Despite their overall similarities, there are important epistemological and political differences between two forms of translation practiced in this context. These I propose to designate as hierarchical vs horizontal translation. Hierarchical translation is characterized by being top-down and is generally based on a subtle distinction between those who understand (critical intellectuals, leftist politicians) and those who do not (the masses, or common people). This notion of the translator as educator has reappeared frequently in the discourse of Podemos’s cadres, who rely on their ability to translate to legitimize their role as political representatives. It is worth noting here that many of Podemos’s initial cadres were academics from the fields of politics and sociology. This might have played a role in their adoption of such understandings and use of translation, which bear the imprint of thinkers such as Gramsci, Butler, Bauman, and Boaventura de Sousa Santos.5

For instance, Íñigo Errejón, one of Podemos’ leading figures until his departure in 2019, claimed that an intellectual “is not a curmudgeon who only reads unintelligible stuff, but eminently a translator” (no es un tipo rancio que solo lee cosas incomprensibles, es eminentemente un traductor), one who “has the duty and the ability to take abstract concepts and translate them” (que tiene la obligación y la capacidad de coger conceptos abstractos y traducirlos) (Soto-Trillo, 2015). In a similar vein, Pablo Iglesias, Podemos’ General Secretary until 2021, argued that political communication is “a pivotal work of translation: to transform your diagnosis into a discourse that people can understand” (un trabajo fundamental de traducción: transformar tu diagnóstico en un discurso que la gente pueda entender) (interview reported in Guedán, 2016, p. 120). From Iglesias’s perspective, it is essential to carry out “translational work” in order to make the specific realities behind complex concepts such as “recessions and crises” understandable in the context of “people’s everyday life” (Tenemos que ser capaces de traducir a la cotidianeidad de la gente lo que implican las recesiones y las crisis de un sistema que va más allá de los estados) (Iglesias and Nega, 2013, p. 13). Similarly, philosopher Germán Cano (2015, p. 196), who left the party in 2019, praised Iglesias’s ability to translate technocratic jargon into a simpler language that is accessible to everyone,6 while also showing how elitist discourses are aimed at creating a chasm to isolate experts from the rest of society.

Indeed, in the early stages of his political career, Pablo Iglesias himself was the perfect embodiment of this kind of intellectual-translator. As presenter of political shows like La Tuerka (The Screw or, reflecting the Spanish punk-inspired spelling, The Skrew), and Fort Apache, Iglesias used his academic training to elaborate alternative arguments and counternarratives. For instance, when the Spanish conservative government started a campaign in 2012 to criminalize and repress popular protests by labelling them as “anti-systemic” (antisistema) (Zaldua, 2012), Iglesias introduced one of his weekly shows (Iglesias, 2012) by explaining Immanuel Wallerstein's theory of anti-systemic movements. Following Wallerstein, Iglesias explained that the movements traditionally considered anti-systemic due to their opposition to the capitalist, nation-state system—such as the workers’ movement and national liberation movements—are precisely those that had introduced key progressive measures, freedoms, and rights. Thus, with the help of both intra- and interlingual translation, Iglesias turned the derogatory, mainstream use of ‘anti-systemic’ on its head and reappraised it as a positive concept for his audience: being labelled as ‘anti-systemic’ became synonymous with opposing an unfair political system.

Such uses of translation can be politically transformative because they expose and refute the discourse mobilized by traditional parties, institutions, and powers, while also articulating a self-critique of traditional intellectuals, who fail to see the existing linguistic and cultural divide between themselves and the rest of society. In other words, the new political figure embodied in the figure of the ‘translator’ is someone who is committed to improving communication and understanding, investing considerable effort in ensuring that citizens understand what is implied below the surface of political jargon. However, this practice of translation is also hierarchical because it places the emphasis on the mediating—or even gate-keeping—role of intellectuals and politicians. Citizens are placed in the passive position of receiving translations produced by a specific group of mediators; they are enlightened and educated by these self-appointed translators, but the possibility that citizens themselves might also have translational skills of their own is rarely considered.7 This form of unidirectional address is most evident in Pablo Iglesias’s monologues at the beginning of his TV shows, discussed above: sitting at his desk or standing in front of the camera, he occupied that space alone and spoke directly to the audience, without comments or interruptions by anyone else. This was a speaker translating for his viewers, in a context far removed from the collective exchanges that took place at the 15M assemblies. Such a practice of translation clearly undermined the principle of direct democracy that the movement had embodied. Despite attempts at nuancing the meaning and purpose of translation in this context, in practice hierarchical translation still supports a conception of politics based on the core notions of representative democracy, where politicians and intellectuals are understood to be in charge of leading the masses and speaking on their behalf.

The key difference between hierarchical and horizontal translation lies precisely in this relationship that the speaker establishes with others. As I have argued, a hierarchical translator claims a position of power based on their ability to translate: they speak for the benefit of an audience, with the assumption of eventually being able to speak on its behalf, to be its voice. By contrast, a horizontal translation does not assume that the translator speaks in the name of any collective: he or she simply exercises their individual right to engage in translating a message in political terms, whether that message comes from a government, a company, or a media outlet. Exercising this right certainly involves a claim to be in possession of a given knowledge: in order to decode institutional language, one needs to have mastered its fundamental features. However, in making that implicit claim the horizontal translator does not assume that other citizens are not able to decipher the message for themselves and does not promote his or her translation at the expense of other forms of knowledge. In other words, he or she questions the political message of the original, but without seeking to prevent the emergence of other, equally valid translations. The political and epistemological implications of this practice are therefore quite distinct: the translator is clearly aware of the political centrality of knowledge, but he or she does not establish a political hierarchy based on knowledge (or its perceived absence), nor does he or she derive a position of power or privilege from their assumed knowledge and expertise.

Examples of horizontal translation can be hard to locate because of the nature of the settings in which it takes place: this type of translation is rarely to be found within those prestigious textual formats that are available to political representatives, such as interviews and books. In fact, my examples are mostly taken from social media and, in the case of this article, exclusively from Twitter.8 Examples of horizontal translation are also harder to identify because the practice tends to depart radically from both traditional and even metaphoric understandings of translation. As will become clear in the examples that follow, citizens invoking their right to translate a given message tend to fully decouple its denotative and connotative meanings. In these horizontal translations, what the original text says at its most basic level might bear little resemblance to what the translator proposes it says. The definition of translation as a process of replacing a set of source signs with another set of target signs “on the strength of an interpretation” (Venuti, 1995, p. 18) is taken here to its extreme: what matters for citizen-translators is the exposure of a secondary set of meanings and implications that typically go unnoticed under the surface of the original statement. At the same time, the traditional relationship between author and translator is often completely reversed: the potential intentions of the author of the original utterance are disregarded, as the translator sets out to emphasize his or her own understanding of the message and its implications.

As already noted, the decoupling of words and meaning within these practices of translation poses some challenges to their analysis. Each horizontal translator deliberately singles out and privileges a certain aspect of the original message and may completely disregard others; what matters for each translator are the political implications of the message. In some cases, a translation may involve minor changes in wording, as the horizontal translator simply attempts to highlight an aspect of the source message that he or she considers vital. An example of this practice can be found in a response given by journalist and cartoonist Ferran Aguiló to a tweet published by the official account for IB3 Notícies, the main news programme broadcast by the public TV corporation of the Balearic Islands. After the release of air traffic data for Son Sant Joan, Palma’s airport and the biggest of the archipelago, IB3 Notícies (2021) tweeted:

L'Aeroport de #Palma ha entrat durant l'agost en el rànquing dels 10 aeroports del món amb més trànsit internacional. En concret, ara mateix està a la novena posició, segons dades d'OAG. Son Sant Joan ha recuperat el 85% del trànsit aeri del 2019.

This August, Palma’s airport has entered the top ten [list] of the world’s airports with the highest [level of] international traffic. To be more concrete, it is now ranked number nine, according to data from OAG. Son Sant Joan has now regained 85% of the air traffic from 2019.

Retweeting this piece of news, Aguiló (2021) commented:

Traduït al llenguatge del segle XXI: L'Aeroport de #Palma ha entrat durant l'agost en el rànquing dels 10 aeroports del món amb més contaminació. En concret, ara mateix està a la novena posició...

Translated into the language of the 21st century: this August, Palma’s airport has entered the top ten [list] of the world’s airports with the [highest] level of pollution. To be more concrete, it is now ranked number nine…

An issue arises here that is common to all examples discussed in this section: to understand the political relevance of this horizontal translation, it is necessary to reconstruct the implications and nuances behind it in some detail. However, it should be noted that most of these details would be familiar to the expected receivers of these translations, that is, citizens who follow regional and/or national news. In this case, the shared knowledge that enables this translation to be comprehensible to its audience consists of recent political and ecological debates in the Balearic Islands. As is well known, the archipelago—and particularly the islands of Majorca and Ibiza—have become heavily dependent on the tourism industry, which is now the main source of work and income. However, the negative consequences of this industry—including job precariousness, higher rents, and increased pressure on natural resources—have created a sense of malaise among local residents since 2015, prompting various campaigns and initiatives against its perceived excesses (Fernández, 2020b, pp. 97–101). Two opposing ideological narratives are therefore articulated in this interaction: while the institutional media outlet weaves a narrative of economic growth and recovery, especially important after the enormous impact of the COVID pandemic on the tourism industry, Aguiló outlines an alternative narrative that emphasizes the dark side of the industry. The concept of translation is mobilized to make this tension between conflicting narratives more visible and cast doubt on the legitimacy of the dominant narrative. In particular, Aguiló’s claim to be translating into “the language of the 21st century” serves to highlight the evolution of political debates within the Balearic society and stresses that awareness of climate change is part and parcel of a more contemporary sensibility.

A second type of horizontal translation involves a more pronounced shift away from the surface of the message; although it might still be possible to identify those elements the translator has chosen to enhance, his or her interpretation largely disregards the semantics of the original text. One example is the intervention below by Yago Álvarez, a left-wing journalist specializing in economics. Known in left-wing circles as the “Furious economist” (Economista cabreado), Álvarez aims to enhance popular knowledge on economics. His Twitter profile offers the following advice to readers: “Learn about economics so that no economist can fuck you up” (Aprende economía para que no te joda un economista). In the example below (Álvarez, 2021)9, he tweets and comments on a piece of news published under the title “Deliveroo is planning to cease its business operations in Spain” (Deliveroo planea el cese, 2021) as follows:

Traduzco: Deliveroo reconoce que sin explotar a los falsos autónomos su modelo de negocio nunca será rentable.

I translate: Deliveroo admits that its business model will never be profitable without exploiting false self-employed workers.

Once again, familiarity with Spanish political and economic debates is essential to understanding the relevance of this horizontal translation. The British food delivery company Deliveroo is a good example of platform capitalism (Srnicek, 2016), a growing business model that relies on the activity of people who are not employed by a certain platform, app, or site, but nevertheless generate benefit for it. In the specific case of food delivery companies such as Deliveroo, workers are expected to be self-employed, and thus pay for their national insurance themselves, even though they are assessed and controlled by the company. Taking advantage of a legal loophole, many companies have favored this type of work model, which allows them to save money at the expense of workers’ rights. However, in 2021, the Spanish Supreme Court ruled twice against Deliveroo (Olías, 2021), arguing that the people employed by the app were “false self-employed workers” (falsos autónomos), that is, they were treated as self-employed when they were not so in practice. Deliveroo was ordered to hire them and pay their insurance and taxes as appropriate.

Álvarez’s horizontal translation is addressed to media users who are familiar with this context but might not have an in-depth understanding of its complexities. Against the apparently neutral statement made by the company, which merely claims that “the level of investment required to be competitive is very high” (requeriría un nivel de inversión ‘muy elevado’) (Deliveroo planea el cese, 2021), the journalist-translator places emphasis on the dubious legality that had allowed the company to benefit from the original work model. This translational practice therefore highlights another clash of narratives: while Deliveroo situates its decision within a standard economic narrative in which only benefits and risks are considered, Álvarez casts it within a more politically-oriented narrative that foregrounds worker resistance to the abuses of big business.

This second form of horizontal translation in fact seems particularly common in the field of labor and economics. In particular, the wealth of neologisms generated by companies, think-tanks, and economic gurus to make neoliberal policies more palatable has come to provide a productive area for this form of engagement. A good example is the coinage trabacaciones—a portmanteau of trabajo (“work”) and vacaciones (“holidays”) which is used to translate the English neologism workcation. Many Twitter users reacted critically to this coinage, with one tweeting under the pseudonym Jorge(r) (2018) claiming that it should be translated as “exploitation of labor” (explotación laboral). Horizontal translation of this type does not only attempt to expose an undeclared hidden message as in the case of the Deliveroo announcement, but also to undermine the neoliberal allure of some concepts such as workcation and trabacaciones, with their promise of combining work and pleasure, and present them instead in a crude and negative light through translation.

The third and more striking form of horizontal translation is parodic in character and emphasizes open ideological disagreement. Here, source and target text bear almost no semantic relationship to each other. The translator does not set out to expose a specific hidden ‘truth’, but rather to expose a speaker’s or writer’s political bias in a mocking manner. An example of this type of horizontal translation comes from commentary on a press conference given in late 2022 by Isabel Díaz Ayuso, conservative president of the Madrid region. Díaz Ayuso had criticized a massive demonstration that had taken place in Madrid in support of the public health system, with approximately 500,000 protesters being involved. On its Twitter account, newspaper El País featured the following quote from Diaz Ayuso’s statement:

Ayuso: “La manifestación de ayer no fue en defensa de la sanidad pública, sino para buscar un nuevo liderazgo de ultraizquierda en Madrid. De lo contrario, hubieran acudido dos millones de madrileños. Esto fue otra cosa”. (El País, 2022)

Ayuso: Yesterday’s demonstration was not in support of the public health system; instead, its aim was to establish a new leadership of the radical left in Madrid. Had this not been the case, two million Madrid citizens would have attended. This was something else.

Someone retweeting this piece of news under the pseudonym Solo un tweet mas (2022) commented as follows: “I translate: I don’t give a damn if you die, how could I not give a damn if you demonstrate” (Traduzco: me la suda si te mueres, como no me la va a sudar que te manifiestes). As in the previous examples, familiarity with the Spanish political context is a prerequisite to understanding the critical weight of this horizontal translation. During the different stages of the COVID pandemic, Díaz Ayuso was heavily criticized for committing a series of grave mistakes and introducing various controversial measures (Plaza Casares, 2021), including the prohibition on admitting certain groups of elderly people such as the disabled and those suffering cognitive impairment to hospital, providing insufficient funding to public centres, and offering incentives to bars and restaurants to revive the economy despite continued high levels of contagion. The claim that Díaz Ayuso does “not give a damn” about people dying must be understood against this background and wider polemic. Interestingly, the translation here once again challenges the official narrative, but it does not offer a clear counternarrative as in the earlier examples. Whereas Díaz Ayuso articulates a clear narrative of mistrust, casting doubt on the purpose and nature of the demonstration (it is not about public health, but a maneuver of the radical left), the retweeter’s horizontal translation attempts to undermine the credibility of the speaker without articulating an alternative narrative to hers.

Translation, narrative, and expertise

Extended conceptualizations of translation such as those discussed in this article are highly relevant to understanding the intellectual and political climate in which traditional politics has come under heavy criticism in recent years. They are also particularly illuminating in relation to an issue that the 15M movement brought to the fore: the growing rejection of the system of expertise upon which contemporary democracies are based. This is a key point where epistemology and politics interact, as decision-making fundamentally depends on knowledge: how it is defined, who has legitimate access to it, and how the power that derives from it is stratified. At the same time, the nature of the interaction between epistemology and politics is itself embedded in a variety of conflicting narratives about the social world and is hence subject to constant re-evaluation by different individuals and groups.

As I have argued in this article and elsewhere (Fernández, 2018; 2020a), hierarchical translation depends on a conception of politics which privileges intellectuals and (leftist) politicians as those with the responsibility and requisite skill to translate political reality for the benefit of the common people. Given their special ability to decipher political language, they are also assumed to be in a position to represent other citizens who lack this knowledge and training in political debates. In this sense, hierarchical translation fails to challenge the system of expertise that has dominated modern democracies; it only offers an improved version of it, as the new experts—such as representatives of Podemos and similar parties—are themselves committed to transforming society, with the support of better-informed citizens. The foregrounding of intellectuals and other experts in the discourse of the post-15M left reflects these intellectuals’ own cultural bias to a large extent. The majority of Podemos’s cadres, as well as some of their allies, come from a privileged cultural and educational background (Fernández, 2018; 2020b). Many were either established or aspiring academics with experience at various universities and think-tanks. This is not necessarily a drawback, especially given that the core of 15M protesters also possessed a high level of educational capital (Della Porta, 2015, pp. 51–52). Nevertheless, the ‘excess of theory’ (Villacañas, 2018) that has characterized Iglesias’ and his colleagues’ political discourse has attracted much criticism, mainly because it has been seen as responsible for their failure to extend their message to other social groups in the long run (Hernández, 2018).

By contrast, the practice of horizontal translation is more consistent with an important strand of thought within the 15M that developed a strong critique of the system of expertise, favoring a non-hierarchical and collective understanding of knowledge. As an anonymous author claimed in the early days of the movement (Anónimo, 2012, pp. 42–45), the 15M was characterized by a deliberate dilution of the figure of the intellectual: although assemblies were rich in intellectual exchanges and did not shy away from addressing complex issues, their dynamics were based on principles of rotation, horizontality, and collectivity, deliberately preventing the emergence of individual leaders or spokespeople. In opposition to the image of a mass of citizens who needed to be provided with appropriate language and concepts to be able to engage politically, because those citizens were assumed to be unable to generate their own language and concepts, radically democratic strands within the 15M claimed that “non-experts” can also “trust in their own abilities to collaboratively construct the knowledge they need in any given situation and to generate effective answers to the problems that confront them” (Moreno Caballud, 2015, p. 3). While horizontal translation often incorporates elements of specialized knowledge, it adopts a more democratic approach to knowledge: here, there is no prerequisite for the use of public speech, and no one is authorized to speak in the name of the collective.

These conflicting understandings of knowledge and expertise generate their own narratives, which recall those mobilized in the Naumann vs. Babels controversy analyzed by Boéri (2008). In 2005, Peter Naumann, a professional German interpreter who had provided paid conference interpreting at a number of World Social Forum events, criticized Babels, an activist collective of interpreters who offered volunteer interpreting for the Forum, for the quality of interpretation services it provided at the Porto Alegre summit, dismissing its members as unprofessional and “cognitively challenged” (Boéri, 2008, p. 37). In analyzing this conflict of narratives, Boéri (2008) argued that each position was shaped by different understandings of commitment and interpreting: while Babels spoke of “[c]ommitment to participation and horizontality”, Naumann prioritized “commitment to expertise and rationality” (p. 43). The former promotes a vision of “a horizontal world” where interpreting is understood as “the product of the collective participation of individuals from a wide range of backgrounds”, while the latter is embedded in a vision of “an expertise-based hierarchical world” in which “conference interpreters are portrayed as an elite of gifted individuals” (2008, p. 44). The conflicting narratives of translation discussed here in the context of the 15M movement likewise reveal very different conceptions of politics, as noted earlier. While Podemos’s cadres believe in a meritocracy of knowledge, where intellectuals occupy the position of indispensable leaders and mediators, the 15M climate strives to create a more egalitarian space, where knowledge is not understood as a predefined entity possessed by the few but rather as a dynamic social construct that is constantly being revisited and reshaped by all members of a society. This continuity and overlap among debates in different contexts at different points of time is far from coincidental. As Wolfson and Funke (2016) explain, the global justice movement of the early 2000s and the movement of the squares which started in 2010 can be understood as two “waves” of the same “epoch of contention” against the consequences of globalization (p. 62). Specifically, some of the internal contradictions and conflicts characterizing these two epochs, including conflictual approaches to the role of knowledge and expertise, are shared and ongoing.

Despite the many differences between the two political cultures discussed here, the way forward for a truly transformative politics might not lie in opposition, but rather in the reconciliation of these divergent understandings of expertise and translation. In his defense of democracy as an “anti-oligarchic principle”, philosopher and activist José Luis Moreno Pestaña (2019, pp. 284–286) has rightly argued that democratic communities cannot manage without specialists in various fields: the complexities of modern societies often surpass the capacity of individual citizens. Moreno Pestaña’s point is that communities should reclaim the right to decide which problems they need to consult experts on, and how these experts might be recruited. Far too frequently, as we know, a specialist or an academic becomes the self-appointed spokesperson for a community because their intellectual and cultural capital gives them an advantage over those who lack it. The hierarchical understanding of translation discussed in this article is certainly one example of this scenario. Departing from this model, the practice of horizontal translation could constitute the germ for an alternative to the hierarchical notion of expertise. Horizontal translation can be strengthened by radicalizing some of the principles it embraces, especially openness to other potential translations and reluctance to speak on behalf of others. At the same time, it can also address some of its weaknesses, such as the relative lack of connection between translator and community. In the examples discussed here, horizontal translators seem to work without a project for the collectivity; while they produce their translations for their potential receivers, it is unclear to what extent they engage with the specific needs of any given collective.

A compromise between the two concepts of translation could be achieved by political communities appointing their own ‘political translators’, in the sense proposed by Nicole Doerr (2018, pp. 4–5). Instead of using their knowledge to affirm and reaffirm their own positions, as hierarchical translators do, these political translators—always subject to rotation, accountability and potential deselection—would use it to minimize social inequalities by encouraging every member of the community to exercise their right to speak and accept their responsibility to translate; in other words, to become horizontal translators.