Trajectories of Translation

Trajectories of translation

Timur Hammond, Brittany Cook

Progress in Human Geography, August 2023

Timur Hammond

Geography & the Environment Department

Middle Eastern Studies Program

South Asia Center

International Affairs

Progress in Human Geography

Timur Hammond

Translation has been a core concern for geographers, particularly in the context of our discipline’s ongoing debate about how to world Geography otherwise. Rather than seeing translation as simply an act of bridging pre-existing differences, this article conceptualizes translation as an act producing differences-in-relation.

It traces four “trajectories of translation” that bring geographers’ discussions of translation into new configurations: (1) Topoglossia, foregrounding the linkage between place and language; (2) imbrication, a metaphor for thinking difference-in-relation; (3) relays, an alternative to the metaphor of the bridge; and (4) communities, defined not by self-identity but by their shared practice of translation.