New Materialist Theory of Translation

This book proposes a New Materialist theory of translation, redefining translation as a negotiation of agency to address the urgent challenges of co-existence in the Anthropocene.In the face of increased migration, runaway climate change, and accelerating AI it takes an innovative transdisciplinary approach, moving beyond language and semiotics to explore relations of co-existence among humans, other species, machines, and other more-than-human beings whose identities are harder to define. By integrating developments in Translation Studies with insights from geography, philosophy, the sciences, and narrative theory, the book conceptualises ‘translationality’ as a material relation of energy, movement, and experience, entangled with the phenomenon of place. Translationality is thought as the process by which worlds narrate and change themselves, and to translate is to participate in this process. An autoethnographic account of Truro, UK—a contested center-periphery site—provides a rich context for developing theory through translational practice. In situating translation within New Materialism, the book offers a philosophical and political framework for approaching co-existence and its ongoing negotiation.This book will appeal to scholars in translation studies, human geography, philosophy, and cultural studies.

Matt Valler holds a PhD in translation studies from Queen’s University Belfast. He is an independent scholar working at the intersection of translation studies, human geography, and philosophy and curates the Complex Cornwall seminar series at the University of Exeter. Matt is the founder of Labyrinth, a place-based narrative change project to re-imagine co-existence in the Anthropocene, and has designed interactive storytelling experiences in London, Melbourne, New York, Washington D.C. and Barcelona.