Ethics of Activist Translation and Interpreting: Julie Boéri and Carmen Delgado Luchner

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Ethics of activist translation

and interpreting
Julie Boéri and Carmen Delgado Luchner
1 Introduction
“Activist translation and interpreting” encompasses a variety of communication practices across
languages, cultures and modalities, whose aim is to support political agendas and struggles at both
the local and the global level. Within this context, a wide array of translation actors –
translators, interpreters, subtitlers, dubbers, with or without a professional background –
“identify with and contribute to concrete political agendas, particularly through volunteer
work,” and “participate in collective action to bring about social change” (Boéri 2008, 22), be it
within relatively stable activist communities (Babels, ECOS, Tlaxcala, etc.) or in temporary,
transient networks (Cuad- erno del Campo, Mosireen, Voices of Women from the Egyptian
Revolution). Although activist translation (as a broad encompassing term for all its modalities)
shares some of the characteristics of volunteer or non-professional translation (see Chapter 16
“Ethics of volunteering in translation and interpreting” in this volume), its explicit political
motivation singles it out, given the ethical issues arising in activist circles.
Politically motivated and performed by actors with varying trajectories and backgrounds,
activist translation is situated at the crossroads between two social fields (activism and
translation) with their own set of norms and values (doxa in Bourdieu’s terms) (Bourdieu 1994;
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Thomson 2012). However, these fields are not homogenous nor do they have clear boundaries.
Indeed, the norms and values influencing the practice of translation are shaped primarily by
both the language industry and the academic (inter-)discipline of translation studies, while the
norms and values of activism arise within a liminal and contentious space between social
movements, civil society, (inter-)state institutions and, increasingly, digital culture. The
intersection of activism and translation gives rise to an even more complex environment,
characterised by a high degree of uncertainty (Inghilleri 2005), as regards which doxa should
prevail (Delgado Luchner and Kherbiche 2019). This intersection configures a space
characterised by hybridity, uncertainty and contentiousness, where ethical issues, and even
dilemmas, are bound to arise.
Since exploring these ethical issues constitutes the raison d’être and the aim of this chap-
ter, it is at this very intersection between translation 1 and political activism that our critical
engagement with ethics is situated. This will allow us to account for the complexity and
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heterogeneity of the activist communities, spaces and practices in question and to examine the
ways in which principles and values are constructed, contested and renewed in this dynamic
and disputed space.
2 Historical trajectory: activist translation and interpreting

Adopting a very broad perspective, one could consider every act of translation as inherently
ideologically motivated, either at the macro-level with regards to the choice of content to be
translated (Schäffner 2003) or at the micro-level of the translation process, for instance the
decision to domesticate or foreignise the original text (Venuti 1995). One of the challenges
of sketching out a history of activist translation and interpreting therefore rests upon its very
definition.
We define activist translation and interpreting as practices that are specifically set out “to
connect across the globe and to bring about social and political change” (Boéri 2019, 1) and
to disrupt dominant discourses and institutions, in the same way that activist movements have
“agendas that explicitly challenge the dominant narratives of the time” (Baker 2006, 462), i.e.
as practices that are intentionally and explicitly geared towards social change and a disruption
of existing power structures. In this light, feminist (see Chapter 9 “Feminist translation ethics”
in this volume), humanitarian (Delgado Luchner and Kherbiche 2018, 2019) or developmental
(Delgado Luchner 2018) translation may sometimes overlap with activism, depending on the
articulation of ends and means.
For instance, some humanitarian organisations, and by extension their translators, may
pursue an activist agenda. However, the ethical principles that guide humanitarian work
emphasise the impartiality of aid organisations (Labbé and Daudin 2016) and the provision of
aid to alleviate immediate needs (van Arsdale and Nockerts 2008) rather than pushing an
agenda for social change. Similarly, development aid is generally provided without disrupting
the world order, and formerly alternative discourses (e.g. participatory or grassroots
development) have become co-opted into the mainstream (Escobar 1995), thereby losing their
activist dimension. Another aspect which contributes to delimiting activism is individual actors’
identification and engagement with the agendas of the institutions, organisations, networks
and communities they work for. For instance, humanitarian work may resemble activism given
its purposes, but translators in this context unlike those involved in social movements (Baker
2006; Boéri 2008) may not self- identify as activists nor even identify with the aims of the
humanitarian organisation employing them (for a discussion on refugees working as
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interpreters for the United Nations High Com- missioner for Refugees in Kenya, see Delgado
Luchner and Kherbiche 2018).
Conversely, the scope of activist translation can be extended to practices that may not bear
this label. Indeed, activist translation, despite its emergence as a field of enquiry in translation
studies in the 21st century, is not a new phenomenon. Historical examples include Luther’s
endeavour to translate the Bible into German with a view to subverting existing ecclesiastic
power structures (Baker 2014, 417), as well as Irish nationalists’ translations under British
colonial rule (Tymoczko 2000a). There are many other examples cutting across time and
space, although they may not have been described as activist in the literature. The three seminal
edited volumes which have explicitly addressed activism in translation studies (Boéri and Maier
2010; Simon 2005; Tymoczko 2010) cover a wide array of translation practices throughout
history that aimed to redress power imbalances, support minorities and resist domination,
dictatorship or censorship.
This continuity between the scholarship on visibility and intervention (which had come to
the fore in the 1990s) and the emerging literature on activism at the turn of the century has led
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Ethics of activist T&I
Gambier to dismiss “activism” as little more than a new term arising in the wake of globalisa-
tion to reiterate the old call for language diversity (see Gambier 2007). However, as argued by
Boéri (2019), the research on activism differs in ways that allow us to speak of an emerging
field of enquiry. It places the emphasis on practices situated outside of the translation industry,
for instance in civil society and social movements (Baker 2006, 2013, 2016a; Boéri 2008,
2012b), uprisings (Baker 2016b) and, increasingly, in information and communication
technology (ICT-) mediated activist communities (Baker 2019; Boéri 2014b; Pérez-González
2010, 2016), where translators and interpreters are more likely to have the agency to address
systemic injustices. It has also initially disregarded individual, textual interventions in order to
explore collective action and discourse beyond the micro-context of the mediated
communication encounter, although the increased technologisation of social life has tended to
blur the line between texts and contexts as well as individuals and communities. Scholars
adopting an activist approach have sometimes supported activist causes, while at the same time
aiming to remain critical and reflexive about the tensions and contradictions underpinning
activism. The work of scholars involved in ECOS, Babels, the Palestinian cause or the Egyptian
revolution are cases in point that illustrate a new trend of politically engaged research in
translation and interpreting studies (see Boéri 2016, 2019).
These trends in activist translation and interpreting scholarship have brought this research
area closer to that of contemporary social movements studies. Present-day social movements
have their roots in struggles of the 1960s and the 1970s, such as the labour movement, the civil
rights movement and the women’s liberation movement (Maeckelbergh 2009). However, while
these were associated with two important changes, namely the emergence of the market and
the creation of the modern nation-state, “new” social movements have shifted from a focus on
individual states towards supranational issues such as the fight against “neoliberal
globalization” (Della Porta and Diani 2006, 46) and from a “command-oriented logic” (typical
of traditional, bureaucratic and hierarchical organisational models) to a “networking logic”
(typical of grassroots groups) (Juris 2005, 256–257).
The global justice movement is a case in point: it encompasses a set of “initiatives against
neoliberal globalization [that] are very heterogeneous, and not necessarily connected to each
other,” and whose actions have taken “a myriad of forms, from individual utterances of dis-
sent and individual behavior to mass collective events, and from a variety of points of view”
(Della Porta and Diani 2006, 2). The global justice movement or alter-globalisation movement
constitutes one of the most thoroughly researched contexts for activist translation (Baker 2013,
2016b, 2019; Boéri 2008, 2010, 2012b). Activist translation practices in this constantly evolv-
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ing movement – often framed as a movement of movements, best captured by the French word
mouvance – constitute the kind of “anti-establishment initiatives” that Baker sees as addressing
“specific issues that exceed national and social boundaries” (Baker 2018, 453). However, it
would be reductive to limit activist translation and interpreting to exclusively political commu-
nities and initiatives since translators’ mobilisation in and beyond this movement take multiple
forms such as “social activism, cultural activism, art activism and aesthetic activism” (Baker
2018, 453) or language activism (Koskinen and Kuusi 2017).
The very purpose of activism is to defend specific values and principles associated with
social change (for instance “participation,” “deliberation” and “horizontality” as outlined in
Boéri 2012b) and to usher in alternatives that embody these. Therefore, its practice and its
study imply ethical motives and have ethical consequences. Groups with diametrically opposed
agendas may consider themselves as “activist,” as evidenced in the example of pro-Israel
activist groups, such as the American Zionist organization, and pro-Palestinian activist groups
who both “refer to themselves and are referred to by others as activists” (Baker 2019, 453).
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The legitimacy of one form of activism or another is a matter of perspective not only for the
groups undertaking it but also for the researchers analysing it. The use of different terms to
label change-oriented action – “radical activism” or even “terrorism” (Moskalenko and
McCauley 2009), or “advocacy” (Keck and Sikkink 1998), to name but a few – may have to do
with the perspective of the researchers and the tradition of their discipline, as regards the groups
under analysis. For instance, social movements studies has been traditionally interested in
movements that are positioned on the left of the political spectrum (Benford and Snow 2000),
despite the fact that anti-globalisation movements exist at either end of this spectrum. It is
worth noting that the left/right vocabulary may be problematic because alter-globalisation
groups tend to eschew the vocabulary of mainstream politics, although, as Della Porta and
Diani remind us, the “majority of those who still regard the left-right distinction as meaningful
identify with the left of the political spectrum” (2006, 71).
Translation studies scholars have also primarily focused on groups closely associated with
the so-called new or international left which has emerged after the collapse of the USSR and
the spread of neoliberalism, even though there may well be translation activist projects on the
other side of the spectrum. This trend is likely to be due to translation scholars’ general
commitment to linguistic and cultural diversity and pluralism (Baker 2016a, 10) that they are
likely to find within these groups by difference with their right-wing, fundamentalist or terrorist
counterparts in the fight against globalisation. Scholars have also tended to focus on groups
with global agendas rather than “nationalist aspirations” or “religious belief ” (Baker 2013, 24;
see Hokkanen 2012 on activist church interpreting, as an exception in this regard) and to
explore activist translation, performed on a volunteer basis (Boéri 2019) or within a radical,
grassroots and revolutionary ethos (Boéri 2008). In this strand of research, the dynamics of co-
optation by the capitalist market and by the service economy and the interplay between
dominance and resistance have been part and parcel of the analysis (Baker 2006, 2018; Boéri
2012b; Piróth and Baker 2019).
This brief historiography of activism in translation studies and social movements studies
sheds light onto the disparate territory configured by activist practices of translation and their
theorisations. Its contours may be renegotiated according to the definition of activism adopted
by researchers, their interest in and/or subscription to an ethics of inclusion or exclusion, of
homogeneity or diversity, an ethos of solidarity, humanitarianism, revolution, the resort to vio-
lence and armed struggle, and the level of critical engagement with the practices, actors and
spaces under analysis.
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3 Core issues and topics: ethics of positionality and organisation

Activist translation and interpreting practices have given rise to ethical controversies within
activist, professional and academic circles. Tensions have particularly crystallised around two
issues, the positionality of translators and interpreters and the organisation of translation and
interpreting. As we shall see, they have been approached from two different, if not opposed,
perspectives: impartiality versus engagement and expertise versus grassroots knowledge.
3.1 Ethics of positionality: impartiality versus engagement

We understand positionality in the sense employed by Delgado Luchner and Kherbiche (2018),
i.e. as shaped concurrently by an individual’s agency, their personal background, their relation-
ships with others and a wider social and political context. In this light, positionality goes
beyond “positioning” as employed by Mason (2009), since it includes the wider socio-political
context individuals are embedded in and the conditions and constraints that shape power
asymmetries.
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Thus, “positionality” is a critical concept for addressing translators’ and interpreters’ dynamic
position and relation to the values and principles of our societies.
The ethical principles most commonly mentioned in professional codes of practice and
taught in training settings revolve around core stakes: accuracy, neutrality and confidentiality (see
Chapter 20 “Ethics codes for interpreters and translators” in this volume). Among these three
principles, it is by far that of neutrality (also linked to impartiality) that has been most
challenged over the last decades, first by post-structuralists who relegated neutrality to a mere
epistemologi- cal ploy, and then in the 1990s by translation researchers who questioned the
traditional “conduit model” of inter-linguistic translation (Baker 2005; Tymoczko 2006; Venuti
1995).
Criticisms of this model have also emanated from studies of dialogue interpreting, where the
physical proximity of the interpreter with third parties imposes a tangible limit on invisibility
and impartiality (Angelelli 2004; Tipton 2008; Wadensjö 1998), and interpreting for the
military (Baker 2010; Inghilleri 2010). In view of these developments, impartiality has ceased to
be viewed as an accurate description of the translator’s actual positionality (Baker and Maier
2011; Delgado Luchner and Kherbiche 2019; Drugan and Tipton 2017). However, this
development in research has had a limited impact on professional organisations (and
educational settings), which still largely subscribe to impartiality and neutrality as inherently
good (Boéri 2015; van Wyke 2010). It was at the turn of the 21st century, with the emergence
of activist communities of translators and interpreters, that the “ethos of neutrality and
non-engagement” (Baker and Maier 2011, 3) was to be more openly questioned (van Wyke
2010). Babels, the international network of volunteer translators and interpreters (Boéri
2008, 2010, 2012b; Lampropoulou 2010), Tlaxcala (Baker 2013; Talens 2010) or ECOS, the
association of translators and interpreters for solidarity (Baker 2013; Boéri 2010; De Manuel
Jerez, López Cortés, and Brander de la Iglesia 2004; Sánchez Balsalobre García, Manuel Jerez,
and Gutiérrez 2010) and Translator Brigades (Baker 2013), to name but a few, became new
players in the field of translation. Alongside these communities of “activist translators,”
communities of “activists who translate” (Guo 2008) were created mostly by actors with no
background in translation or interpreting, namely Gush Sha- lom (Baker 2006), Cuaderno del
campo (Baker 2019; Pérez-González 2010), or Mosireen, an
Egyptian collective of citizen journalists and cultural activists (Baker 2016b).
All these communities have adopted a discourse of engagement and partisanship and put this
discourse into practice in highly visible settings, such as international social forums and digital
environments. This discourse is at odds with a profession that has traditionally been developed,
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taught, theorised and learnt within an ethos of impartiality. Even within collectives which
involve an important number of professionals, and teachers or students of translation and inter-
preting like ECOS, Babels or Translator Brigades, engagement seems to take precedence over
neutrality and impartiality. Such a radical political profile was bound to spark conflict within
professional circles. Tensions became public after the World Social Forum in 2005, when con-
ference interpreter Peter Naumann published a letter against Babels (the network in charge of
volunteer interpreting in this event), in Communicate!, the webzine of AIIC (the French
acronym for the International Association of Conference Interpreters). His satiric portrayal
of Babels’ members as “ideologues of militancy” (Naumann 2005, n.d.), for instance, is an
unveiled criticism of engagement at the elite end of the conference interpreting profession (see
Boéri 2008). However much at odds with the profession, it is the very blending of translation
and activism, and the hybridity of actors as both translators and activists, which is characteristic
of activist settings: translation becomes an activist endeavour and activism, in its attempt to
build networks of
solidarity across the globe, becomes a translated collective action.
By getting involved in specific communities and agendas, by selecting and translating
“missing narratives,” translators and interpreters play a major role in boosting public opinion
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attention and curtailing the state repressive power on specific communities. This is for instance
evidenced by the involvement of Translate for Justice since 2013 “in making suppressed news
and documentation about violations of human rights in Turkey available at a global level”
(Baker 2019, 455).

This has a direct bearing on the ethics of positionality, as reported by Samah Selim, award-
winning Arabic translator, scholar and volunteer activist subtitler for Mosireen during the
Egyp- tian revolution:
This type of translation is not and cannot be “neutral”, and I mean this both in the broader
ethical – or what I would prefer to call, political – sense, and in the pragmatic of “profes-
sional” sense. In times of revolutionary crisis, the dissident translator is a partisan, fully
present in non-textual actuality, in place.
(Selim 2016, 82; emphasis original)
Activist settings, particularly revolutionary ones, configure a space where being involved
means finding one’s “place,” “being-in-place”; a positionality that is dynamically constructed
in and through translation, for and by fighting injustices. Selim’s emphasis on the “political,”
rather than the “ethical,” shows how limiting the doxa of our field has been for an ethics of
engagement. Selim’s account shows that where and when the two fields of the profession and
political activism intersect, impartiality and neutrality are often overridden by political
engagement.
3.2 Ethics of organisation: expertise versus grassroots knowledge

The tension over the positionality of the translator/interpreter is coupled with a tension over the
organisation of translation and interpreting in activist settings. Activism in contemporary social
movements is guided by several overarching principles, such as horizontality and participation
(Boéri 2008, 31), diversity and pluralism (Baker 2016a, 10), advocacy and listening (Mosko
2018, 326) and a quest for social justice (Della Porta and Diani 2006, 68). Even though they
do not provide clear “prescriptions for acting,” they illuminate “a moral posture” (Mosko 2018,
331) and shape the organisational principles of activist communities. For instance, both the
Social Forum and Babels, in their charter of principles, adhere to horizontality (in the sense that
they are both self-conceived as open spaces for people to freely and equally contribute with no
hierarchies in the organisation), participation (that is, the direct involvement of participants in
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the organisation, as opposed to representation whereby mandated organisers take decisions on

behalf of others) and prefiguration (the belief that activism in the here and now should embody
the desired social transformation) (see Boéri 2012b). They believe that these principles have the
potential to create a space for pluralism, diversity, inclusion and grassroots knowledge (Boéri
2010, 65).
The experience of the Social Forum reveals an important development in contemporary
politics, namely that “ideology is increasingly expressed through organizational practice and
design as opposed to discourse” (Juris 2005, 258). It thus follows that studying the ethics of
engagement requires examining the organisational culture of activist translators and
interpreters, and the extent to which it corresponds to that of the profession.
Diversity and inclusion have been at the heart of the field of translation and interpreting,
but it is through the ethos of expertise (quality, working conditions, competences) that they
have been championed, sometimes creating the illusion that interpreting as a technical skill has
universal features that are unconstrained by a specific cultural context (Delgado Luchner 2019).
By contrast, Babels, like many other groups emerging outside of the profession, did not (at least
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initially) show “any engagement . . . with issues of quality, nor working conditions” (Boéri
2010, 66), since requirements to join the group were very loose. Such a stance challenges the
very foundations of the profession, as it implies that speaking foreign languages is sufficient in
order to translate and interpret. However, professionalisation rests upon the development of a
profile of expert, rather than “natural,” “ad hoc,” “novice” translators and interpreters (see
Boéri 2012a). It is thus not surprising that the shift in discourse (the emphasis on political
engagement rather than competence) and in practice (actual involvement of non-professional
volunteers) has sparked controversy in professional circles.
This is particularly the case in the field of conference interpreting, where services provided
for free by untrained bilinguals, interpreting students or recent interpreting graduates are per-
ceived as a threat to professional standards, as made explicit by Naumann’s (2005, n.d.)
reference to Babels as “the innocents, the dilettantes, the semi-professionals, the perfect fools
and an army of the well-intentioned [who] will again join the travelling circus and stage the
next fiasco.” The propensity of professional conference interpreters and their associations to
speak out publicly against activist and non-professional practices may also have to do with the
volte-face brought about by activism in a profession which has traditionally serviced the
interests of the first world (Cronin 2002) and which boasts the image of a “strongly eurocentrist,
elitist professional caste” (Gentile, Ozolins, and Vasilakakos 1996, 8, in Martin 2016, 231).
Furthermore, unlike other modalities of translation, activist interpreting practices enjoy a
high degree of visibility: Babels interpreters have been involved and seen in social forums
across the world, and their calls for volunteers are widely circulated across the globe. The
visibility of these initiatives can backfire given their uneven efficacy: interpreters’ booth
planning sheets have been described as hanging on “washing lines,” working conditions as
“chaotic” (Cathy Arnaud interviewed in Boéri and Hodkinson 2005), and Babels volunteers’
translation output as “hazardeuse” (“arbitrary”) (Agrikoliansky 2007, 37; our translation from
French). Interest- ingly, the lack of efficacy is perceived differently at the two ends of the
spectrum: as a decline by the elite end of the profession (particularly AIIC), for whom
interpreting services ought to be provided by expert, remunerated professionals in the market
economy (Boéri 2015); and as part and parcel of the process of experimenting alternatives to
neoliberalism for activists, which requires inclusion of the grassroots from the bottom up (Boéri
2010). These two stances take the ethics of organisation in two different directions – expertise
in the market economy versus grassroots experimentation in a new world under construction
– and this has a direct bearing on translation planning and language diversity. For instance, in
their attempt to step out of the market economy, activist communities question the law of
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supply and demand of languages and champion the coverage of non-colonial languages or
languages that are not used as an international lingua franca, in order to allow all activists to
contribute to political debates in the language of their choice. This is particularly the case of
Babels, whose identity as a political actor rather than as a service provider shapes its
interpreting and language policy in the Social Forum:
In addition to the unavoidable vehicular languages, Babels proposes the languages of the
location where the Forum takes place: Hindi and Marathi at the Mumbai WSF [World
Social Forum] in 2004, Quechua at the Quito Americas Social Forum in 2004, Catalan
at the Barcelona Mediterranean Social Forum in 2005, Greek at the Athens ESF [Euro-
pean Social Forum] in 2006, Swedish at the Malmö ESF in 2008, British Sign Language
(BSL) at the London ESF in 2004 and Brazilian Sign Language (Libras) at the Porto
Alegre WSF in 2005, and Arabic at the Tunis WSF in 2013. Added to this are languages
that are deemed strategic for the extension of forums into under-represented regions:
languages of India (Telugu, Bengali, Malayalam) and of Asia (Korean, Indonesian,
Japanese and Thai) in
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Mumbai, Mediterranean, Central and Eastern European languages in London, Barcelona

and Athens.
(Boéri 2013, 9; our translation from French)
Thus, by difference with many ad hoc translation and interpreting settings, engagement in
activist settings is not a mere “side-effect” of power asymmetries or a lack of professional
training. It results from social actors’ deliberate choice to use translation, interpreting,
subtitling, and dub- bing as “means of engaging in political activism” (El Tarzi 2016, 92) and,
more importantly, of transforming our societies towards greater justice. In such a process,
translation may also become an empowering space of self-expression for engaged citizens and
artists (Mohamed 2016; Strowe 2017), in a wide array of digital and non-digital settings.
Nevertheless, however much activist communities strive for an alternative ethics of
organisation, they cannot fully escape logistical constraints, particularly the lack of training in
minori- tised languages. Therefore, there is a constant tension between the ideal of diversity and
its implementation, between organising translation and interpreting from a bottom-up
perspective (attending to the needs of the grassroots, and shaping the direction of social
transformation by their inclusion) and from a top-down perspective (resorting to formally
trained translators and interpreters in the major international lingua francas) (Boéri 2012b).
To strike a balance between the two approaches, activists might experiment with diversity
called for by many activist communities of translators and interpreters. And indeed, in spite of
an apparent clash between the doxa of activism and the doxa of the profession, the emergence
of activist practices of translation and interpreting have also opened a space for reflection and
for pushing the boundaries of each field towards the other.
4 Current debates and issues: revisiting ethics

The ethical principles and praxis emerging at the intersection of translation and activism are
heterogeneous. They are embedded in the power asymmetries of this intersectional space, and
consequently some of them may have more currency and recognition (ethics doxa) than others
have, which are shared only by a minority of marginal actors in the field (ethics heterodoxa).
4.1 Ethics doxa: impartiality and expertise in volunteer services

As already discussed, activist translation and interpreting tend to challenge the ethical
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principles of impartiality and expertise. However, a critical examination of what is meant by

engagement may lead us to reconsider the apparent incompatibility of these principles with
activism, at least within certain activist circles. Indeed, activist communities of translators and
interpreters rarely refer to engagement as a form of intervention in the text, which is one of the
key distinctions between translation in the context of social movements (what we consider
activist translation) and feminist translation, where intervention in the text has tended to take
centre stage. Instead, they frame engagement in the very choice to translate and interpret for a
particular cause. Even in Babels which, in the first decade of the century, was recognised as one
of the most politicised communities of translators and interpreters (Baker 2006), intervention in
the organisational and interpreting policy of the event (Boéri 2012b) has taken precedence over
textual intervention in the booth (Boéri 2008; Baker 2018).
The professional background of some of the actors involved may be influential given their
usual concern for textual integrity, regardless of their ideological positioning (Tymoczko 2007).
As noted by Boéri (2019), “it is by way of stepping out of subservient role they [translators and
252
interpreters] are assigned within the communication encounter itself that they might find some
leeway to adopt a political stance” (4).
Nevertheless, research shows that translators and interpreters do intervene in and beyond
the text, through intentional omission, addition or alteration of elements (Tymoczko 2000b;
Kassiem 2017), choice of content to be translated (Schäffner 2003), choice of language (Martin
2016), paratextual interventions (Baker 2007), and so on. In fact, intervention – both at the
micro-level of the text and at the macro-level beyond the text – has been at the heart of
scholarly accounts of free, ethnodeviant, foreignising and resistant strategies of translation and
interpreting, be they displayed within elitist circles such as the French Canadian feminist
translators (Von Flotow 1997) or within grassroots contexts such as the case of immigrants
acting as brokers between the Indignados and the Occupy Wall Street movements (Romanos
2016).
Nevertheless, actors who organise and provide translation and interpreting services in vol-
unteer, activist circles might be more concerned with the logistics of getting the message across
than with accounting for the complexities and the granularity of translation engagement. As
“beneficiaries” of interpreting, they may be unaware of the fact that an interpreter is more than
a mere conduit and view activist interpreters as they would view any other language services
provider (i.e. impartial and qualified), with the only difference that they support their political
cause through volunteering their time and skills. Thus, even in activist circles, there may be an
assumption that translation and interpreting activism revolves around merely providing
impartial and expert (however free) services. This assumption is in some cases shared by the
individuals acting as translators and interpreters, whether they are trained or untrained, paid or
volunteering their time, as has been observed in the case of an advocacy organisation, Amnesty
International (Tesseur 2017). In these cases, the traditional view of translators as neutral,
impartial and expert is reconciled with an ethics of engagement that starts and ends with the
choice of the cause to support, with no intervention in the realm of the text and the message.
Thus, at the core of the intersectional space between political activism and translation, the
professional doxa of impartiality and the activist doxa of communicational and organisational
efficiency shape an ethics of selfless service provision based on expertise and solidarity. One of the
risks of this “ethics doxa” is that volunteering may be instrumentalised by commercial agendas
which are concealed behind a non-profit organisation. A case in point is that of Translators
Without Borders, which functions as an offshoot and a selling point of a commercial translation
agency (Baker 2006) and as the “philanthropic arm of a massive business consortium” (Piróth
and Baker 2019).
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Professionals who are reluctant to see interpreting services provided for free might view
these scenarios as evidence that volunteering is only about economic savings, and thus
unethical. For translators and interpreters who identify primarily as activists and derive their
motivation from this positionality, these scenarios might be alienating. Indeed, as observed by
Baker (2016a, 11), who draws on Boéri (2008), there exists
a persistent tension between the volunteers’ conceptualization of their role – as primar-

ily political activists . . . – and the conceptualization of that role by non-translators in the
movement, who often seem unable to think of translators as anything other than service
providers positioned outside the main struggle.
Nevertheless, both conceptualisations may well be championed by translators and non-trans-

lators alike. Those positioned within traditional organisational politics (NGOs, humanitarian
organisations, etc.), are more likely to subscribe to a service provision ethics, whereas those
positioned in “new” social movements, with grassroots politics of organisation, are more likely
to adopt a political stance on translation (Boéri 2012b). In any case, even radical social
movements
253
struggle to resist the pattern of efficiency because of the pressure to deliver macro-events, like
the social forums, or the urgency to get the message across in violent, high-risk activism
processes such as the Egyptian uprising (Baker 2019).
In the case of the social forum, the logistical pressure is coupled with the dominance of
traditional groups over the organisational process because of inequality of resources (Boéri and
Hodkinson 2005). The subsequent reproduction of the ethics of selflessness, solidarity,
impartiality and expertise in a space that, according to the Charter of Principles of Porto
Alegre, was to embody alternative organisational politics has led Babels to withdraw from the
Social Forums process at several points in time, and definitively, it seems, in 2015.
From 2015 onwards, volunteer interpreting at the Social Forums has no longer been
provided by Babels. In a 2015 press release, the collective underlines,
[T]here has been a lack of prior participatory consultation with our collective on the politi-
cal or logistical issues that we consider should be jointly and collectively defined,
including diversity of languages to be covered by interpretation, and dates and content of
training sessions.
(www.babels.org/spip.php?article566)
Even though the press release ended on a somewhat conciliatory note, pledging support to
the organisers “through other means,” the 2016 WSF in Montréal seems to mark a split which
does not seem to have been overcome at the time of writing this chapter, given that this docu-
ment was the last to be posted on the Babels website. The Babels coordination for the 2016
edition of the World Social Forum provides the following reasons for the network’s withdrawal:
the Organising Committee’s decision to “only offer interpreting into three colonial languages,”
thereby running the risk of silencing “a number of grassroot indigenous voices as well as voices
from the Global South,” the provision of interpreting services and equipment “for large con-
ferences only,” due mainly to the absence of a “meaningful provision for a solidarity fund for
interpreting”; the impossibility of guaranteeing “the right of everyone to express themselves in
the language of their choice and to contribute to discussions on the part language plays in the
mechanisms of cultural domination and in the circulation of ideas,” the organising committee’s
decision to launch “an interpreter pre-selection process without the involvement or knowledge
of the Babels coordination team” and the lack of clarity surrounding working conditions for
volunteer interpreters (including reimbursement of expenses for travel, food and lodging, as
well as available interpreting equipment). In other words, Babels coordinators felt that their
chapter17, 10.4324/978100312
involvement was to be relegated to a mere free service and that they were not given the
leeway to shape the politics of language and interpreting at the Social Forum.
These withdrawals are indicative of the difficulty, if not failure, to challenge the ethics of
solidarity, impartiality and expertise in service provision and indicate that this service provision
ethics currently constitutes the ethics doxa of the intersectional space between political activism
and translation. In this light, scholars may have to turn their attention to the alternative ethical
principles and practices relegated to the margins, so as to explore the ethics heterodoxa and its
potential for a renewed ethics of translation and interpreting.
4.2 Ethics heterodoxa: intervention and prefiguration

The Social Forum experience, one of the most documented cases of activist translation in the
field, has shown the logistical and political difficulties of developing alternatives to the service
economy and to the belief that societal development rests upon greater progress, championed
254
by experts rising above their own ideological biases. These alternatives are thus pushed away
by mainstream approaches to socio-political change (doxa), towards the margins of the inter-
sectional space between translation and political activism (heterodoxa). Despite their peripheral
positioning and their imperfect implementations on the ground, these alternatives take ethics
to uncharted territories where scholars and professionals alike may find inspiring principles and
practices of translation and interpreting to contribute to social justice.
The value of diversity has been constitutive of the collective identity and action of the
movement for global justice, since it is considered “an act of resistance to the homogenization
of 500 years of colonial history, contemporary democracy, the mass media and consumer-
ism” (Maeckelbergh 2007, 92). This mass-based movement which cuts across time, space and
struggles – including the 1960s’ women’s, civil rights and peace movements (Polletta 1998),
the alter-globalisation movement in the 1990s, the World Social Forum at the turn of the
century and the more locally rooted upsurges that have arisen this decade (the Arab Spring, the
Occupy and Square movements, etc.) – “stands against the unitary narratives of
(neo-)colonialism, progress and expertise and advocates for social change as diverse,
multilayered, undefined and under construction” (Boéri 2020). It is thus constitutive of an
alternative approach to knowledge and power whereby translation and interpreting may take on
a new meaning (Boéri 2010) both at the micro-level and at the macro-level (e.g. in and beyond
the communication encounter).
Activist movements take the view that if structures of oppression are to be overcome, their
communication practices ought to be inclusive of difference, in such a way that translation and
interpreting become constitutive of social justice. The conflation of means and ends of social
change and the attempt to enact “the values of an ideal society within the very means of
struggle for that society,” which are defining features of prefigurative politics according to
Maeckelbergh (2007, 43), is also championed by communities of activist translators and
interpreters. This is attested to by the fact that these communities spend a considerable amount
of time discussing their scope of involvement not only to avoid dumping but also to resist the
co-optation of volunteering by commercial agendas (Sánchez Balsalobre et al. 2010 for
ECOS; Boéri 2014b for Babels).
Challenging the commodification of all aspects of life and work and structures of cultural
oppression might not be achievable without translators’ and interpreters’ intervention within the
texts, at the micro-level of communication. Despite a lack of explicit engagement with activ-
ist translators’ and interpreters’ interventions at this level, as underlined earlier, communities
develop initiatives to prepare volunteers for the tasks awaiting them in the realm of mediation.
chapter17, 10.4324/978100312
For instance, ECOS and Babels have developed the situational preparation materials that aim to
test volunteers’ technical skills and background knowledge (Boéri 2010, 67).
Quality is acknowledged as a necessary requirement if the actual process of translating is to
embody social change and justice, since the translation provision serves the purpose of allow-
ing everyone to partake in the debate and have their voice heard. However, quality is reframed
within a narrative of grassroots and critical knowledge, away from expertise and impartiality
(Boéri 2014a). This approach is very much in line with the “self-reflexive” nature of contempo-
rary social movements and their often lauded high “internal ability for critique, analysis, and
the distribution of perspectives” (Lewis 2012, 229). In this context, issues such as accuracy,
quality and working conditions have gradually emerged as important ethical concerns.
In this light, prefiguration (the principle of embodying the change one wants to see) appears
as a key concept for a renewed ethics of translation and interpreting, not only at the macro-level
(Boéri 2012b) but also at the micro-level, for example in subtitling practices (Baker 2019). In
this sense, Baker’s use of prefigurative politics to account for subtitlers’ “commitment to
solidarity, diversity, non-hierarchy, horizontality, non-representational modes of practice”
(460) can
255
be extended to translation and interpreting at large. “Prefigurative translation and interpreting,”

thus, refers to these interventionist practices in the texts, the discourses, subtitles, sound tracks
or any other semiotic elements such as images and their paratexts, which bring to light the act
of mediation both at the micro- and the macro-levels, across cultures, languages, channels and
modalities in cultural, political and artistic activism, e.g. in making a film, in organising with
and for movements or in performing expressive political actions.
It is not surprising that it is in audiovisual translation studies that prefiguration at the micro-
level was first addressed to account for activist interventions, since as argued by Pérez
González (2014, 255–256), this area of practice is a “site of interventionist practice” through
the replace- ment of subtitles, the exploitation of the visual in order to communicate alternative
messages, the use of sarcasm, the subversion of conventions. These practices embody the trends
of inter- linguistic, multimodal and intercultural communication in social movements which
include the increased mediation of technologies, the increased disregard for authorship, a sense
of urgency to get the message across (particularly in high-risk activism), the blurring of the
frontier between aesthetic and political activism given the similarities between contemporary
mobilisations and fan cultures, the blurring of the frontier between individual and collective
initiatives, and the shift from formalised (fan) communities to ad hoc, temporary community
building, i.e. “ad- hocracies” (Pérez González 2014).
Exploring translation and interpreting practices through the lenses of prefiguration allows
scholars to explore how means and ends can be conflated in the very mode of doing translation.
For instance, with reference to subtitling revolutionary materials in the Egyptian uprising,
Baker (2019) underlines that not attending to register variation, code-switching, coherence
when translating at the micro-level of activist texts contradicts the agenda of empowering the
peoples and the communities “represented” in these audiovisual materials and neglects the
empowering potential of language and translation. The choice of languages (Boéri 2012b;
Martin 2016), technical and technological tools (Baker 2019; Boéri 2012b), and the causes to
support at the macro-level also deserves some reflection on the part of decision makers. For
instance, Babels has always strived to raise awareness among Social Forum organisers of the
contradiction between the political aim to involve the grassroots organisations (ends) and
opting for colonial languages only in their interpreting policy (means) which ultimately
reinforces language and cultural barriers. Similarly, resorting to patented soundproof booths
from private monopolistic companies contradicts the agenda of providing an alternative to
capitalism in the Social Forum (Boéri 2013).
Such a reconciliation of practices from both levels can equip scholars to account for the
chapter17, 10.4324/978100312
complexities and the granularity of activism in translation and interpreting. Prefiguration can
become a yardstick for scholars and practitioners to assess translators’ and interpreters’
interventions in and beyond the realm of mediation, or to put it in another way, to assess the
extent to which their interventions embody the values of diversity, inclusion and social justice.
The assessment of these heterodox and marginal practices, however, need to take into account
their limita- tions in terms of lack of resources and time, as well as their difficulties to resist co-
optation in that “‘liminal’ space between the world of activism and the service economy”
(Baker 2013, 23).
5 Conclusions
Research into activist translation and interpreting practices overlaps with a growing body of
research into non-professional, volunteer practices that are not performed or organised accord-
ing to professional standards. However, researching activism is distinct from researching these
unconventional practices in the sense that the former is claimed to be undertaken for bringing
256
about social change. The emergence of activist communities and ad hoc temporary
communities (ad-hocracies) of translators and interpreters on the ground, their political stance
on translation as an act of engagement to be organised from the bottom up, have disrupted the
professional standards of impartial and expert services provision. Nevertheless, the

complexities of ethics cannot be accounted for by drawing on professional versus activist,
engaged versus impartial, expert versus grassroots dichotomies, as actors who are involved in
the liminal space between political activism and translation/interpreting are heterogeneous,
even hybrid, their participation is unstable, and their principles and practices are constantly
evolving. Activism does not escape from the interplay between dominance and resistance,
between principles and practices, politics and logistics, and is configured around power
asymmetries. The diversity and contentious nature of the ethical principles and praxis
developed in activist contexts configure ethics doxa, at their core, and ethics heterodoxa at their
margins. The former stabilises an ethics of impartial, expert service provision within a view of
volunteer activist translation as a mere act of solidarity and selflessness. The latter champions
an ethics of agency and intervention in ways that prefigure the social justice advocated for.
Using prefiguration as a yardstick to explore activist translation and interpreting both at the
macro-level and at the micro-level of communication promises to renew ethics in translation
and social movement studies.
Related topics in this volume

Translator ethics; professional translator ethics; conference interpreter ethics; the ethics of
public service interpreting; ethics of volunteering in translation and interpreting; feminist
translation ethics.
Note
1 Throughout this chapter, we will use the term “translation” to refer to both (audiovisual) translation and
interpreting, and the term “interpreting” when referring to interpreting only.
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Further reading
Baker, Mona.2016b. Translating Dissent: Voices from and with the Egyptian Revolution. Edited by Mona Baker.
London, New York: Routledge.
In addition to academic contributions, this edited volume features texts written by activists involved
in translating the Egyptian Revolution, and provides readers with unique perspectives which push the
boundaries of our field and its traditional understanding of ethics.
260
Boéri, Julie. 2008. “A Narrative Account of the Babels vs. Naumann Controversy: Competing Perspectives
on Activism in Conference Interpreting.” Translator 14, no. 1: 21–50.
This paper offers a contrastive analysis of the ethical principles guiding Babels volunteers and profes-
sional conference interpreters, and thus illustrates the two sets of doxa presented in this chapter.
Boéri, Julie. 2019a. “Activism.” In The Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, edited by Mona Baker,
and Gabriela Saldanha. London, New York: Routledge.
This entry is dedicated to research into activism within translation studies, thus encompassing its
various strands of research such as (audiovisual) translation and interpreting.
Della Porta, Donatella, and Mario Diani. 2006. Social Movements: An Introduction. Oxford, UK:
Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
In this monograph, the authors present the historical roots and key features of contemporary social
movements. As such, it allows translation studies scholars with an interest in activist translation to
better understand the context within which this practice is embedded.
Tymoczko, Maria. 2010. Translation, Resistance, Activism: Essays on the Role of Translators as Agents of Change.
Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press.
This collection of papers covers a broad range of examples of activist translation practices distributed
across time and space. Although not explicitly focusing on ethics, the chapters in this volume enrich
our understanding of the history of activist translation.
chapter17, 10.4324/978100312
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Translation as an Alternative Space for

Political Action
Mona Baker a
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Published online: 08 May 2012.
To cite this article: Mona Baker (2013) Translation as an Alternative Space for Political Action,
Social Movement Studies: Journal of Social, Cultural and Political Protest, 12:1, 23-47, DOI:
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Translation as an Alternative Space

for Political Action
MONA BAKER
Centre for Translation and Intercultural Studies, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK
Downloaded by [University Library Utrecht] at 10:29 17 March 2015
ABSTRACT This article examines the genesis, dynamics and positioning of activist groups of
translators and interpreters who engage in various forms of collective action. The activism of these
groups is distinctive in that they use their linguistic skills to extend narrative space and empower
voices made invisible by the global power of English and the politics of language. They further
recognise that language and translation themselves constitute a space of resistance, a means of
reversing the symbolic order. Their use of hybrid language, their deliberate downgrading of
English, the constant shuffling of the order and space allocated to different languages on their
websites—all this is as much part of their political agenda as their linguistic mediation of texts and
utterances produced by others, in their capacity as translators and interpreters. The article
examines the positioning of these groups vis-a`-vis what Tarrow (2006, p. 16) terms ‘the new
generation of global justice activists’ on the one hand, and professional translators and
interpreters on the other, and argues that they occupy a ‘liminal’ space between the world of
activism and the service economy.
KEY WORDS: Translation, interpreting, narrative, collective action, global movements of justice,
prefiguration
Introduction
One of the unexamined assumptions that continue to underpin discussions of translation
and interpreting, particularly among lay members of society, is that the individuals who
produce translated texts and utterances are neutral, disinterested, apolitical creatures,
mere conduits who take no sides and have no stake in the outcome of any interaction they
mediate. Numerous real-life examples, on the other hand, continue to attest to the fact
that translators and interpreters are not apolitical, that many hold strong beliefs about the
rights and wrongs of (political) events in which they find themselves involved
professionally, as translators and interpreters.1 Indeed, as this article demonstrates,
various groups of translators and interpreters now actively engage in forms of collective
action that set out to challenge the political status quo. In this respect, they have broken
away from a long tradition of positioning themselves purely as neutral, unengaged
professionals who stand in some ‘liminal’ space between cultures and political divides.
Such recent forms of collective action aside, I would argue, translation as such does
not mediate cultural encounters that exist outside the act of translation but rather
participates
Correspondence Address: Mona Baker, Centre for Translation and Intercultural Studies, School of Languages,
Linguistics and Cultures, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, UK.
Email: mona.baker@manchester.ac.uk
q 2013 Taylor & Francis
24 M.
in producing these encounters. It does not reproduce texts but constructs cultural
realities, and it does so by intervening in the processes of narration and renarration that
constitute all encounters, and that essentially construct the world for us. It is not an
innocent act of disinterested mediation but an important means of constructing identities
and configuring the shape of any encounter. Adopting a narrative view of interaction as
elaborated in connection with translation in earlier work (Baker, 2006a, 2006b, 2009,
2010), I take it as given that the stories we tell and retell, including those we retell
through the medium of translation, constitute a site where we exercise our agency, and in
this sense are ultimately a tool for changing the world. They enable us to elaborate our
individual and collective identities and negotiate the conditions of history in which we
find ourselves, whether as lay members of society, as professionals in a particular
domain or as activists who consciously exploit their professional skills to effect change at
a local or global level.
Translation, Narration and Collective Action

Hernadi (1980/1981, p. 199) attributes our need to narrate to two ultimate motivations:
‘self-assertive entertainment’ and ‘self-transcending commitment’. It is the latter
motivation that is relevant in the current context. ‘Self-transcending commitment’ leads
us to narrate to ‘replace indifference by the social or cosmic commitment either to
change the world or to change ourselves’ (Hernadi, 1980/1981). Narrative is often linked
to the moralising impulse in human beings, which is partly what makes it an attractive
framework for engaging with forms of activism generally, including forms of collective
action in the world of translation and interpreting.
In the sections that follow, I will examine the genesis, positioning and prefigurative
strategies of groups of activist translators and interpreters who are ultimately motivated
not by any intrinsic, shared attributes of the individuals who constitute each group—
these groups do not engage in identity politics—but by a sense of identification with a
‘story’ or set of ‘stories’ that provide a focal point for their political activity. These
stories are rooted in broader narratives of global justice, rather than narratives of
nationalist aspirations, for instance, or religious belief. In this sense, the groups in
question belong to what Tarrow describes as ‘the new generation of global justice
activists’ (2006, p. 46) who have become particularly visible since the events in Seattle
in 1999. They are also ‘activist outsiders’ (Tarrow, 2006, p. 45) who challenge existing
institutions rather than attempt to change them from the inside. Indeed, most reject any
form of institutionalisation at all. On the whole, the narratives to which these groups
subscribe and which they attempt to promote globally through their acts of translation
and their engagement with various forms of prefigurative politics are very much geared
to replacing indifference, in Hernadi’s terms, with a commitment to change the entire set
of relations that define the current world order. One of the largest and most visible of
these groups, Babels, explicitly aligns itself with the World Social Forum and its motto
of ‘Another World is Possible’, suggesting that its members see themselves as actively
engaged in renarrating the world across linguistic and cultural boundaries.
What I hope to demonstrate in this article is that these groups operate in very similar
ways to other global movements of collective action, and most fulfil the criteria of
‘autonomous movements’ outlined by Flesher Fominaya (2007, pp. 337 – 341).
However, unlike most other global and autonomous movements, they have a strong
‘professional’ character in that many (possibly most) members of each group are
professional or student
Translation as an Alternative Space for Political 2
translators and/or interpreters, each group signals the identity of its members as
‘translators’ clearly in its name and the raison d’eˆtre of each group is tightly connected
to the ability of its members to offer linguistic mediation. Members of all the groups
examined here specifically use their linguistic skills to extend narrative space and
narrative opportunities for resistance, and to empower voices made invisible by the
global power of English and the politics of language. In so doing, and against a long and
powerful tradition of emphasising the neutrality of translators in lay, professional and
scholarly discourse, these activists position themselves within a space that is neither fully
understood and appreciated by the activist communities with which they interact, as
evident in ongoing tensions between Babels and the World Social Forum organisers, nor
fully accepted by their professional colleagues, who generally regard such concrete
political involvement with suspicion and concern.
Beyond the issue of giving voice, of extending narrative space, what is particularly
interesting about these groups is that they recognise that language and translation
themselves constitute a space of resistance, a means of reversing the symbolic order

(Melucci, 1996). The mode of operation and practices of groups like Babels and
Tlaxcala, discussed below, are consciously designed to question boundaries and narrate
them as permeable and porous. Their use of hybrid language, their deliberate
downgrading of English, the constant shuffling of the order and space allocated to
different languages on their website—all this is as much part of their political agenda as
their linguistic mediation of texts and utterances produced by others, in their capacity as
translators and interpreters. It is this practice of prefigurative politics, a core feature of
autonomous movements (Flesher Fominaya, 2007), that distinguishes them most clearly
from other groups of translators who offer linguistic support to humanitarian
organisations and a variety of good causes. In many ways, discursive as well as
behavioural, they practise the principles they support themselves, rather than remaining
within the rigid boundaries of their professional role and entrusting the political work to
others, at the same time as advocating these principles and enabling others to articulate
them in a range of languages. They further apply the principles, often in highly
innovative ways, in the present, rather than work towards applying them at some point in
the future, when certain tangible and well-defined political aims have been achieved.
Translation and Interpreting as Forms of Collective Action

Like the new generation of global justice activists (Tarrow, 2006), the groups discussed
here tend to rely heavily on Internet technology, both to communicate among themselves
and coordinate their work, and in some cases to circulate their translations. With limited
resources and diverse, diffuse memberships, these groups manage to mobilise effectively
in the virtual environment afforded by new media and Internet technologies. To varying
degrees, they are international in profile, attracting members from all six continents,
though admittedly they tend to be run and maintained mainly from Europe, perhaps
because translators and interpreters based in Europe have better and less constrained
access to resources, and can afford to devote relatively more of their time to political
work than, say, their counterparts in Cameroon, Iran or China. Tarrow (2006) reports a
similar geographical imbalance in all global movements; even in activism, it seems,
‘there is still a net advantage for the richer, better-connected citizens of the North,
who have greater
26 M.
financial and organizational resources and who live close to the sites of major
international institutions’ (p. 44).2
Two broad types of activist communities of translators and interpreters may be
identified on the basis of the type of material translated and the venues in which the
translations are offered: (1) groups whose activities predominantly revolve around the
selection, translation and dissemination of written material via websites and mailing lists;
and (2) groups who work in the community and/or within collective forums—mainly the
World Social Forum—and whose activities predominantly consist of interpreting oral
interaction in specific events. In both cases, and unlike many other activist groups that
translate political material with a view to effecting change, such as the community that
established Tahrir Documents in March 2011, 3 the groups examined here all identify
themselves as translators and interpreters, and hence position themselves explicitly
within the professional and scholarly world of translation, giving rise to certain tensions
that I explore later in this article. This positioning is strongly signalled in the names of
the groups (Translators for Peace; Translators United for Peace (TUP); Translator
Brigades; Tlaxcala: The International Network of Translators for Linguistic Diversity;
ECOS, traductores e inte´rpretes por la solidaridad). It is further foregrounded in each
group’s narrative of itself, mostly in the ‘About Us’ section of the relevant website. For
example, Translators for Peace describes itself as ‘a free association of translators from
all countries and of all nationalities’ and Babels narrates itself as ‘an international
network of volunteer interpreters and translators’.4 Cutting across these two broad types,
we might also distinguish between groups with a restricted, anti-war agenda (Translators
for Peace and TUP) and those with a broader agenda for radical political change (Babels,
ECOS, Tlaxcala and Translator Brigades).
Type 1: Focus on Written Translations

The first type of activist community discussed here, which focuses on translating and
disseminating written texts, is exemplified by Traduttori par la Pace/Translators for
Peace (founded in Italy in 1999), TUP (founded in Japan in March 2003), Tlaxcala
(founded ‘virtually’ in December 2005, with no national base declared) and Translator
Brigades (founded as part of ‘the wave of solidarity with the 15-M 5 and Occupy
Movements’ in September 2011). The first two adopt a restricted, peace agenda, and
seem to have been established in response to specific wars: Kosovo in the case of
Translators for Peace and Iraq in the case of TUP. The Translators for Peace ‘Charter’
states that:
The Association was established in the historical context of the war launched by
the countries belonging to the Nato [sic] alliance against Serbia, in an effort to
respond to the lack and distortion of information which the promoters [sic] to be
the result of the propagandistic wall present in both the countries of the Western
Alliance and Serbia.6
The homepage declares that the group aims ‘to publish, as far as possible in every
language and by whatever channel, every message against: war in general; and in
particular, against the use of war as a means of resolving international disputes’. The
group thus narrates itself essentially as a coalition of anti-war activists. TUP signals a
similar agenda in its name; the website does not yet offer an English interface (Figure
1), but a
Figure 1. Translators United for Peace website.
member of the group (Mari Oka, Kyoto University) confirms that the ‘About Us’ page
narrates the group as committed to ‘making a contribution to create a peaceful world
without wars’7 (personal communication, 2 November 2011).
Groups that adopt a peace agenda, like Translators for Peace and TUP, tend to be
restricted to a specific geographical setting (Italy, Japan) and focus on promoting anti-
war narratives within their immediate local space, largely by translating and disseminating
texts that elaborate these anti-war narratives for members of their immediate community.
Translators for Peace translate predominantly between Italian and other languages,
mostly English. English is the only other interface language that features on the site, in
contrast with other groups, such as Babels, Tlaxcala and Translator Brigades, whose
websites offer interfaces and/or translated content in a variety of languages. TUP
translates only in Japanese, and states on its site that these translations are meant to
‘make an impact on Japanese citizens, media and politics’. 8 Both groups, Translators for
Peace and TUP, are relatively small in size—around 25 in the case of TUP (Mari Oka,
personal communication, 2 November 2011) and no more than 35 or 40 in the case of
Translators for Peace (on the basis of the lists of members available on the site between
2005 and 2012). In addition to written translations, TUP occasionally offers volunteer
interpreting for anti-war speakers touring Japan. Of all the groups discussed in this
article, these two groups are the least embedded in the global movement for justice and
the farthest from the definition of ‘autonomous movements’ discussed in Flesher
Fominaya (2007) and elsewhere.
Tlaxcala and Translator Brigades do not narrate themselves as anti-war coalitions, and
do not set out to influence a geographically circumscribed audience. Translator Brigades
narrates itself as ‘a network of international activists and translators pursuing global
change’ and as ‘an idea, the idea that as the different problems we face in every country
are caused by a global crisis of this system, the solutions should come from the dialogue
and union of citizens worldwide’9 (emphasis added). Tlaxcala describes itself as an
‘international network of translators for linguistic diversity’10 and signals its radical and
militant agenda clearly (emphasis added). While other groups have ‘charters’ and
‘constitutions’, Tlaxcala has a ‘manifesto’ that describes the network and its aims in
revolutionary language:
28 M.
The translators of Tlaxcala are anti-militarists, anti-imperialists and stand against
‘neoliberal’ corporate globalization. They yearn for peace and equality among all
languages and cultures. They believe neither in a clash of civilizations nor in the
current imperial crusade against terrorism.11
It ends with a call to arms: ‘Translators and interpreters of all languages, connect
yourselves and unite! Webmasters and bloggers of all colors in the rainbow who share
our concerns, contact us!’.
Tlaxcala’s ‘manifesto’ is an extended treatise on the politics of language in general
and English in particular. It elaborates a narrative of an inherently conflictual world
where different imperial powers have subjugated weaker nations and groups and
reinforced this subjugation through their language since time immemorial. Members of
Tlaxcala are then projected as particular types of protagonist: fighters with a specific
political role to play within that narrative:
The translators of Tlaxcala believe in otherness, in the goodness of approaching

others’ points of view, and for that reason they take the stand of de-imperializing
the English language by publishing in all possible languages (including English)
the voices of writers, thinkers, cartoonists and activists who nowadays write their
original texts in languages that the domineering empire’s influence do [sic] not
allow to be heard. As well, the translators of Tlaxcala will provide an opportunity
for non- English speakers to be exposed to ideas from English language writers
who now are on the fringe, or who were only published in really small, hard to find
places.
The English language in its position as an apparatus of institutional knowledge

functions as a global power structure that presents the world’s languages and
cultures in its image and likeness without bothering to seek the permission of the
world it purports to represent. The translators of Tlaxcala are convinced that the
masters of discourse can be defeated and hope to blur such an apparatus in the faith
that the world can become both multipolar and multilingual, as diverse as life
itself.12
Although Tlaxcala restricts itself to written translation disseminated via the internet, it is
better embedded in the culture of transnational activism than the anti-war groups
discussed above, and signals its alignment with the principles of the World Social Forum
in various ways—directly, in its manifesto, and indirectly through the various choices it
makes on an ongoing basis, in terms of the choice of texts to be translated, for instance,
the way it configures its own structure as a network of individuals and organisations, and
the way it projects the relationship(s) between the languages from and to which it
translates. The same is largely true of the recently founded Translator Brigades, whose
mission statement signals a similar positioning:
We come from different contexts but have a common concern for global inequality
and human suffering. We hold the principles of solidarity, collective authorship,
and direct democracy. We believe our creative use of social networking and
commitment to translating will serve to spread valuable ideas and empower
struggles for justice by creating and reinforcing bonds among social movements
across the globe.13
Figure 2. Translator Brigades’ translations of Adbusters articles.
Translator Brigades also embeds itself within movements of global justice by focusing
much of its energy on translating global calls for action, as well as content from
Adbusters ‘to create an international readership for this valuable publication’. 14 Its
‘About’ page declares that the group translates ‘into twenty languages’, but it is not clear
what these languages are nor whether the direction of translation is restricted, for
instance from English to other languages but not vice versa. It appears to be so in the
case of material translated from Adbusters, which is hosted outside the main site and
accessed via a link on the ‘About’ page. The direction of translation in this case seems to
be strictly from English into other languages (Figure 2).15
The site itself features only four language sections—Greek, Portuguese, Spanish and
Turkish, with content in each, but no content in English other than the ‘About’ page
(Figure 3). As will become clear in later analysis, attention to the relationships between
different languages and the direction(s) of translation is an important element of the
prefigurative politics of many, but not all, of the groups under examination and signals
the level of each group’s awareness of the broader political project of contemporary
global movements.
Translator Brigades’ ‘membership’ is unclear at this stage: there are no names of
individuals nor an indication of who is involved in the project anywhere on the site.
Tlaxcala, on the other hand, provides detailed information on the people involved in the
project. In 2009, it had 74 members and offered translations between 13 languages, with
no priority given to any of these as source or target languages. Today, it still offers
translations into and out of 13 languages, but it is difficult to ascertain exactly how many
individual translators consider themselves ‘members’ of the group. First, whereas in
2009 the list of translators appeared under a section entitled ‘Who We Are’, the current
site lists translators under ‘Library of Translators’, itself part of a larger section
comprising ‘Library of Authors’, ‘Library of Translators’ and ‘Library of Editors’. The
first classification, ‘Who We Are’, clearly signals that anyone listed in the section
considers themselves part of the
30 M.
Figure 3. Translator Brigades site and language categories.
group; more importantly, the label suggests a stable identity that is out of tune with the
contemporary culture of political movements. By contrast, the current classification
suggests a much looser association of contributors to the project. The change in
designation and the looseness and open-endedness of the current structure signal a
process of political maturation that brings the group closer to forms of collective action
described by Melucci (1996) and the character of autonomous movements discussed by
Flesher Fominaya (2007). Second, the current ‘Library of Translators’, which extends to
40 web sub-pages, does not offer a total count of the names listed, and lists not only
individuals but also other groups and associations, including the World Social Forum,
whose material Tlaxcala occasionally features on its site (Figure 4), suggesting
identification with the political project of collective forums despite the fact that Tlaxcala
does not offer volunteer translation or interpreting to the World Social Forum or similar
communities.
Even the individuals listed are not necessarily all contributors to the site. For example,
Wael Aly (Abouleil) is not described as a contributor but as someone Tlaxcala ‘adopted
as an honorary member, in solidarity with him and all Egyptians who continue the
revolution begun on 25 January 2011, despite all obstacles and continued oppression’;
there is no indication that he ever contributed material to the site. Nevertheless, the
section does list numerous individual translators who appear to be regular contributors, at
least as many as were listed in 2009, with detailed biographies in a range of languages.
Some, such as Supriyo Chatterjee, are explicitly described (in the third person) as
members of Tlaxcala:
Now in his fifties, Supriyo Chatterjee divides his time between India and England
and divides his work between working for and with popular organisations in India
and a three-way translation interest involving Spanish, English and Bangla. He is a
member of Tlaxcala.16
Figure 4. Extract from Tlaxcala’s ‘Library of Translators’ featuring WSF as an entry.
This reinforces the message that not all individuals listed are or regard themselves as
members of the group, and that the group itself is not a stable structure with clear
boundaries that separate it from individuals and groups that lie outside it. Flexible as this
structure might be, however, Tlaxcala—unlike Babels, another group discussed below—
still does not narrate itself as a fully autonomous, ‘biodegradable’ network ‘dissolving and
regenerating into new forms of organization and action’ (Flesher Fominaya, 2007, p. 339).
Whether we consider the individuals and groups that Tlaxcala lists on its site as loose
associates or committed members who subscribe to the group’s manifesto, the list that
appears under ‘Library of Translators’ is extremely varied in composition. It includes
individuals from various parts of the world, different ethnic origins, speaking very
different languages and with highly varied biographies. The diversity of people brought
together by this project was even more evident in 2009, when ‘members’ appeared under
‘Who We Are’ and their biographies were worded in a more personal style, with no third
person reference. Members then described themselves in colourful terms—as Brazilian,
Mexican, feminist, activist, Iranian, biochemist, Turkish, internationalist, Italian, French,
American Palestinian, Muslim, sociologist, human, mother, journalist, teacher,
philologist—and almost always as ‘translator’ (Figure 5). This diversity in the ways in
which they individually chose to identify, or not identify, gave the group a particularly
spontaneous and fresh character. It is worth noting that Tlaxcala is the only group that
continues to provide detailed biographies of its members and contributors, including
photographs; these concrete expressions of multi-layered identities give substance to the
World Social Forum’s stress on ‘unity in diversity’ in individual, personal (rather than
32 M.
Figure 5. Tlaxcala’s ‘Who We Are’ section, 2009.
movement) terms and is in line with the idea of the autonomous subject as ‘multifaceted
with multiple overlapping identities’ (Flesher Fominaya, 2007, p. 340).
All groups within this first category focus on producing and circulating written
translations of texts that they themselves select. Like the fansubber networks discussed
by Pe´rez-Gonza´lez,17 they ‘act effectively as self-appointed translation commissioners
that choose what is to be subtitled’ (2007, p. 71)—or, in this case, what is to be
translated, posted on the website and circulated through mailing lists and other means. 18
Similarly, while a group such as Adbusters, with whom Translator Brigades identify
explicitly, engage in disseminating information about the unsavoury business practices of
companies such as Nike in order to ‘“uncool” the brand’ (Carty, 2002, p. 141), we might
say that the groups examined here use their linguistic skills to disseminate counter
narratives that can ‘uncool’ dominant takes on a range of issues, including the siege of
Gaza, continued poverty in Africa and drug trafficking in Latin America. Each
translation they produce functions as an episode in a larger narrative under construction,
itself an episode of a larger narrative still.
In the case of Tlaxcala, the largest and most elaborate of these groups, each set of
narratives, as elaborated in individual translations, is classified under a specific heading:
Africa; Abya Yala; Asia and Oceania; Land of Palestine; Umma; Europe; USA and
Canada. Taken together, the individual translations in each section cumulatively
elaborate
a certain narrative or set of related narratives of the relevant region, for example about
the causes of poverty and conflict in Africa. This narrative is elaborated both through the
selection of what to translate and include in each section and through the way the entire
section is framed, always within the larger narrative of an age-old imperial onslaught on
weaker cultures, a narrative that unfolds over extended periods of time, follows a familiar
story line, is projected onto a future that members of the group and other activists are
invited to participate in shaping and features a range of abstract character types as well as
more specific protagonists. For example, Abya Yala, the title of one of the sections, is
glossed as follows:
Living Earth: the indigenous name of Latin America
In the spirit of Mart´ı and native peoples, ABYA YALA is a collection of

everything related to Our Ame´rica, living earth that begins at R´ıo Bravo and ends
at Tierra del Fuego, including the Caribbean islands, not forgetting the First
Nations of Northern America.
Umma is glossed as:
Common hopes
People, groups and territories marked by Islamic civilization. A community of

beliefs, values, debates and hopes gathered together in a quarter of all humanity.
Like the other groups under discussion, the translators of Tlaxcala engage actively in
renarrating the world from a specific position and locality, using translation as a means
of reconfiguring relations between protagonists and events in an unfolding story of the
world in which they live.
Type 2: Interpreting for Collective Forums and the Community

The second type of activist groups, who largely work within collective forums or in the
community, is exemplified by ECOS and Babels. ECOS (Traductores e Inte´rpretes por
la Solidaridad)19 was set up in Granada in 1998 by lecturers and students of translation
and interpreting at the University of Granada (Balsalobre et al. 2010). The name, ECOS,
‘reflects a twofold concern: to facilitate communication across language barriers for
those individuals and groups excluded from the institutional or private market; and to
“echo” (Eco) or give visibility to the situations in our contemporary world which are
silenced because they are not a priority for those controlling the dominant media’
(Balsalobre et al. 2010, p. 9).
Unlike the groups discussed above, ECOS provides volunteer translation and
interpreting to various sectors of civil society. In addition, members of the association
also organise local talks, in Granada, for the public (sometimes featuring international
speakers) to raise awareness about contemporary social and political questions, including
fair trade and the situations in Iraq and the Middle East. Although locally based at its
inception, since the second European Social Forum (ESF) in 2003, ECOS has been
collaborating with another activist group, Babels, in some international venues,
34 M.
Figure 6. Ecos– Babels section of the ECOS site.
particularly the Social Forum (Balsalobre et al. 2010, p. 9). Its website includes a full
section entitled ECOS– Babels, to foreground this relationship (Figure 6). This pattern of
collaboration represents one area in which activist groups in the world of translation and
interpreting operate like other movements of collective action, not only in terms of their
aims but also their practices.
Babels is by far the best known and the largest of the activist communities under
discussion. It was set up in September 2002 by a group of activists linked to the French
branch of ATTAC, to meet the translation and interpreting needs of the ESF in Florence.
Babels’ charter explicitly describes the group as a ‘player in the “anti-capitalist” debate’
and signals their commitment to debate and experimentation as modes of political
engagement:
Babels is:
●A network of interpreters and translators
●A player in the ‘anti-capitalist’ debate
●A workshop for the evolution of languages, expressions and their terminological
differences; proposals for translation of technical terms or ideas, taking into
account their linguistic heritage.
●A way of proposing within the framework of an organisation international
events in which Babels could take part: e.g. choice of languages, organisation of
conferences, seminars or workshops on the theme of languages and linguistic
diversity
●A meeting space for interpreters and organisations who come together for
different events; meetings on a technical level between speakers and interpreters
and assistance with expressing things orally20
An earlier version of the website featured an explanation of the choice of the plural form
‘Babels’ as a name for the group: this was meant to ‘underline the supranational
character of the association’. Unlike ECOS, Translators for Peace and TUP, then, Babels
—like Tlaxcala and Translator Brigades—was conceived from the beginning as a
transnational network of activists.
Babels’ debut in Florence in 2002 featured 350 volunteer translators and interpreters
working without a budget and without even basic facilities such as computers and
telephones (Hodkinson & Boe´ri, 2005). The success and dedication of the group,
however, convinced the organisers of the following ESF to give it better facilities and the
relatively large sum of £200,000 to prepare for Paris. The Paris Forum held in 2003 was
linguistically mediated by more than 1000 ‘Babelitos’ drawn from a volunteer pool four
times that number. By the time the London ESF was held in October 2004, the Babels
database included over 7000 volunteers working in 63 languages (Boe ´ri & Hodkinson,
2005). By 2005, the number of volunteers registered with Babels had increased to 9000.
By any standard, this is an impressive coalition of translators and interpreters, or people
with the requisite language skills, actively engaging with and volunteering their time to
facilitate the task of envisioning a different world, one in which anyone can have a voice
and can contribute to the debate, whether or not they speak a colonial language such as
English or French.
Babels, like ECOS and Translator Brigades, has never published a list of its members.
Members who post messages or report on events sign the messages and reports in their
name, often only a first name, but otherwise there is no list of individual names on the
site. This is possibly because of the sheer size and fluidity of the group. It is also in line
with the group’s overall political stance and its emebeddedness within the culture of the
World Social Forum: as a matter of principle, Babels foregrounds the collective nature of
the project and downplays the role of any individual within it. I will return to this issue
shortly when I discuss Babels’ resistance to patterns of representation. Resistance to
representation and hierarchy is characteristic of most of the other groups under
discussion; however, being ‘organic’21 to the World Social Forum, Babels reflects
explicitly and extensively on issues such as representation, participation, deliberation,
process, etc. on an ongoing basis (see Boe ´ri (2009) for a detailed analysis of the debates
about these principles among members of Babels).
Positioning and Dynamics of Activist Groups of Translators

To varying degrees, but as particularly evident in the case of Babels, ECOS, Translator
Brigades and Tlaxcala, activist groups of translators are structured, operate and narrate
themselves in very similar ways to other movements of collective action. In terms of
their ultimate goals, they do not aim to seize power or achieve a set of political demands
within a specific period of time, but to effect a gradual change of consciousness that can
have enduring effects—globally, not locally. As members of ECOS put it, they set out to
achieve ‘a profound transformation of [ .. . ] unjust structures, as opposed to promoting
mere reforms that in fact only lend greater legitimacy to the current order’ (Balsalobre et
al. 2010, p. 9). This is very much in line with the general shift in patterns of resistance
that Melucci (1996), among others, has explained in terms of the fact that our
contemporary societies ‘have no centres’, and that it is now much more difficult to
identify and seize central instruments of power. Contemporary movements realise that in
this context it is ‘as important to capture imagination as to command actions’ (Notes
from Nowhere, 2003,
p. 65), that information has become a crucial resource, and that collective action must
therefore focus on changing public discourse and consciousness rather than effecting
change by material force. Against this background, translation and interpreting become
much more important—indeed, central to fulfilling the objectives of contemporary
political movements. They become a privileged space of political action in their own
right.
36 M.
Melucci (1996, p. 308) identifies ‘globality’ as one of the features of mobilisation in
contemporary movements. ‘Affirming globality’, he explains, means ‘raising issues that
do not concern specific social groups only but, more generally, the system as such’
(emphasis in original). By and large, the groups discussed here have increasingly moved
away from championing single issues and veered towards globality in these terms. Their
aims and praxis are fundamentally global in reach, even when they make space for
specific local struggles, as in the case of Tlaxcala. Local struggles are used as models,
narrative elements to be combined into a larger narrative of the entire globe and the
system as such, rather than providing an exclusive focus for group activism. These
groups did not all start with a diverse, global agenda that questions the prevailing world
order, but even those who started out within a particular physical space—Spain in the
case of ECOS, Italy in the case of Translators for Peace, Japan in the case of TUP—have
tended to broaden or ‘globalise’ their agendas to varying degrees with time, not only in
terms of collaborating with other groups at an international level, but also in terms of
extending their remit beyond the small range of issues on which they initially focused.
As they continue to evolve, they seem to work more consciously at avoiding potential
categorisation as single-issue groups, reflecting the wider trend toward multi-issue
activism documented in Tarrow (2006) and recognised by della Porta and Mosca (2010,
pp. 66, 76) as one of the contributions of local social forums to the global justice
movement. For example, an early version of the ECOS website showed a strong focus on
the issue of Palestine (Figure 7). But the most recent version of the website downplays
individual issues in favour of a broader agenda. This suggests that activist groups in the
world of translation and interpreting are coming much more in line with global
movements of collective action, with a steady drift in the direction of engaging with a
diverse range of issues that exceed the concerns of particular regions and question the
very basis of the political and social order.
In addition to being increasingly global in focus, these groups are also transnational
and trans-professional in terms of their composition. The individuals who make up the
groups translate and interpret—this is their contribution to the struggle. But they come
from very many backgrounds. Some are qualified translators and interpreters, including
students and lecturers of translation. Some are practising professionals with few or many
years’ experience as translators and/or interpreters. Some are neither: they may be
sociologists, students of literature, biologists or journalists. We may think of them, on
the whole, as
Figure 7. An early version of the ECOS site (2009) giving prominence to the issue of Palestine.
22
‘amateur’ translators and interpreters, in Edward Said’s sense: meaning not that they
are unskilled, but that as a group, and in many cases as individuals, they are not affiliated
with the profession or the institutions that represent translators and interpreters, such as
AIIC,23 the International Association of Conference Interpreters.
Not only do these groups refrain from forging formal relationships with professional
associations, but some, such as Babels and ECOS, are also perceived by professionals
who think of translation purely as a service, rather than as a political act in its own right,
as undermining the status of the profession—by taking work away from professionals,
providing poor quality interpretation that reflects badly on the profession (Naumann,
2006; Boe´ri, 2008) or potentially undermining client trust by compromising the core
principles of neutrality and impartiality that define translation in the context of the
service economy. Babels, for example, has been accused of disrupting the market. 24 By
providing free interpreting at the Social Forum, some have argued, it allows Forum
organisers to avoid hiring professional interpreters and paying for the service, although,
the criticism goes, the organisers are perfectly happy to pay for other services and should
therefore also be prepared to pay for interpreting.
Unlike other groups of activists, therefore, the fact that they offer a service normally
provided by professionals represented by associations, and explicitly refer to themselves
as translators both in the name of the group and their narratives of themselves, as
discussed earlier, means that in some respects the groups discussed here are caught
between the world of activism and the politics of professional competition and ethos of
the service economy. The analysis by Boe´ri (2009) of exchanges among members of
Babels over a period of time to establish how the group’s public narrative of itself
evolved shows that elaborating a seemingly stable and streamlined narrative of the group
involved considerable negotiation among many ‘Babelitos’. This negotiation often
revealed sensitivity to the positioning of Babels vis-a `-vis the profession, despite the
deliberately ‘amateur’ character of the group, as evident in the following exchange (Boe
´ri, 2009, p. 79):
I am firmly opposed to any intervention by Babels beyond the ESF and the
WSF . . . There is a big risk, after all, of unfair competition with professional
interpreters. When all associations become aware that there is a big pool of
volunteer interpreters, they won’t be willing to budget for interpreting, even if they
have the funds to do so. It is too easy to counter this argument on the grounds that
professional interpreters are guided by their own financial interests and that there is
something automatically gratifying in providing free interpreting. It is not the role
of a network that is supposed to be aware of social problems to destroy the market.
(Sarah, Babels Forum, 28 March 2004; translated from French by Julie Boe´ri).
ECOS has similarly felt obliged to ‘explain’ and justify its activities to the community of
professional translators and interpreters who have felt threatened by its activities (Manuel
Jerez et al. n.d.):
In the association ECOS, Translators and Interpreters for Solidarity, we perform

volunteer work of translation and interpreting for NGOs, social forums and other
nonprofit organisations with affinities to the philosophy of our organisation. In no
38 M.
case would we wish to accept a continuous role in the performance of a service
which ought to be supplied by professionals under contract.25
Positioning themselves as unaffiliated ‘amateurs’, then, does not make these groups
impervious to pressure from professionals who offer similar skills for financial gain. But
it is a choice they continue to make.
Like other contemporary movements, the groups under discussion also reject patterns
of representation and all forms of hierarchy, and treat themselves not as static groups
with identifiable structures and targets, but rather as loose networks of like-minded
people, and as experimental projects that are constantly in the making. Translator
Brigades’ rejection of hierarchy and representation is evident in its statement about
decision-making and demonstrates another aspect of prefiguration that characterises
these groups, namely that they experiment with ways of enacting democracy globally
‘within their own organizing process’ (Maeckelbergh, 2011, p. 3):
Decision making
Who decides what the group translates? Each person in the group decides what he
or she wish [sic] to translate. While there is a certain degree of delegation of tasks
and people are encouraged to assume a role as facilitators of the group, there are no
leaders, hierarchy or centralized guidance at all.26
Rejection of hierarchy entails specific modes of functioning; ‘a movement with no
leaders organizes horizontally, through networks’ (Notes from Nowhere, 2003, p. 64).
Babels’ mode of operation reflects this. The group explicitly adopts a ‘networking logic’
rather than a ‘command-oriented logic’ (Juris, 2005), as outlined in its ‘About Us’ page:
How does Babels work?

Babels is a horizontal, non-hierarchical network, with no permanent structures of
any kind, in which we are all volunteers and we each work on the tasks to which
we freely commit. Some of us interpret in a booth. Others volunteer our time to
help organise the various projects which the network initiates or to which it
contributes. Some of us create glossaries to internationalise, expand and shape the
language of the causes which interest us. We all contribute to the political debate
and to the experimentation in linguistic activism and horizontal organisation. 27
Of all the groups discussed here, Babels is perhaps the most self-reflexive and the most
alert to its positioning within the constantly changing landscape of contemporary
movements of collective action. Its members have created several spaces on their
website, including the Babels Forum, Wiki, Chat and baBeLOG, where they continually
debate issues such as representation versus participation, event versus process,
deliberation versus struggle and horizontal versus vertical modes of operation. It is a
‘biodegradable network’ in the terms of Flesher Fominaya (2007) and a ‘textbook case’
of contemporary movements of collective action as described by Melucci (1996, p. 115):
Above all, [ .. . ] one notes the segmented, reticular, and multi-faceted structure of
‘movements’. This is a hidden or, more correctly, latent structure; individual cells
operate on their own entirely independently of the rest of the movement, although
they maintain links to it through the circulation of information and persons. These
links become explicit only during the transient periods of collective mobilization
over issues which bring the latent network to the surface and then allow it to
submerge again in the fabric of daily life.
All Babels activity is organised around precisely such loosely linked episodes, temporary
projects set up for very specific events. The Babels Protocols summarise the process as
follows:
Protocol summary:
1. New project is created. See Communication Protocol for details.
2. Babels-Tech creates a new project-oriented list and a new project-oriented
admin. The project should have deadlines (if applicable), so that we know when
it is no longer useful to recruit new volunteers. For example, if a forum ends on
March 31st, the project should end on March 31st, and the list should be taken
off the registration page on that date (this does not mean the list is deleted). The
project should also be clearly described.
3. The general-purpose admin sends a message to volunteers using the general-
purpose list (‘Info Babels’) to explain that a new project has been created, and
that volunteers should subscribe to the new project if they are interested.
4. The project is organized by the project-oriented admin with the project-oriented
list. This list is used to contact the volunteers who chose to subscribe to the new
list/project. The project-oriented admin can look at the files of the volunteers in
detail.
5. Once the project is over, the list is removed from the registration page, and the
project-related admin is deleted shortly after that. If the project takes a new
form, then a new project should be created, to allow for more/other people to
volunteer, and the protocol has to be applied again.28
This ‘cyclical’ form of mobilisation, as Melucci explains, may serve to strengthen rather
than diffuse networks of solidarity and, importantly, ‘protects the various cells from the
effect of centrifugal forces threatening the movement’s integrity’ (1996, p. 116). A
network that has no leader(s) to represent it and no permanent, stable structure is more
difficult to co-opt than one that is diffuse and relies on transient and fluid forms of
mobilisation. But this fluidity and open-endedness are unsettling and tend to be perceived
as suspicious by a professional community that has continually sought to increase rather
than undermine its own institutionalisation to promote and safeguard its interests.
Members of a loose, open-ended network who still refer to themselves as translators and
interpreters cannot be held accountable by their peers, and the impact of their behaviour
on the profession cannot be controlled by institutions like AIIC that invest in the idea that
they ‘represent’ the profession.
Another source of tension for these groups, this time in their relations with other
activist movements, is the fact that the kind of solidarity they offer consists of some form
of voluntary professional service. Specifically, the goals and functioning of these groups
share certain features with a particular type of collective action that Melucci calls
‘altruistic action’ (1996, pp. 166 – 170) and defines as ‘a form of collective, purposive,
and organized social altruism’ (p. 168). Like contemporary social and political
movements, he
40 M.
explains, altruistic action is ‘directed against the processes by which dominant cultural
codes are formed [ .. . ] By its sheer existence, such action challenges power, upsets its
logic, and constructs alternative meanings. [It] indicates that the encounter with the
“other” is not reducible to the instrumental logic’ (Melucci, 1996, p. 169). The type of
collective action undertaken by the activist groups discussed here shares a number of
features with forms of altruistic action in Melucci’s terms.
First, the action in which these groups engage is altruistic because it is voluntary: ‘A
voluntary actor joins a form of collective solidarity of her/his own free will, and belongs
to a network of relations by virtue of personal choice’ (Melucci, 1996, p. 167). In other
words, these groups do not function as unions, and there is no social requirement,
implicit or explicit, that leads individuals to volunteer their services as translators or
interpreters. Second, in terms of objectives, altruistic action is ‘specifically aimed at
producing benefits or advantages for subjects other than the volunteers, and it therefore
takes the form of a service provided or a good distributed to others’ (Melucci, 1996, p.
167). This is precisely what activist groups of translators and interpreters do. They
provide a service to others, a service that has benefits for others, not for themselves. And
yet, as Melucci explains, what most distinguishes altruistic from other types of action is
that ‘economic benefits do not constitute the basis of the relationship among those
involved, nor between them and the recipients in the performed action’ (1996, p. 167).
Although the action is gratuitous, it is not about making or saving money for either the
volunteer group or the community they volunteer for. This is a continued bone of
contention in Babels’ relationship with the Social Forum, as documented in detail in Boe
´ri (2009). Although the group provides volunteer interpreting which does save the
Forum the cost of employing paid professionals, Babels argues strongly that they do not
volunteer to save the Forum money but, as their ‘About Us’ page explains, to ‘give voice
to peoples of different languages and cultures [ . . . ] to fight for the right of all, including
those who don’t speak a colonial language, to contribute to the common work [ .. . and]
allow everyone to express themselves in the language of their choice’. In other words,
they see their work as direct political action, as creating a space for multiple voices,
rather than as saving the Social Forum the cost of interpreting. They have repeatedly
argued that they do not see Babels as a low-cost service provider but rather as an active
member and co-organiser of the Forum (Lampropoulou, 2010, p. 29), with a key role to
play in elaborating the vision of the WSF.
Both as ‘amateurs’ and as ‘volunteers’ engaged in altruistic action, then, the groups
under discussion occupy an ambivalent space between activism and the service economy.
They are obliged to attend to attempts on the part of professionals to narrate them as a
threat to the profession and the tendency of other activists to treat them as low-cost
service providers rather than equal players in the political field.
Prefiguration: Reversing the Symbolic Order

Melucci (1996) discusses the ways in which contemporary movements attempt to
‘reverse the symbolic order’ to undermine the very foundations of power in our
increasingly complex societies. In particular, he argues (1996, p. 357):
Contemporary movements strive to reappropriate the capacity to name through the

elaboration of codes and languages designed to define reality, in the twofold sense of
constituting it symbolically and of regaining it, thereby escaping from the
predominant forms of representation.
Activist groups like Babels and Tlaxcala engage in this process of renaming and
renarrating the world using a variety of resources, especially those provided by new
media and technologies. As Carty and Onyett (2006, p. 230) argue, ‘new forms of
technology are redefining political struggle by providing the resources and environment
necessary for cohesive organized resistance’. Some of these resources are symbolic, and
allow the groups discussed here to create spaces where translation and interpreting can
function as emancipatory, empowering tools of resistance. These are also spaces where
the group can practise prefigurative politics in a way that is not only instrumental in
articulating its vision, but also vital for maintaining and protecting the group itself as a
locus of collective action. As Melucci explains (1996, pp. 328 – 329):
Contemporary movements maintain a degree of separation from the dominant

cultural codes through the constitution and operation of organizational forms which
prefigure the goals they pursue, and through their activity of visibly signalling the
societal problems addressed by it. [ .. . ] The greater the emphasis on challenge and
the more prominent such prefiguration, the lesser the risk that organizational forms
will be assimilated or co-opted.
In other words, prefiguration is strategic in more than one sense (Maeckelbergh, 2011); it
not only brings about change by enacting the principles being advocated here and now,
but also protects a group like Babels from being co-opted.
New technologies allow groups like Babels and Tlaxcala to engage in prefigurative
politics in ways that are specific to translation: by means of layout, colour, links, drop-
down lists and a variety of other features that can be manipulated to reconfigure the
relationship between languages. Both Babels and Tlaxcala, and to a lesser extent
Translator Brigades, use such resources to deliberately undermine the power of English,
as part of their commitment to linguistic diversity. For example, the Babels
homepage features a highly colourful banner at the top, with equivalents to ‘Welcome’ in
a variety of languages: Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, Thai, Spanish, Italian and Turkish,
among many others. English, the lingua franca of the world, is conspicuous by its
absence (Figure 8).
A list of abbreviations denoting different interface languages appears a short distance
below the banner:
[Catala` j Deutsch j ellhnika´ j English j Espan˜ol j Franc¸ais j Hrvatski j Magyar j

Italiano j Latviesˇu j Nederlands j Polski j Portugueˆs j Romaˆna˘ j ]
Another list of languages appears in the form of a drop-down window accessible from
the baBeLOG section of the site (Figure 9). Most websites would list English first,
perhaps followed by French and Spanish, but in the various permutations of these
interface languages since the founding of Babels in 2002, English has never appeared in
prime position, in any section of the site.
Until 2009, Tlaxcala’s website reflected a similar though less radical strategy, aimed at
relative downgrading of the status of English but with prominence still given to other
dominant languages, namely Spanish and French (Figure 10). Its current site, however,
42 M.
Figure 8. Babels homepage (accessed 12 August 2011).
Figure 9. List of Babels site languages accessible through baBeLOG section (accessed 12 August
2011).
Figure 10. Interface languages on earlier version of Tlaxcala website (2009).
lists English first. It does nevertheless continue to give visibility to a range of other
languages, including Tamazight and Esperanto (Figure 11).

In addition to undermining the global power of English, either by pushing it down the
list of interface languages or contaminating the space with numerous other languages, the
layout of the Babels and Tlaxcala sites effects global linkages, celebrates contamination
and undermines established linguistic hierarchies in other interesting ways.
As can be seen in Figure 8, a brief statement about Babels appears just below the list
of interface languages on the homepage. This statement unpredictably comes up in
different languages at different times. When it occasionally appears in English, it reads:
‘Babels is an international network of volunteer interpreters and translators whose main
objective is to cover the interpreting needs of the Social Forums’. The shuffling of
languages on different days and visits to the site, and of the order in which languages are
listed, as well as the varying levels of visibility given to various languages in different
sections are part of Babels’ political message. They are part of a broader strategy
designed to reverse the symbolic order by narrating the linguistic—and hence cultural—
landscape as diverse, fluid, contaminated and non-hierarchical.
Babels also engages in creating polyvocal and inclusive spaces in other areas of its
own practice. The way its members interact among themselves—on Wiki, Chat and
baBeLOG—enacts the same principles of linguistic contamination and fluidity, as in the
baBeLOG entry shown in Figure 12.
Tlaxcala reverses the symbolic order by disrupting dominant patterns of translation
flow. The dominant pattern, as they argue, is that ‘Non-Anglophones are relegated to
mere
Figure 11. Interface languages on current Tlaxcala site (accessed 12 August 2011).
44 M.
Figure 12. baBeLOG entry, 2006.
passive spectators whose opinions do not contribute to the global discussion’ because
their contributions are generally not translated into English and other languages of wide
diffusion (Talens, 2010, p. 20). Hence, Tlaxcala gives no priority to English—or French,
or Spanish—as source languages, nor are languages like Arabic, Turkish and Persian
treated as predominantly target languages, i.e. passive receivers of political wisdom
emanating from Europe. The translations posted on the site are undertaken from and into
all 13 languages on offer, depending on the selections made by those who decide to
volunteer their time as translators.
This contrasts sharply with the practice of advocacy groups that court mainstream
political institutions. For example, the Middle East Media Research Institute maintains a
sharp divide between source languages such as Arabic, Persian and Turkish, and target
languages such as English, French, Spanish and Hebrew (Baker, 2010). In the context of
MEMRI’s declared narrative of itself as a player in the fight against terrorism, 29 this
division constructs a rigid narrative of the world as made up of two types of protagonist:
‘those who represent a threat to progressive, democratic societies, and who therefore
have to be monitored very closely (through translation), and those who bear the burden
of monitoring these sources of security threat in order to protect the innocent,
democratic, civilised Western world against terrorist activities’ (Baker, 2010, p. 355).
Tlaxcala’s practice, on the other hand, constructs a narrative of a world whose
protagonists are citizens of the world, with an equal right to speak in any language of
their choice, and be heard in any language in which a willing volunteer translator can be
found. The translations are not framed as a tool of monitoring suspect communities but
as a means of exchange and a challenge to the dominant world order.
Conclusion
What I have tried to demonstrate in this article is that a growing number of activist
groups of translators and interpreters have been joining the global movement of justice
since 1998, and are increasingly creating distinctive, autonomous spaces in which a
multitude of actors can come to experiment with the prospect of envisioning a new
world. In addition to
engaging in resistant and altruistic forms of action, and to providing volunteer
interpreting and translation, what Babels, Tlaxcala and other groups discussed here are
increasingly doing is configuring a space in which specific linguistic performances
participate, however subtly, in creating new cultural situations and new balances of
power. This space is not configured in their practice as static but as fluid, dynamic,
negotiable, always in the making. Apart from the deliberate downgrading of English as a
colonial language, the fluidity and contamination are meant to undermine and dissolve
the hierarchical ordering and separation of languages, and all that this hierarchical
ordering signals in terms of power and implicit evaluation of the different languages and
hence cultures involved.
Precisely because they put their professional and linguistic skills at the service of
political movements, and explicitly identify themselves as translators and interpreters, the
activities of these groups create tensions within professional circles that have long been
dominated by a discourse of neutrality and non-engagement as pre-requisites for
facilitating communication across cultures. At the same time, the altruistic nature of their
contribution frustrates their attempt to play a full political role in some activist venues.
As they expand in number and size and develop their own, novel ways of doing politics,
scholars of translation and social movement studies would do well to take heed of their
activities and endeavour to theorise their positioning and methods of prefiguration in
ways that can contribute productively to both disciplines.
Notes
1. The Granada Declaration, issued at the end of a forum on ‘Social Activism in Translation and Interpreting’
held in Granada in April 2007, rejects the common view of the translator ‘as a neutral vehicle between
ideas and cultures’. See http://www.translationactivism.com/Manifest.html (accessed 8 August 2011).
2. See also Atton (2003, p. 8), who confirms that the concentration of Indymedia IMCs similarly ‘remains
greatest in the USA [ .. . ] and Europe [ .. . ] Other regions are far less well represented’.
3. According to its ‘About’ page, Tahrir Documents ‘is an ongoing effort to archive and translate activist
papers from the 2011 Egyptian uprising and its aftermath. Materials are collected from demonstrations in
Cairo’s Tahrir Square and published in complete English translation alongside scans of the original
documents. The project is not affiliated with any political organization, Egyptian or otherwise’. See
http://www.tahrirdo cuments.org/about/ (accessed 9 March 2012).
4. See http://web.tiscali.it/traduttoriperlapace/ and http://www.babels.org/spip.php?rubrique2 (accessed 9
March 2012).
5. The protest movement that started in Spain on 15 May 2011. The statement signals the Spanish origin of
the group indirectly, but there is no attempt on the site to locate the initiative within a specific
geographical context.
6. http://web.tiscali.it/traduttoriperlapace/ (accessed 9 March 2012).
7. http://www.tup-bulletin.org/modules/main/index.php?content_id¼1 (accessed 9 March 2012).
8. I am grateful to Mari Oka for providing me with an English translation of the relevant sections of the site.
9. http://translatorbrigades.wordpress.com/about/ (accessed 9 March 2012).
10. http://www.tlaxcala-int.org/ (accessed 11 August 2011).
11. http://www.tlaxcala-int.org/manifeste.asp?lg_aff¼en (accessed 11 August 2011).
12. http://www.tlaxcala-int.org/manifeste.asp?lg_aff¼en (accessed 11 August 2011).
15. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zDEzDVs1DomZ3LA5-14CJgrqm-
sA6hGQNaWwHIWA2ek/edit?hl¼en_US&pli¼1 (accessed 9 March 2012).
16. http://www.tlaxcala-int.org/biographie.asp?ref_aut¼87&lg_pp¼en (accessed 9 March 2012).
17. Fansubbers are fan/amateur subtitlers of foreign films and television programmes.
18. So far, none of the groups discussed here has ventured into the area of subtitling, even though much of the
activist material circulating on the internet now comes in the form of video clips.
46 M.
19. http://cicode-gcubo.ugr.es/ecos (accessed 9 March 2012).
20. http://www.babels.org/spip.php?article1 (accessed 9 March 2012).
21. Babels’ organicity to the World Social Forum is itself the subject of continuing debate within the network
(Boe´ri, 2009).
22. Cf. Atton’s discussion of the role of ‘amateur journalists’ in the history of social movement media (2003,
p. 10).
23. AIIC stands for Association Internationale des Interpre`tes de Confe´rence. See http://www.aiic.net/ (accessed
11 August 2011).
24. For an extended critical discussion of some of the criticism levelled against Babels in particular, see Boe´ri
(2008).
25. http://cicode-gcubo.ugr.es/ecos/artecos/articuloingles (accessed 11 March 2012).
26. http://translatorbrigades.org/?q¼about (accessed 9 March 2012).
27. http://www.babels.org/spip.php?article272 (accessed 11 August 2011).
28. http://www.babels.org/spip.php?article30 (accessed 12 August 2011).
29. ‘MEMRI’s work directly supports fighting the U.S. War on Terror’; see
http://www.memri.org/assistingamer ica/ (accessed 12 August 2011).
References
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Review, 47(III), pp. 462 – 484.
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(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan).
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the barriers of silence and languages, trans. from Spanish by A. Martin, in: J. Boe´ri & C. Maier (Eds)
Translation/interpreting and social activism, pp. 7 – 18 (Granada: ECOS).
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in conference interpreting, The Translator, 14(1), pp. 21 – 50.
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narratives on activism and interpreting in the era of globalisation, PhD Thesis, CTIS, University of
Manchester, Manchester.
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movement post 9/11, Social Movement Studies, 5(3), pp. 229 – 249.
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pp. 197 – 199 (Chicago, IL/London: University of Chicago Press).
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Ephemera, 5(2), pp. 253 – 272.
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approach to interpreting, in: J. Boe´ri & C. Maier (Eds) Interpreting and Social Activism, pp. 28 – 37
(Granada: ECOS).
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movement, Social Movement Studies, 10(1), pp. 1 – 20.
Manuel Jerez, J., Lo´pez Corte´s, J. & Brander de la Iglesia, M. (n.d.) Social commitment in translation and
interpreting: A view from ECOS, translators and interpreters for solidarity. Available at http://cicode-
gcubo. ugr.es/ecos/artecos/articuloingles (accessed 11 March 2012).
Melucci, A. (1996) Challenging Codes: Collective Action in the Information Age (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press).
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Verso).
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Social Forum, Communicate! Available at http://aiic.net/ViewPage.cfm/page1800.htm (accessed 27 April
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Antverpiensia, 6, pp. 67 – 80.
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Mona Baker is professor of Translation Studies at the Centre for Translation and
Intercultural Studies, University of Manchester, UK. She is author of In Other Words: A
Coursebook on Translation (Routledge, 1992; 2nd ed. 2011) and Translation and
Conflict: A Narrative Account (Routledge, 2006), editor of the Routledge Encyclopedia
of Translation Studies (1998, 2001; 2nd ed., co-edited with Gabriela Saldanha, 2009);
Critical Concepts: Translation Studies (Routledge, 2009) and Critical Readings in
Translation Studies (Routledge, 2010). She is also founding editor of The Translator
(St. Jerome Publishing, 1995 till Present), editorial director of St. Jerome Publishing,
and founding vice-president of IATIS (International Association for Translation
and Intercultural Studies, www.iatis.org).

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17

Ethics of activist translation

2 Historical trajectory: activist translation and interpreting

3 Core issues and topics: ethics of positionality and organisation

3.1 Ethics of positionality: impartiality versus engagement

(Baker 2019, 455).

3.2 Ethics of organisation: expertise versus grassroots knowledge

the organisation, as opposed to representation whereby mandated organisers take decisions on

Mumbai, Mediterranean, Central and Eastern European languages in London, Barcelona

4 Current debates and issues: revisiting ethics

4.1 Ethics doxa: impartiality and expertise in volunteer services

principles of impartiality and expertise. However, a critical examination of what is meant by

a persistent tension between the volunteers’ conceptualization of their role – as primar-

Nevertheless, both conceptualisations may well be championed by translators and non-trans-

4.2 Ethics heterodoxa: intervention and prefiguration

be extended to translation and interpreting at large. “Prefigurative translation and interpreting,”

professional standards of impartial and expert services provision. Nevertheless, the

Related topics in this volume

Interpreter and Translator Trainer 5, no. 1: 1–14.

ian Assistance. https://sites.tufts.edu/jha/archives/138

Social Movement Studies: Journal of

Translation as an Alternative Space for

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14742837.2012.685624

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Translation as an Alternative Space

Translation, Narration and Collective Action

themselves constitute a space of resistance, a means of reversing the symbolic order

Translation and Interpreting as Forms of Collective Action

Type 1: Focus on Written Translations

Figure 1. Translators United for Peace website.

The translators of Tlaxcala believe in otherness, in the goodness of approaching

The English language in its position as an apparatus of institutional knowledge

Figure 2. Translator Brigades’ translations of Adbusters articles.

Figure 3. Translator Brigades site and language categories.

Figure 4. Extract from Tlaxcala’s ‘Library of Translators’ featuring WSF as an entry.

Figure 5. Tlaxcala’s ‘Who We Are’ section, 2009.

Living Earth: the indigenous name of Latin America

In the spirit of Mart´ı and native peoples, ABYA YALA is a collection of

Umma is glossed as:

People, groups and territories marked by Islamic civilization. A community of

Type 2: Interpreting for Collective Forums and the Community

Figure 6. Ecos– Babels section of the ECOS site.

Positioning and Dynamics of Activist Groups of Translators

In the association ECOS, Translators and Interpreters for Solidarity, we perform

How does Babels work?

Prefiguration: Reversing the Symbolic Order

Contemporary movements strive to reappropriate the capacity to name through the

Contemporary movements maintain a degree of separation from the dominant

[Catala` j Deutsch j ellhnika´ j English j Espan˜ol j Franc¸ais j Hrvatski j Magyar j

Figure 8. Babels homepage (accessed 12 August 2011).

Figure 10. Interface languages on earlier version of Tlaxcala website (2009).

languages, including Tamazight and Esperanto (Figure 11).

Figure 12. baBeLOG entry, 2006.

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