ABSTRACT
This chapter starts with Michael Cronin’s Eco-Translation: Translation and Ecology in the Age of the Anthropocene (2017) to discuss a redefinition of translators that moves the discipline into the posthuman, asking who, or what, is it that translates. Decentering anthropomorphic privileges in the face of environmental crisis and interrogating the interlingual and textual biases that have dominated Translation Studies, ecological approaches challenge human exceptionalism. Ecotranslation goes beyond the conception of translation as a task to construe it as a life form. Thus, in place of objects of translation, ecotranslation is posited as a constitutive force in the Anthropocene. Ecology as a theme and metaphor, especially in the tradition of Chinese translation scholars, is distinguished from ecological approaches that are not another turn in Translation Studies, but an overturning. Ecological approaches instead align with biosemiotics (Marais, Kull) and feminist methodologies, including French philosopher Catherine Malabou’s schema of plasticity and the translational implications of the plastic articulated by Malabou’s English translator, Carolyn Shread. In the face of the failure of voluntaristic responses to the climate crisis, Malabou’s evocation of a new libidinal economy produced by ecological addiction and affective indifference would bring translation into relation with the truly foreign.
