ABSTRACT
Scholars investigating the diffusion of norms and ideas have increasingly started to pay attention to the processes of translations. Intertwined with an overall critique of representation – popularized, for example, in Anthropology through the writing culture debate – translation is understood as an inherently political process. Colonial expansion and the ‘politics of translation’ have historically been deeply intertwined and translation has been a key concept of postcolonial scholarship. In the early 1980s, Bruno Latour, Michel Callon and John Law wrote a series of empirical essays in which they outlined elements of a sociology of translation. Thinking of translation as a process rather than a result opens up the space to take seriously the non-humans that are part of the formation of a scientific or political object. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
