Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book outlines the contours of a sociology that is centrally defined by an investigation of the key role of translation in society. Translation can deepen our insights on key sociological issues and debates around identity and transformation, politics and democracy, or the nature of modern experience, renewing our approaches to the global character of contemporary society and of sociology. Translation crucially mediates between what Walter Benjamin would call the language of things and human language, or what Bruno Latour approaches as a material world that we have rendered, in language and by means of language, mute and inert. Translation is also key for the international circulation of policy and human rights norms and increasingly approached as a basic medium for the creation of alternative democratic practices in local as well as transnational contexts.