ABSTRACT
They all agreed. This is when Kay started to act strangely. ‘She had been amazingly altered, they felt, by a course in Animal Behaviour she had taken with old Miss Washburn (who had left her brain in her will to Science) during their junior year’ (McCarthy 2009: 2-3). After she took the course, nothing was ever the same again. Kay no longer dressed the same way. She no longer used the same language. And her opinions were decidedly different. For the group of young American graduates from Vassar College, New York in Mary McCarthy’s novel The Group (1963) talking about as opposed to the animals is a risky business. Translation studies would appear to be haunted by a similar nervousness as animals other than the human have been remarkably silent in its brief history. They are not even spoken about, much less spoken to. This silence is all the more unsettling in that the earth has entered the sixth mass extinction of plants and species in the last 500 million years:
Although extinction is a natural phenomenon, it occurs at a natural ‘background’ rate of about one to five species per year. Scientists estimate we’re now losing species at 1,000 to 10,000 times the background rate, with literally dozens going extinct every day.
