2. Gavagai? The International Politics of Translation

This chapter unpacks the politics of translation in four steps. In a first step, it reviews how translation is made unproblematic in contexts as diverse as the literature on international norms, actor-network theory, and in a generalised attitude toward social research commonly dubbed ‘positivism’. Second, it turns to W. V. O. Quine’s influential take on the indeterminacy of translation to highlight how it effectively disrupts routinised attempts to render translation unproblematic. A third step discusses these attempts in the broader horizon of a quest for certainty, a longing for knowledge to stand on a firm ground, which contrasts sharply with the reflexive interplay of social relations of translation. In a concluding step, the chapter discusses the politics of both translation and untranslatability in terms of its inextricably international dimension.