Knowing one's place: Travel, difference and translation

In a multilingual world, language difference and translation are inevitable features of travel. How travellers deal with the fact of languages other than their own, or radically distinct varieties of their own language, has clear implications for their capacity to engage with or interpret the realities they encounter. The article explores contemporary English-language travel accounts where language concerns are the central topic rather than an unacknowledged by-product of the travel experience. The language concerns are principally articulated around the plight of minority and endangered languages in Europe and elsewhere. Using the notions of place, space, the trope of decline and the necessity of the political, the article investigates how questions of translation make mobility in a plurilingual globe a highly problematic practice. Particular attention is paid to how minority languages become reified in the absence of the possibility of translation.