Introduction

most intransigent core of language ideology -which holds that languages are unified, countable, stable, orderly, well-bordered systems, and that human speakers use language(s) for discrete and instrumental communicative aims to represent their ideas. This is a conceit that the Danish linguist Sune Vork Steffensen refers to as the "3I model" of language: the substantialist-behaviorist notion that language is fundamentally instrumental, internal, and individual to persons (2015: 106). In contrast, Steffensen envisions a post-3I linguistics that views languages (and their translation) as only ever embodied, extended, ecological, and enacted, a paradigm that he calls a "4E-linguistics" (105). Indeed, the ethnographic and philological studies in this special issue underscore and elaborate on Steffensen's revision of the legacy of structuralist linguistics, a legacy from which contemporary orthodoxies about translation tend to derive.