Dislocating the Sign: Toward a Translocal Feminist Politics of Translation

The concept of translation in its broadest sense—based on not only an ontological but also a linguistic paradigm—has become central to cultural theory, especially for feminism. The translation turn, so to speak, shows that translation exceeds the linguistic transfer of meaning from one language to another and seeks to encompass the very act of enunciation—when we speak we are always already engaged in translation, for ourselves as well as for others. If to speak means to be already engaged in translation, and if translation is a process of opening the self to the other, then we can say it always involves a process of displacement of the self. Therefore, in translation there is a moral obligation to uproot ourselves, to be, even temporarily, homeless so that the other can dwell, albeit provisionally, in our home. To translate means to come and go, to be, as María Lugones writes, “‘world’-travelling,” to live in the interstice, to be perennially dis-placed.