Introduction: Thinking cities through translation

Abstract

The city is where translation takes place across a wide variety of idioms, regional variants and languages which are not necessarily ‘foreign’ one to the other, but share common references and in some cases a common sense of entitlement to the city. Meanwhile, it puts pressure on translation as a clearly bounded concept, making it a wide category of language exchange that includes translanguaging, multilingual artistic projects, political activism mediating across global movements, projects of renaming that symbolically territorialize public space, and the shifts in individual identity that are forms of self-translation. This chapter therefore will examine recent research into the city by focusing on six critical concepts: nationalist makeovers; dual cities; migration, presencing and translanguaging; mediation and mediators; modernist aesthetic practices; and translation sites.