Amid rising authoritarianism, displacement, and ecological crises, Living in Languages 2024 examines translation’s entanglement with power, identity, and survival. This edition foregrounds translation’s fractures—where opacity, multiplicity, and disruption resist homogenization—showcasing essays and translations that challenge seamless mastery while exploring the transformative possibilities of language in shaping histories, connections, and futures.

The Life of Omar ibn Said (1831) is a narrative written by an enslaved person in Arabic and went through multiple English translations over the centuries. This article examines the ways in which these translations involve the nineteenth-century Christian agenda as well as the translators’ decisions in the twentieth-first century that multiply Omar ibn Said’s voice. In response to the recent scholarship’s effort to find Omar’s “true self” in his writings, which shows the meshing of Christian and Islamic faith, I aim to foreground his voice as a powerful presence at the intersections of the two languages and religions. My reading of Omar’s narrative is informed by other scholarly works on American slave narratives and emphasizes the displacement and multiplicity of his voice, while I argue that his narrative also deepens our reading experience of multi-faceted American literary traditions by introducing criticism of slavery through the Islamic teaching that complicates the description of the “merciful master.”

Russophone poet Galina Itskovich wrote the statement serving as the title of this text about the identity of her native Odesa, Ukraine in 2023, more than a year and a half after the full-scale invasion by Russia. I propose an examination of the relationship of contemporary Odesan writers to the Russian language. Sources for this examination include the work of writers in or from Odesa such as Galina Itskovich, Maria Galina, Oleg Fesenko, and Igor Bozhko. To discuss what this situation means for translation, such as is demanded by Ukraine’s 2019 law on the status of the Ukrainian language, I use the ideas of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o as a critical lens for establishing a decolonial approach to considering Russophone literary writing in Odesa after February 2022. Of specific use for this project will be Ngũgĩ’s ideas about how a colonial language such as English or Russian, while not necessarily being a language utilized by a given writer themselves, can be utilized as an interlanguage for translation between subjugated languages such as Gĩkũyũ or Ukrainian. The tension surrounding Russian can open a discourse on translation between Russian and Ukrainian in Ukraine. While the war continues, translation cannot determine what the relationship between these languages will be. But translation can help articulate questions about the relationship between colonialism and language.

Ilka Kressner presents translations of Victoria Guerrero Peirano’s poetry, focusing on spatial and linguistic shifts in works from Berlín. These translations examine Guerrero Peirano’s engagement with everyday spaces and experiences, reflecting on movement, perception, and shared encounters across languages and locations. Kressner’s process highlights the interplay of sound, syntax, and geography.

This research proposes a structural reading of El rincón de los muertos to decode and trace echoes to the khipu which are embedded throughout the novel. Contrary to a graphic writing system, the Incan empire’s khipu (khipu) was a mnemotechnic system—a three-dimensional communicative device, an archive of memory that recorded information using different colored strings, and a system of knots. Our concept of mnemonics is different than that of the indigenous communities who relied on oral tradition and specifically for khipu a khipukamayuq (reader of khipu), in a narrative and discursive manner, to reconstruct the message the khipu contained. This research explores why these trans-medial references are made and precisely what aspects of a khipu are ‘translatable’ via a written text. Pita’s novel, however, is a metaphoric ‘translation’ of this recording device, provided that an exact translation is impossible based on the textual limitations of a novel. The focus of my essay will be to demonstrate how certain elements of the khipu are translatable in the novel but in a metaphoric sense. El rincón de los muertos’ polyphonic narrative, explicit references to the khipu, and the novel’s structural components are a few of the several aspects that make a metaphoric comparison to a khipu plausible. Vicente, this literary work’s protagonist, figuratively attempts to piece together, or rather, untangle the frayed strands of the khipu — the lost, forgotten, and neglected narrative of the origins of violence in the Andes.

Any form of audio-visual media utilises specific stylistic elements in order to represent the reality within which the media form is situated. These representations occur through the language and iconography of the media form, which works on stereotypical features that the audience can easily identify. Forming a pivotal part of the media, these representations must be rendered in the translations for a linguistically and culturally diverse audience. Audio-Visual Translation (AVT) has been used since the 1930s to make media accessible. Of the various modalities, subtitling has emerged as the most widespread mode of AVT due to time and cost benefits. However, the subtitling process is restricted by various challenges that can restrict the translation process, especially in terms of transferring culturally specific terms from the source. The verbal or linguistic aspect is merely one dimension of the process, as this form of translation deals not only with relaying information but also with the semiotics and pragmatics of meaning-making. The socio-cultural context of the linguistic element within media forms requires the translators to opt for a set of translation strategies that will best express this context to the audience. Through the examination of the subtitles of the Bollywood film Rocky Aur Rani kii Prem Kahani (2023), the paper will examine the process of AVT and the subtitling decisions made to reveal the cultural nuances embedded within the film that must be translated through subtitling. This forms an analysis framework, which the paper explores in terms of the narrative constructed on the cultural and socio-linguistic identity markers pertinent to audio-visual media.

This article presents Jay Boss Rubin's translation of Fadhy Mtanga's Swahili short story "Two Friends." The story, set in a universal desert landscape, explores themes of friendship, forgiveness, and gratitude through the journey of two lifelong friends. Rubin highlights Mtanga's "mtori style," a metaphor for the layered meanings in his writing, encouraging readers to uncover deeper insights. The piece showcases Mtanga's linguistic innovation and the resonance of Swahili literature in translation, emphasizing the enduring significance of human connections.

Jin Li examines the Chinese translation of Henry James' Washington Square through the lens of thematic contrasts like gaining and losing. Exploring translation as literary criticism, Li highlights how narrative voice, key epithets, and cultural interpretations shape the novel’s critique of utilitarianism and Catherine Sloper’s subversion of materialistic values.

This paper examines Walter Benjamin's engagement with the motif of Heim (home) as it interweaves with his intellectual and personal experiences during the early 1920s. Through an analysis of Benjamin’s writings and correspondence, including his plans for the journal Angelus Novus and reflections on his friendship with Fritz Heinle, the study explores Heim as both a real and rhetorical space. Initially conceived as an idealized site of intellectual and spiritual communion, Heim is transformed by personal tragedy and historical crisis into an unattainable, speculative ideal—a rhetorical atopos. This evolution parallels Benjamin’s philosophical pursuit of “pure language” and his reimagining of translation as a generative act in the face of catastrophe. By situating Heim within Benjamin’s broader philosophical and political tensions, this paper argues that his work reflects a yearning for new forms of community while grappling with the irreducible fragmentation of language, memory, and belonging.