What Does Translation Do? | Los Angeles Book Review

HOW ARE OUR LIVES SHAPED and our worlds shaped by the languages ​​we encounter every day? When we understand language as a historical and material force, we begin to identify the power through which language works, and how our political beliefs, social practices and personal identities affect this reality.

In his new book Learning Through Translation: A Critical and Integrated ApproachVirginie Bobin, “a French curator, writer, editor, and learned translator,” uses practical experiments to explore this power, re-examining a series of workshops, exhibitions, and other collaborative activities to place translation as “a way to remove the orders and groups of social status.” In these chapters, translation becomes a mere tool of communication; it is a way of being in the world with others, a tool for “collective care and resistance.”

At a time when translation jobs are increasingly AI driven, Bobin reminds us of all the humanity involved in the act of translation. He investigates why it is important to “stay with the problem” and dealing with language and communication problems together—being open to failure, trying again and again. In this way, Learning about Translation it becomes a revolutionary manual, set in theory but supported by practical practice. Bobin asks not only “what does translation do?” but also “what can we do with translation?”

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Our current political situation shows the ways in which the influence of language can be increased, it is used as a tool of propaganda, a vehicle for spreading ideas. The recent genocide in Gaza is one such example. In 2025, the Media Monitoring Center shared the report concluding that the BBC’s reporting on the war was “systematically biased against the Palestinians.” And continuing to use more emotional language when talking about Israel’s death, the BBC reportedly “reported on the people of Israel 33 times”—”despite the plight of Gaza 34 [times] more victims. ” With a simple choice of language, the BBC failed to find the truth of life in Gaza.

In this context, the use of language to shape public opinion about Israel takes on new importance, by three US public relations firms have recently entered into a contract by Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs to curry favor with unsettled Americans. By optimizing multiple platforms, this content can be fed into AI LLMs such as ChatGPT, allowing the use of biased language that favors Israel when responding to user queries. By acknowledging these important effects of language use, Bobin shows that translation is far more than a communication process; it has the power to shape the circulation of knowledge, to call out the policies of genocide and the lives they continue to destroy.

Bobin emphasizes the importance of undermining Western translations. Establishing the value of collective translation, he notes that such exercises are “open methods for important movements to purify oneself by contaminating situations and feelings.” He suggests that the spontaneous process of translation provides an opportunity to think about what words and experiences are included in the telling of the story.

To illustrate this point, Bobin recalls 2021 conflicts about the translation of Amanda Gorman’s poetry collection The Hill We Have, title poem which was performed at the presidential inauguration of Joe Biden. In response to widespread outrage that a Black translator was not hired for the job, Booker International Prize winner Lucas Rijneveld resigned from the Dutch translation. To quote Canan Marasligil’s conflict analysis, Bobin reveals the problem as “the state of representation, as well as availability, and therefore: power. Who will say which stories, and how, are important, as well as for whom they are translated, and in what context.”

This debate, which arose after the murder of George Floyd in 2020, brought the political aspect of translation to light, as many questioned the meaning of a white writer who received money for translating Gorman’s poems when racism contributed to the genocide of Black people in the country. It also raised the question among Bobin and his colleagues about whether situations like this can facilitate translation as a form of solidarity, “contributing to the dissemination of voices and bodies affected by, and combating, racism.”

Bobin points to translation as a way of seeing racist violence. He shows how the language used by the authorities to deny this violence, remembering the police killing of George Floyd, as well as the murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and Michael Brown, and emphasizing “the need to name, literally, the circumstances of the murders of these people” when writing in French. In this way, translation works to address the power imbalance attached to the language we choose. Therefore, translation can be a form of political intervention.

By understanding how language is translated for the benefit of the masses, we can begin to embrace the stories that are told and silenced. Bobin brings up the COVID-19 epidemic as an example, referring to France’s crisis management and the lack of language resources – despite their legal right to translate – for displaced people forced to live in temporary camps. In this case, the translation—or lack thereof—directly prevented access to life-saving “information about safety measures, health care and regulations related to COVID.”

Such translation problems are not new. Like New York Times report in 2019, dire consequences await immigrants to the United States who speak Mayan languages ​​and cannot find interpreters at the border. Two particularly serious cases involved Jakelin Caal Maquín and Felipe Gómez Alonzo, children who died on the way to detention. Their fathers were blamed for their deaths after they signed waivers that said their children did not need medical attention. These releases were written in English and translated into Spanish, “two languages ​​that the fathers did not speak well or at all.”

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In the chapter “Learning with Others,” Bobin shows the ways in which defined statuses—based on characteristics such as gender, sexual orientation, race, and status—are perpetuated through the language we use. He offers translation as a place to clarify these hegemonic influences if we ultimately hope to change the extent of their influence and prevent them from being used to strengthen social conditions.

Discussing his involvement with the Mercedes Azpilicueta project A Dictionary of Languages [Bestiary of Tonguelets] (2017–21), Bobin explores the benefits and challenges of using “écriture inclusive,” a practice that seeks to combat the rules of French grammar that give the masculine form of nouns before the feminine. One response he envisions involves introducing female versions of various job titles — a trend that has rejected by institutions such as the Académie Française. Recounting the exhilarating task of speaking aloud these translations of the language play, Bobin argues that translation is never a neutral endeavor, and emphasizes how the use of a generic text can allow us to “free ourselves and use grammar as a political technique.”

These examples of imaginative linguistic experiments prompt the reader to ask how we can expand the lexicon to accommodate feminist, feminist, and other non-conforming views of gender instead of forcing people into linguistic categories that reinforce hierarchies and social norms. Through this intervention, Bobin makes a case for translation as a political tool and a method of analyzing political oppression, seeing it as “a method of knowledge production, as a social process, and as a form of gender and race work.” He argues that grappling with language and meaning is a way of showing concern for the experiences of others.

Expanding language practices across barriers, identities, biases, and experiences, collaborative projects such as A Dictionary of Languages it serves as a way of “learning together and repeating other ways of being, and doing things, in the world.” Other examples include Bobin’s own participation in Sara Ahmed’s collaborative version “Feminists at Work: Complaints, Differences, Organizations” and workshops he writes in which participants with no translation experience play with idioms related to body parts, thus helping “to facilitate general conversation and language.”

Translation is an embodied act in which the translator keeps one foot in the target language and one in the target language, treading the fine line between the two, and Bobin points out the benefits of not walking that line alone. Instead, he encourages us to be political actors, armed with language, who can work with others in the service of certain goals and outcomes.

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In the final chapter, Bobin shares his letters with his friend, editor Andrea Ancira. In an email, Ancira admits that she struggled with the professional decision after she found out that one of the writers whose work she was translating was accused of transphobia.

Whether one agrees with Ancira’s decision to publish the author’s writings, it does not matter. What I found myself disappointed was Bobin’s refusal to consider, in the context of translation as a political act, the possible consequences of such a decision. Although earlier chapters explore the process of who and what we translate, Bobin does not hesitate to ask whether publishing a translated text can be an act of solidarity with the trans community. She fails to ask why inclusive feminists would have pursued the more inclusive language that the author in question criticized—a notable oversight in a book that devotes many pages to the merits of inclusive translation.

By continuing the translation, Ancira argues, she would have encouraged discussions about transphobia in feminist movements; he says that stifling such discussions would not have helped. This may be true, but neither she nor Bobin is questioning whether a self-described “transfeminist media platform” should take responsibility for the spread of language that can ultimately harm people. In a book that is otherwise candid about its author’s belief that the language we put out into the world is important, these omissions are disappointing. If we want to live with the problems, we need to be transparent about who I am. affected by the decisions we make as a group.

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