Translating with your body: Translation as a tangible and corporeal experience

Abstract

Translating is never an activity that is oblivious to what is going on around it. Hence, as is well known, translation theories have changed so much from the middle of the last century to the present day. It goes without saying that the social, economic, political and ethical challenges of the 21st century are unparalleled. In the face of this, translation could not remain on the sidelines. And it has not. There are already many theories that insist on overcoming the “linguistic bias in Translation Studies” (Marais, 2019). What this means is that translation between languages does not seem at all sufficient today, when information is transmitted through many semiotic systems. Meaning is created through varied channels, among them the materiality of objects. That is why in the first part of this lecture I will focus on the so-called “tangible translation” (Ciribuco & O'Connor, 2022), which I will exemplify through tangible translations that have been made in the art world, not with words but with other semiotic systems. These tangible translations will lead us in the second part of the article to understand translation as an experience with our whole body (Campbell & Vidal, 2024, 2025), not only with the intellect. Following the so-called “anthropology of the senses” (Howes, 2005), my proposal is that in the 21st century we translate in a tangible way with the body, because we transmit information with the senses, with emotions, with gestures, with touch, with taste, with smell. Translation is thus extended to become a somatic and parasomatic process (Robinson, 1991, 2023). The third section of the article proposes to apply this tangible translation that is created with the body to the work of an indigenous artist, Cecilia Vicuña, who translates with all the senses, without words, by means of quipus.

Keywords
translation; body; senses; materiality of translation; tangible translation; Cecilia Vicuña