oa Chapter 15. Exploring interspecies translation and interpreting through multispecies ethnography

Against the background of the recent enlarging of translation studies to include the more-than-professional (Tymoczko 2007), more-than-verbal (Petrilli 2016) and more-than-human (Cronin 2017; Marais 2019), this chapter explores the opportunities that accompany multispecies translational research by focusing on multispecies ethnography as a research design. It will provide examples from a recent multispecies translation and interpreting project that involved the application of such a design in an animal welfare context.

By taking an ecosemiotic approach to conceptualising the process of translation and interpreting, this chapter assumes that all forms of semiosis are, in essence, translational processes (Petrilli 2016) that are “shaped by available conditions, encumbered by their history, yet at the same time … partly autonomous and independent” (Maran 2020: 1).

• Affiliations: 1: University of the Free State