Preface

The last three decades has seen rapid growth in the number of states and universities that offer degrees in International Relations, with a corresponding growth in scholarly output and channels through which it may be published. This development has dovetailed with, and probably even stimulated, a widening of theories used and phenomena addressed. It is often argued that the result is a decentred discipline. While this may be true, it is also true that the resulting widening and deepening of our common investigation of phenomena that are relevant to international and global life means that future successful synthesising exercises will rest on firmer foundations than previous ones. It follows that we should continue to widen and deepen our scope of inquiry, and we should do it in such a way that we speak to the discipline at large.

By bringing previously neglected tasks of translation into the remit of IR, this book succeeds in doing exactly that. While it is true that poststructuralists have done work premised on the idea that we may understand global and international as language, and also on both textual and non-textual semiotic systems, the editors are right in arguing that the acts of translation themselves, as well as the social apparati that have been there to facilitate and execute it, have largely escaped our attention. I write largely, for there is some work on issues such as intentionally non-corresponding versions of treaties, but as we may see from the sources drawn upon in this volume, IR has come late to this particular ball. However, given that translation and translators are certainly part of those relations that we claim as our object of study, the important thing is that we are now finally joining the dance.

Translation spans from trafficking in simultaneous interpretation and period interpretation (spoken language), via translation in the narrow sense (written langue) and translation of specific semiotic systems (interaction understood as intertextual), to attempts at making entire cultures legible to one another. Usage changes continuously, some languages have their span of usage reduced (e.g. Latin), others go through a revival (e.g. Hebrew), while yet others experience changes in annotation (e.g. Kazakh). An utterance is a piece of language that does a job in a context, so such processes involve translation.

This book is an agenda-setting one. It is therefore appropriate that phenomena of all these kinds receive attention. It is probably also appropriate that philosophical issues, such as the extent to which the categories of a language are determining for the world view of its bearers (the Sapir-Wharf hypothesis), what it means that language gains its meaning in its use (Wittgenstein) or whether language is best understood as referential or relational (de Saussure) take a back seat to concrete issues, such as the specific problems and effects of rendering a concept like sovereignty in a new language, or how different practices regarding the status of translators colour political outcomes. These are perennial issues. While it is a proven fact that some kind of communication will eventually materialise amongst the different detachments of our species, it is also impossible to imagine a world where problems of translation do not exist. I hope and believe that the scholarship on display here will inspire more IR scholars to do further empirical research on such matters, and that these studies will in turn inspire new syntheses regarding the role of language in relations between polities, as well as the structural roles that language plays for international relations.