Commoning Translation: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons

Abstract

This article introduces the concept of “commoning translation” as developed by the translation col­lective Coletivo Sycorax: Solo Comum (common ground), anchored to two pillars: (a) a decolonial feminist reinterpreta­tion of Jennifer Hayashida’s “commoning translation”, and (b) the collective praxis of an­ti-capitalist feminist translation in Silvia Federici’s Reenchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons. Commoning translation is a notion describing collective translation as both a potentially transformative and political practice all over from text selection, through the translators’ intellectual formation, building relationships among participants, up to the launch of the final work. This approach aligns theory and practice with individual and collective experiences of feminist political struggle to redefine translation agency as going beyond the textual level. Thus, commoning translation broadens translation agency expanding translators’ spheres of action guided by an ethos of global justice through collective translation practices. Our praxis incorporates principles of the politics of the commons as examined by Federici and implemented in the collective translation process of the translation collective herein, such as self-management, task rotation, horizontal decision-making, and labor directed toward producing common goods. As a mode of production that necessarily considers how, where, by whom, and for whom knowledge is produced, commoning translation is also structured through reflections on decolonial feminist translation practices, the coloniality of knowledge, and situated knowledges.