Translation and the Political: Antagonism and hegemony

Interest in the political dimensions of translation is well established. There has been less focus in translation studies, however, on understanding the nature of the political itself. This leaves the concept fuzzy and limits its analytical power. This article begins to address this gap by drawing on the work of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe to offer a precisely articulated understanding of the political. This approach is illustrated through examination of divergent concepts of “translation” in translation studies and in the field of knowledge translation in medicine, suggesting that antagonism and hegemony, key aspects of the political in Laclau and Mouffe’s approach, play central roles in both cases. This approach allows the political to be more clearly differentiated from the social, cultural and aesthetic while also bringing the relationships between it and those other dimensions more clearly into view.