If talking to people who speak another language is often difficult, then trying to make decisions with them should be even harder. In most theories of democratic deliberation, linguistic difference is treated as an obstacle to democracy. This paper treats translation instead as a precondition for deliberation in local minipublics and transnational polities. My paper is part of a seven-year ethnographic study of multilingual democracy experiments in transnational social movements and local citizen councils and community organizing. Treating their linguistic diversity as a basis for radical democracy based on translation, global justice activists in the South African Social Forum, the American Social Forum and the European Social Forum were able to make decisions more equally and include socially disadvantaged groups. My paper presents evidence on the impact of translation in the European Social Forum (ESF). Activists who created the ESF took decisions debating the EU constitution, and on specific EU policies in European meetings. Comparing activists’ practices of translation in these multilingual European meetings with monolingual meetings at the national level in Germany, Italy and the UK, I came to a counter-intuitive result: it was the European meetings that had a higher degree of inclusive, transparent and egalitarian decision-making and not, as would have been expected, national meetings. I show it was a very distinct engaged practice of translation that underpins this finding. I conclude by discussing initiatives for translation connecting local social movements and citizen forums in the US, in Europe and in South Africa to transnational publics.
