Political Translation: How Deliberative Democracies Survive

At a time of increasing popular doubts about political legitimacy, concern for deliberative democracy is sweeping the social sciences. Yet actual deliberation lies far from the deliberative ideal. Cultural and linguistic differences often foster inequality and impede democratic deliberation. In this empirical study, however, I present the collective practices of political translation, which help multilingual and culturally diverse groups work together more democratically than homogeneous groups. Political translation, distinct from linguistic translation, is a set of disruptive and communicative practices developed by activists and grassroots community organizers in order to address inequities hindering democratic deliberation and to encourage powerful groups to work together more inclusively with disempowered groups. Based on ten years of fieldwork, Political Translation provides a systematic comparative study of deliberation under conditions of linguistic difference and cultural misunderstanding; it includes data on the largest face-to-face democracy experiment, the World Social Forum, and two of its regional chapters, the European Social Forum, and the US Social Forum.