Introduction: Translation Matters

What is more, we devised the issue by choosing texts whose varied natures translate different modes and forms of access to knowledge: the interview form, formal analysis, artists’ texts, case studies, the analytical-philosophical approach – all these articles are alternate and multifarious ways of showing why translation matters. For us, therefore, translation works less as a common measure to map a use of this term in a certain theoretical frame onto another one than as a relational concept to probe cultural dynamics that unfold in time, across space and through different mediums (cinema, photography, book) and disciplines (art history, philosophy, visual arts, literary studies, film studies, etc.). [...]this issue presents a mapping of differences (see Cassin) that translatability and untranslatability enables, between diverse subject matters and the material mediations that articulate them.