Introduction: The city as translation zone

Cities have the potential to make us more complex human beings. A city is a place where people can learn to live with strangers, to enter into the experiences and interests of unfamiliar lives. Sameness stultifies the mind; diversity stimulates and expands it.

(Sennett 2001)

In arguing that the lived experience of difference is at the core of urban viability, Richard Sennett (2001) offers a stirring defence of the city as a space of productive diversity. His has been one of the most important voices in the rich discussions on urban life that have flourished since the 1980s. While cities worldwide grapple with the pressures of globalization and massive income disparities, with non-existent or crumbling infrastructure and with violence and ghettoization, issues of cultural citizenship and community remain central to any discussion of successful city life.

Questions of public space – and in particular their visual aspects – have been central to debates over public engagement and belonging, but the city's audible spaces have not received the same attention. What is surprising is that language, itself an essential instrument and domain of the public, the medium through which public discussion takes place, is simply taken for granted. Despite the sensory evidence of multilingualism in today's cities, there has been little sustained discussion of language as a vehicle of urban cultural memory and identity, or as a key in the creation of meaningful spaces of contact and civic participation.

This special issue aims to nourish debate on urban language by introducing the idea of the translational city. What is the difference between the translational and the multilingual city? Multilingualism calls to mind a space of plurality and diversity, with no particular idea of hierarchy or organization. Translation proposes an active, directional and interactional model of language relations. Translation becomes a key to understanding the cultural life of cities when it is used to map out movements across language, to reveal the passages created among communities at specific times. All cities are translational, but there are historical moments when language movements are key to political or cultural reversals.

The material dimension of these passages is important. It is useful to consider the idea of translation zones – areas of intense interaction across languages, spaces defined by an acute consciousness of cultural negotiations and often host to the kinds of polymorphous translation practices characteristic of multilingual milieus. All cities have such zones, as well as areas of resistance to – or forced – translation. What emerges, then, is an image of divided and contested urban space, where language relations are regulated by the opposing forces of coercion and resistance, of wilful indifference and engaged interconnection.

This special issue proposes studies of five cities: Antwerp, Lviv, Istanbul, Tampere and New Orleans. These cities are geographically dispersed, of different size and stature, and marked by very different imperial histories. What they have in common, however, is a history heavily influenced by language frictions – a history that has contributed to the particular sensibility of the city. In some of these cities, translation histories are front and centre, in others they come to light only through determined micro-cosmopolitan excavation. But as the contributions to this issue make clear, translation can be a revealing lens for investigating social and cultural history in a broad range of urban contexts.

What perceptions, then, are possible when “city” and “translation” are brought into conversation? Let us outline here four elements through which translation can be considered a key to understanding urban life. These are: the sensory landscape of the city, translation zones, cultural mediators and digital connectivity.

The sensory landscape

Just as seeing the buildings and streets of an urban aggregation is crucial to understanding its history, its organization into neighbourhoods, its systems of circulation, so hearing introduces the observer into layers of social, economic and cultural complexity. The waves of languages that flow into one another provide the listener with a rich sensory surface. They merge with particular intensity in border areas, like the noisy streets of polyglot neighbourhoods.

Language is part of the audible surface of the city, the sensory landscape: “A city's sounds, odours and movement constitute its identity as much as the stones of its architecture. […] Great cities have their own music that ‘expresses the movement and mutations of the life […] that inhabits them, every moment of the day’ ” (Corbin 1990, 14). Alain Corbin is best known for his evocation of the power of church bells in nineteenth-century life, but in his discussion of the sensory overlays of cities he also speaks of the cries of peddlers and vendors, for instance, sounds that were important to daily life in the nineteenth century and which he says can be compared to costumes because the cries conveyed information about not only wares that were being sold, but also the geographical origins of the peddlers themselves.

Unlike the enduring legacy of stone and brick, the sounds of the city are ephemeral. While events are memorialized, languages are not. Shifting soundscapes alter perceptions of the city, change the everyday lived experience and also our understanding of the past. How are languages remembered as part of the city's past? What are the effects of reading the history of a city through the lens of one language rather than another? Which sites of memory in multilingual cities are particularly revealing of the struggles of history?

The music of languages that one can hear in parks or markets and in workplaces and schools can change dramatically. The city of Thessaloniki today is a Greek-speaking city but 100 years ago the languages that filled its streets were Turkish and Judeo-Spanish. Vilnius today is mainly a Lithuanian-speaking city, though few Lithuanians lived in the city before 1945. Russian and Polish are still heard, but Yiddish, which was one of the city's most important languages, has been wiped out entirely. The city that is now called Bratislava had three names that were used throughout the period 1867–1914: Pressburg (German), Pozsony (Hungarian) and Presporok (Slovak). To refer to the city by each of these names (including today's “Bratislava”, which was a name given to the city only in 1918) is to project a different historical view of the city. Translation has the force of coercion when it participates in the violence of sponging out, of renaming. City streets are renamed as old heroes are disqualified, as new icons are glorified. Sometimes entire cities are covered over in a new language, as though the decor were being changed. This pattern of shuffled borders and city renamings was repeated countless times across the globe as imperial regimes replace one another, or as empires are replaced by nations. The fall of the Habsburg empire, the defeat of Nazism and then the rise of Soviet power in central Europe led to the disappearance of German. (This is in contrast with the fall of other empires – the French, the British – where the imperial language was not evinced.) The fall of the Ottoman empire and the rise of the Turkish nation under Kemal Attaturk meant that the multilingualism of Istanbul was replaced by the authority of Turkish unilingualism. In some cases, this sponging out is definitive and irrevocable (Yiddish, German). In other cases, the violent suppression of language is followed by new moments of translation, where ghost tongues come to reclaim their rights.

Antwerp, New Orleans, Tampere, Lviv, Istanbul – all experienced language makeovers, though not all in a necessarily cataclysmic manner. Nevertheless, they too have been “rewritten” – Antwerp from a mainly francophone city into a Flemish one; New Orleans from a Spanish and French-speaking colony into an English-speaking American city; Tampere from Swedish into Finnish; Istanbul from a multilingual Ottoman city to a largely Turkish one; Lviv through a sequence of transformations into today's largely Ukrainian-speaking city.

Translation spaces

Putting translation to work in thinking about the ongoing language transactions in cities is to evoke the idea of translation zones. The term was developed through analogy with Mary Louise Pratt's (1992) influential “contact zone”, which has been in wide use since its introduction in Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. Pratt defined “contact zones” as “social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination-like colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out across the globe today” (ibid., 4). Translation is logically one of the major activities in the contact zone, and Pratt (2002) developed this connection in “The Traffic in Meaning: Translation, Contagion, Infiltration”. Emily Apter's (2006) The Translation Zone is a wide-ranging attempt to reshape both translation studies and comparative literature by including the politics and technologies of translation. She uses zone to imagine a “broad intellectual topography, a zone of critical engagement” that is not restricted by the boundary of the nation (ibid., 5). The term is used here in echo to these previous engagements with embattled social and disciplinary relations, but more specifically to refer to the cultural and geographical spaces that give rise to intense language traffic.

These spaces are a product of the city's history. Colonialism, for example, left a distinct spatial imprint on urban topography, in the divisions between “European” and “native” sections of town. Such divisions give rise to interzones, “grey” areas, which become home to mixed and polyglot communities, the focus of mediation across divides. The histories of both Kolkata (Calcutta) in India and Montreal in Canada illustrate the power of these intermediary zones.

The historical cosmopolitan site of Beyoğlu/Pera in Istanbul is an illuminating example of a translation zone. Historically an interzone within the constellation of identities in Constantinople and the Sublime Porte, the home of the people who began to be called Levantines, the area has a long and rich history of mediation. This history was reactivated in the 1990s as a renewed place of interaction and exchange. According to Saliha Paker and Sule Demirkol-Ertürk in this issue, this is not

the cosmopolitan, multicultural Beyoğlu of the late Ottoman times but a new space of resistance, challenge, as well as mediation, intended for the voices of “minorities” to be heard and, hopefully, understood. [… It] stands today as not just a multilingual interaction zone, but a cultural network that is inherently hybrid, which is closer to what we mean by “interculture” (an overlap of diverse domestic cultures and languages, which may not be easily described as “source” and “target” in translations produced from one into the other by a network of cultural agents).

Zones of linguistic dispossession or insecurity have a special role to play in the emergence of a modernist sensibility. A strong tradition of thought sees in the uncertainty of language a rich source of inspiration for literature. Exile and diaspora are variants on the ideas of marginality and dissonance implied in the modernist paradigm. For itinerants, migrants, how are the histories of these precarious subjects written into the history of the city? What language choices are made by the less powerful and how are their words translated into public space in the city?

When translations take place among communities that share the same territory, the same geographical and cultural references, the social effects of translation are enhanced. Relentless contact between languages reaffirms language as a marker of identity, and language calls attention to itself. This persistent reaffirmation of language as a performative marker of identity increases the fraught nature of translation – and defines the kinds of border logics that operate across small distances. When languages are privileged markers of conflictual identity, then the social effect of translation is restricted to forms of distancing – that is, when translations serve to underscore the differences that prevail among cultures and languages, even when the gap may be the small distances of urban space. Distancing occurs when authors are treated as representatives of their origins, of their national or religious traditions, when translation is undertaken for ideological reasons, either in a mood of antagonism, of generosity or simply of politeness. It has the same affective force as tolerance; it is a regime of managing difference – not of changing the terms of engagement. This does not mean that the translations are ineffective or futile. It simply means that the context in which they are produced is an overwhelming influence on the way they are received. The opposite is furthering, the “revivifying and expansive effect” of translation, one language infusing another “with influences, alterations and combinations that would not have been possible without the presence of translated foreign literary styles and perceptions, the material significance and heft of literature that lies outside the territory of the purely monolingual” (Grossman 2010, 16). Furthering is a warmer form of interaction, more volatile, allowing for the possibility of creating hybrid forms, more similar to a “leap” than to a “bridge”.

Cultural mediators

Mediators are essential figures on the urban landscape, as Michel de Certeau reminds us. As intermediaries, shifters, connecting agents, translators and dispatchers they are the “anonymous heroes” of communication, making “social space more habitable” (Certeau and Giard 1983, 11). Because the actual production of translated texts usually takes place in the removes of private space, we do not often visualize the work of translation or the travels that sustain it. That is why it is necessary to draw portraits of significant individuals who have played this role, to see them gathering information and making connections, moving across language zones, putting languages and texts into circulation. Translators often incorporate language transfer into a broad cultural project, resisting existing norms and challenging power relations. As Reine Meylaerts and Maud Gonne explain in this issue, a privileged way to gain understanding of transfer activities in multilingual contexts is to focus on the people who incorporate them. Mediators are involved in activities of exchange that involve a range of activities which exceeds mere translation – they are multilingual authors, self-translators, often active in a variety of intercultural and inter-artistic networks, often migrants, with hybrid identities, who develop transfer activities in several geo-cultural spaces. In sum, much more than the prominent figures canonized by literary studies and traditional national history, mediators are the true architects of common repertoires and frames of reference, e.g. a model of an urban, national or international culture.

In their article, Meylaerts and Gonne propose a study of two important cultural mediators, whose work both reflects and influences the changing linguistic landscape of Antwerp – as Dutch becomes an increasingly important language and acquires legitimacy against French. They show how Antwerp is dominated by language struggles and by the shifting power relations between the languages and cultures in place. Indeed, translation and transfer activities between French and Dutch continued to shape the daily life of the city and its inhabitants during the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth. Georges Eekhoud (1854–1927) and Roger Avermaete (1893–1988) are two key figures whose multiple transfer activities are inextricably bound up with Antwerp's history as a dual city between 1850 and 1930.

Saliha Paker and Sule Demirkol-Ertürk similarly focus on the translators and publishers of the Kurdish and Armenian languages in Istanbul, showing how they have transformed “the interzone” of Beyoğlu/Pera from an area of non-translation and exclusion to an area of new mediations that are enlarging the established culture repertoire.

The digital city

In the contemporary moment, cities are irreducibly dual. One dimension of the city is located in the physical, material reality of the built environment. The other dimension is the virtual skin of digital connectivity which is wrapped around urban spaces. Urban life is increasingly as much about (digital) connectivity as (physical) contact. Rosi Braidotti, in her reflections on the mutations of human identity in a global age, points to the centrality of technology to a new, emerging knowledge order in the city:

The global city space requires and depends upon intelligent spaces of high-technological interactivity and can thus be defined as a “smart” city space with dense technological infrastructure. Ambient technology rests on infrastructural networks which, being non-hierarchical and user-friendly, defeat the traditional organization of both knowledge production and knowledge transfer. […] In some ways, the technologically smart urban space displaces and replaces the university, by inscribing knowledge and its circulation at the heart of the social order. (2013, 179)

This dual regime of knowledge and connectedness in the multilingual metropolis of the present is inextricably bound up with translation. Whether it is accessing information on social services in different languages, using translation to post notices on social media sites or availing of new digital subtitling technology to view downloaded films from the internet, the uses of translation in digital contexts are various and growing. If knowledge is inscribed and circulates at “the heart of the social order”, one question we might ask is what kind of new translational order comes into being in the dual communicative spaces of the city?

If one estimation is that by 2050 two-thirds of the world population will live in urban centres, the inevitable corollary is that these new inhabitants will have to come from somewhere. Part of the new inward urban migration will be from rural areas within the nation state and the other inhabitants will hail from elsewhere. What had traditionally characterized migrant experiences in the past was a sense of rupture. Going to another country involved an often decisive break with the language, culture and society of the place that was being left behind. Ethnic enclaves in the host city did provide a certain sense of continuity but, as the stay lengthened in the country of migration, contact with a language of origin became more and more problematic. The pressure was increasingly to translate oneself into the dominant language of the host community. Contact with what was formerly home was slow, expensive and complicated. Definitive translation out of the language of origin became the almost (though not always) inevitable telos of the migrant. In a world of Skype, Viber, Facebook, text messaging, the near instantaneity of contact with elsewhere makes staying in touch both economically and technically feasible. This, in turn, creates a new kind of translational reality for the migrant in the multilingual city space. Repeated contact with fellow speakers of a language in the country of origin or technically mediated communication with fellow nationals in the host city leads to a much keener perception of translation as process as opposed to translation as state. In other words, whereas in pre-digital settings the pressure of language distance resulted in a push towards the state of translated subject with the language of origin as an increasingly marginal presence in the language life of the migrant, in the digital moment, instant access to the mother tongue means a much more vivid sense of translation as process for the migrant, the continual daily negotiation between the language or languages inhabiting the public, physical spaces of the city and the language or languages inhabiting the privatized, digital spaces of internet communication. What this process ontology of translation points to is not the surrender of the translation zone of the city to a pre-Babelian fantasy of harmonious monolingualism but rather an intensification of the sense of lived, urban experience as a continuous engagement with the possibilities and aporias of translation.

One notable consequence of the advent of the digital has been the dematerialization of the object world. Modern university libraries have fewer and fewer shelves and fewer and fewer books on those shelves as access to the world's knowledge resources shrinks to tiny data points and the materiality of paper gives way to the virtuality of the screen. Traditionally, cities have proclaimed their status as translation zone in the multiple semiotic surfaces of the city, the visible traces of language otherness, the sense that different geographical areas corresponded to different ethnic enclaves. The sights and sounds of urban Chinatowns were the visible and audible proof of difference. What happens, then, when communication migrates to the digital? Will there be a “dematerialization of the ghetto”, a move away from the marked, physical space of language alterity to a reticular or network-based sense of language identity in urban settings? What kind of new translation cartography can we expect to find in the altered exchange between the physical and the virtual in the urban centres of the twenty-first century? Whatever the answers to the questions, one certainty is that much will depend on the future relationship between autonomous and heteronomous forms of translation. As the ubiquitous Google Translate button suggests, an abiding aspiration of late digital modernity is the provision of simultaneous, instantaneous translation. Less important than the present deficiencies of the system is the utopian project of seamless, heteronomous translation where the user, through the use of smartphones or other more advanced digital devices to come, could effortlessly navigate the translation zone of the city, thanks to the technologically mediated translation labour of the Google corporation. Or perhaps that Utopia may not be so alluring, given the worrying dependency on the translational dictates of the mega-corporation, and the desire will be to continue to invest in the project of autonomous translation – that long, complex but exhilarating and transformative engagement with the languages and cultures of others in the spaces, both public and private, of the world's many cities. Whatever the choices that are made – and they are as much to do with politics and the economy as they are to do with individual preference – translation will remain an inescapable part of the urban landscape.

Aristotle contended in his Politics that similar people could not bring a city into existence. The city could only be the creation of different kinds of people who come together to found a community where they can live in common. However, as John Phillips et al. have argued, an inescapable fact for many city dwellers is that they are “surrounded by barriers built for the maintenance of the spatial habits of similar people, dividing the city into exclusive ghettos of habits, privileges and deprivations” (2011, 289). The endless negotiated dilemma for the city is how to reconcile diversity and singularity without recourse to violent division. It is, perhaps, worth aligning this notion of division to other forms of divisiveness as a way of thinking how translation itself might fare in a new understanding of what it is that universities might do in our contemporary cities.

A standard impulse of the encyclopaedic movement of the eighteenth century was to classify all forms of existing knowledge (Richards 1993). Clarity came with separation. The emergence of faculties and autonomous disciplines is a clear development out of the desire for a rational ordering of reality and of the instruments that would be used to analyse and account for that reality. A further elaboration on the classificatory drive is an increasing differentiation between the natural and human sciences (Latour 1987). In more recent decades, however, the project of partition is in crisis. One of the salient features of capitalist society in the late twentieth century that has been detailed, in particular, by the geographers Harvey (1990) and Massey (2005) is the relentless drive towards de-differentiation and declassification in everything from broadcasting (reality TV where the mundane dissolves into the spectacle) to warfare (video arcades and drone strikes). The incessant flows of images, ideas, products and people that have both driven and been driven by globalizing practices call into the question the usefulness and pertinence of classificatory paradigms from another age. It is in this context that we might begin to associate the notion of the city as translation zone with a new vision of the university itself.

In the classic Humboldtian understanding of the university, the university was responsible for two kinds of Bildung. The first was the internal Bildung of the individual who through contact with the best that was written or thought would develop as a self-possessed individual confident in the exercise of the faculties of reason. The second was the external Bildung of the student as future citizen who would integrate into the existing or emerging nation state, equipped with the necessary knowledge (historical, political, economic) to serve the state faithfully and effectively (Readings 1996). A permutation on this model with a distinctive shift away from the humanities to the sciences was the emergence after the Second World War of the Cold War global R&D (Research & Development) university which saw a dovetailing of university research and military science. What has happened, however, in the aftermath of the Cold War is that the post-Westphalian understanding of the nation state has altered dramatically. The all-pervasive influence of the neo-liberal political rationale has meant that what were previously core functions of the state (health, education, security, public utilities) are increasingly subject to the logic of market competition (Brown 2005). What this means in effect is that the territorial state of modernity is increasingly giving way to the privatized, outsourced, “market state” of postmodernity (Bobbit 2002). If the nation state is changing, the institution that has been closely linked to the nation state in its Bildung mission, the university, must find itself being transformed by this process of accelerated change. Rosi Braidotti (2013, 173) speaks of the advent of the global “multi”-versity. She claims: “[t]he combination of technical skills and civic responsibility, a concern for social and environmental sustainability, and a discerning relationship to consumerism, are the core values of the contemporary multi-versity” (ibid., 181). The core characteristics of the multi-versity are movement, relationality (spatial, environmental) and connectivity (virtual). Implicit in the notion of de-differentiation that is at the heart of many contemporary global phenomena is that the former partitionist, classificatory, discipline-based responses to contemporary questions and issues are no longer pertinent or effective. It is in the context of the emergent, global multi-versity that the notion of the city as translation zone takes on a new resonance. Firstly, one understanding of de-differentiation is structural. Formerly, one had the notion of the university town (Heidelberg, Oxford) where the community of learning led a largely self-sufficient existence, untroubled by excessive claims from the world beyond its walls. Later, there was the university city (China) or the university campus where again the emphasis was on the self-enclosed nature of the community of scholars and students with the occasional campus company as a nod to the demands or needs of modernity. However, as cities become a network of smart hubs in a globalized knowledge economy, the structural differences between the universities and their surrounding world begin to break down. Knowledge becomes the business of everyone living in the city, not just those with student cards (Landry 2006). Universities, in a sense, have the potential to reconnect with the kind of café culture of knowledge dissemination which characterized the Republics of Letters in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe. Translation as an interdisciplinary formation stands to benefit from this emerging city/university structural de-differentiation in that translation as practice permits a dialogue with the surrounding polylingual city, and as reflection it has the conceptual tools to understand and analyse endlessly hybridized cultural and political realities. Secondly, environmental relationality is an inescapable feature of the present and future of the world's cities (ibid., 77–143). As humans shift from being biological agents, interacting with the rest of the natural world, to being geological agents, their actions now determining the survival of the planet as a viable ecosystem, the environment is no longer an invisible externality but a highly visible and forceful internality (Chakrabarthy 2009). The need for a post-anthropocentric view of the relationality between human beings and all the other inhabitants of the planet demands in our cities the emergence of a translation ecology which mobilizes thinking around perhaps the least understood or theorized part of translation – namely, intersemiotic translation. How are we, in effect, to create lines and forms of communication with other sentient beings in our cities so that we can construct viable, sustainable urban communities into the future? The city as translation zone is at the heart, then, of new emerging forms of relationality. Lastly, the global multi-versity in a new relationship to the city and the environment involves from the translation point of view a further anti-partitionist move, the bringing of the humanities and sciences back into a sense of collaborative form of inquiry. The present situation of the instrumentalist fetishization of technoscience (Latour 1993) in the universities and government policy does little for the necessary social self-reflexivity of science and leaves the humanities and social sciences as embittered poor cousins in the scrap for public and private funding. Cities are both manifestations of human scientific and technical ingenuity (sewage, drainage, transportation, lighting, heating) and social, linguistic and cultural creativity (conversation, theatre, welfare provision, parenting, football practice). Technics cannot be separated out as a distinctive element of city life any more than culture or language can be considered in isolation from the enabling and formative capacity of tools (Cronin 2013). Translation, which throughout its history has been as implicated in the dissemination and the advancement of science and technology as it has been in the development of languages and cultures, is particularly well placed to pioneer new forms of dialogue between science and technology and the humanities and social sciences in the multiple translation zones of our cities.

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The city most usually noted for its language politics in Belgium today is Brussels, but Reine Meylaerts and Maud Gonne choose to discuss Antwerp instead – as a city whose character has been shaped by translation. Intensely polyglot in the sixteenth century as the centre of North-European trade and finance, increasingly French-speaking after 1770 as French became the language of the city's upper classes, Antwerp was also a Dutch-language city. The nineteenth century saw ongoing competition between French and Dutch, with Dutch finally gaining the dominant position in the twentieth century and Antwerp becoming the most prominent Flemish city. During the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, life in Antwerp was profoundly marked by the rivalry of Dutch and French and by translation and transfer processes in all possible forms. It is the variety and the ubiquitousness of these forms that Meylaerts and Gonne highlight as they discuss the translational activities of two important cultural mediators. Attentive to the material spaces and institutional implications of these mediations, they show how the city is criss-crossed by multiple language exchanges. It is the level of detail given to the material trajectories and networks that makes this portrait of Antwerp extremely valuable – providing a kind of template through which mediations in other cities might be explored.

Leopolis, Lemberg, Lwów, Львов (Lvov) and Львiв (Lviv) – these are the names that over the centuries have captured the varying linguistic and translational fortunes of the city of Lviv in Western Ukraine. Irene Sywenky explores the trope of translation as a way of understanding the construction and representation of an urban space that has been home to a host of different language communities over the century. Informed by the fractal inquisitiveness of the micro-cosmopolitan, she maps out the lines of contact, division and interpenetration that follow from the successive domination of the city by the Poles, Habsburgs, Russians and Ukrainians. Lviv is a city whose shape-shifting has attracted writerly attention over the centuries from Leopold von Sacher-Masoch to Joseph Roth to Józef Wittlin, Stanislaw Lem, Adam Zagajewski, Zbigniew Herbert and Iurii Andrukhovych. The very instability of meaning and topography in the city that was host to a significant Jewish diasporic community, where names and memories mutated with the changing configurations of power, point to the labour of translation as the appropriate hermeneutic for a city caught between multiple pasts and diverse presents. Central to the notion of Lviv as a translation zone is the dual impulse at work in the translation process. On the one hand, Sywenky argues, there is the centripetal effort to construct a national narrative that looks for principles of continuity and coherence in the translational palimpsest. On the other, there is the centrifugal pressure to construct an image of place that corresponds to the desires of the imagined other, whether in the West or elsewhere. Different versions of a guidebook to the city in Ukrainian/English and Polish offer subtle changes in emphasis, practise different forms of inclusion and exclusion to shape a vision of a city that obeys different historical and political imperatives. Within a centrifugal framework, it is the (re)construction of Lviv as an idealized cosmopolitan space that folds translation practices into the competitive market strategies of global tourism. If writers on Lviv in different languages are haunted by real and imagined absences, translation becomes an act of recovery, a way of attempting to capture through multilingual anthologies and translated texts a sense of the linguistic plurality and cultural density of the city. In this way, to use a recurrent metaphor in Sywenky's article, translation becomes a gateway to a renewed or differentiated understanding of the city. In the multiple, layered linguistic experiences of Lviv covered in everything from Latin chronicle to television reportage, the task of the translator(s) is one of understanding the nature of language, meaning and memory in urban landscapes permeated by the shifting presences of peripherality and postcolonialism. The city is both the figure of and ground for translation in its long, metamorphic history.

The moment of Istanbul's modern history that most strikingly represents a translational turn is the turbulent transition from the Ottoman period to that of the new Turkish nation in the 1920s. Just as the Ottoman language was reformed and corrected under Kemal Ataturk's policies, the city was made Turkish – many of its minorities fleeing or being expelled. But the new turn that Saliha Paker and Sule Demirkol-Ertürk wish to analyse is much more recent, and concerns the return of translational activities to the area called Beyoğlu/Pera, the reappearance of minority languages such as Kurdish and Armenian “as an indicator of a will to communicate and of mutual recognition between communities, in contrast to non-translation which can be interpreted as a sign of neglect or rejection”. Since the 1990s, translators and publishers have been challenging the idea of a monocultural city. The original research which went into Paker's and Demirkol-Ertürk's paper shows the area being reinvested by members of minority communities, who have made this legendarily “in-between” neighbourhood the site of new intercultural engagements – in the context of difficult political relationships between the Turkish state and its minorities, particularly the Armenians and the Kurds. This research shows how the multicultural fabric of Istanbul is being revived, through specific translational initiatives. Much more than conventional mediators, these publishers and translators are challenging cultural norms.

Any discussion of the city as translation zone brings to mind the great cosmopolitan metropolises of the planet like Istanbul, but also like New York, London or Paris, New Delhi, Beijing or Tokyo. Scale and complexity are viewed as commensurate and the great urban centres of the planet are seen as fitting hosts to linguistic diversity and translation exchange. Kaisa Koskinen in her article on Tampere – a small city in Southern Finland, with a population of around 300,000 – contests, however, the notion that small is simple. Situating her analysis in a micro-cosmopolitan perspective that sees complexity as constant across different scales, she details the presence of translationality in multiple guises in the emergent and present history of Tampere. Echoing contemporary debates around translation and globalization, Koskinen points to the genesis of Tampere as a translation zone in the nineteenth century as resulting from a process of industrialization spearheaded by an anglophone, Scot James Finlayson, newly arrived in the city from St Petersburg. In a city that since 1809 had become part of the Russian Empire after centuries of Swedish rule, English, Swedish and Finnish come to occupy varying positions on the grid of translation power. The story of the nineteenth century, from a translation perspective, is the inexorable rise of national vernaculars and Koskinen charts the shifting translation relationships between the majority Finnish-speaking and minority Swedish-speaking population. In the period leading up to Finnish independence in 1917, there is a belated attempt by the Russian imperial authorities to change the dual translation dynamic and impose Russian in the public sphere of the city but it is conspicuously little and conspicuously late. Tampere, like Montreal, is one of those cities where the history and sources of political and cultural patronage alter the directionality of translation. If for much of the nineteenth century Finnish speakers felt the pressure to translate themselves into Swedish, in the twentieth century it is increasingly the Swedish speakers who feel the need to translate themselves into Finnish in the translation zone of the Tampere public sphere. Of course, what marks out the Finnish experience in the period from 1809 to 1917 as markedly different from elsewhere is the relatively pacific nature of the interactions in the translation zone. No blood is spilled over raised voices. A parallelism of linguistic accommodation and liberal bilingualism remains the norm. What awaits the translation zone in the future is the question posed by the alteration of the linguistic landscape in Tampere and other Finnish cities as a result of successive waves of migration from the 1990s onwards. In an interesting historical twist, there are now more Russian speakers than Swedish speakers in Tampere. However, the Russian-language infrastructure for a Russian-speaking population that was 10 times smaller in the nineteenth century was far superior to what it is in the contemporary city. So, again, the city needs to re-evaluate translation needs in the context of new circumstances.

New Orleans is a magical, legendary city – a crossroads of cultures which saw the birth and development of jazz as well as the emergence of creolized cultures and identities. Anne Malena's exploration of the city as a palimpsest but also as a phoenix rising out of its destruction by hurricane Katrina reminds us of the sheer enduring power of the “city that shouldn't be”. Malena emphasizes the way that New Orleans is a city “in performance”, with translation one of the activities that the city performs in order to affirm its identity. Whether it be authors like Alfred Mercier or Lafcadio Hearn, whether it be the carnival practices that define New Orleans life, the city proposes original modes of self-expression. Walking the streets of the French Quarter, the author takes us on an unusual tour of the city – one that links language to place. Moving across cultural forms as she moves across the city, Anne Malena takes the reader through both time and space, showing how translation in its many forms has been and remains a constitutive process of New Orleans history-making.

As models of plurality, all translational cities provide insights into the evolution of today's global cosmopolis, contributing to an understanding of meaningful interaction among its increasingly diverse communities and heightening awareness of the precariousness of coexistence. In a short essay published in The New York Review of Books for the first time on 25 March 2010, the late Tony Judt celebrated the power of the “edge”: “I prefer the edge: the place where countries, communities, allegiances, affinities, and roots bump uncomfortably up against one another – where cosmopolitanism is not so much an identity as the normal condition of life” (2013, 102). He argues that once such places abounded where multiple communities and languages cohabited in an atmosphere of creative edginess. Among these edge cities he lists Sarajevo, Alexandria, Tangiers, Salonica, Odessa, Beirut, Istanbul, Chernovitz and Uzhhorod. In the piece published in the year of his death, Judt forecast “a time of troubles”:

“Identities” will grow mean and tight, as the indigent and the uprooted beat upon the ever-rising walls of gated communities from Delhi to Dallas. Being “Danish” or “Italian”, “American” or “European” won't be just an identity; it will be a rebuff and a reproof to those whom it excludes. (Ibid.)

As is evident in the anti-migration rhetoric of European populist parties such as the Front National, the Danish Peoples’ Party and the True Finns, the multicultural and multilingual nature of large cities becomes the unacceptable face of a modernity that threatens unitary narratives of nation and community (see Titley and Lentin 2011). Echoing an older trope of nineteenth-century European cultural nationalism, where the purity of the rural, ethnic heartland is juxtaposed with the polluted, mongrel corruptibility of the city (O'Toole 1987), the city becomes a central part of the narrative of national decline as espoused by identitarian populists. It is in this sense that conceiving of the city as a translation zone and exploring the conditions of its sustainability draws translation inevitably into political debates around migration, identity and place that are likely to become more and more prominent, if not indeed more virulent, as cities and societies evolve in globalized settings. Already, language tests of one kind or the other are becoming a central feature of entry or citizenship requirements in more and more countries where integration and translation (into the dominant host language and culture) become increasingly synonymous. The defence of values like freedom, solidarity and human flourishing in the coming times will inevitably and inescapably involve reflecting on the role of translation in urban settings.

The politics of the translation zone do not only reside in the fractures and tensions of contemporary mobility. They are also bound up with the specific ecology of urban centres. Vandana Shiva (1997) has pointed to the very real dangers for societies which opt for monoculturalism. As any one culture will only provide a subset of all the possible responses to a situation and generally these responses are tailored to meet situations that have already been encountered, societies that are beholden to the monocultural have immense difficulty in dealing with the unforeseen or the unexpected (ibid.). What constitutes resilience for societies in the liquid modernity of the contemporary world is precisely the availability of a large repertoire of cultural responses and different world views that feeds into a creativity of imagination and an inventiveness of action. It is the translation zone of the city that acts as the hub of this resilience. Translation as the clearing house of possibility reveals the immensity of the resources that a city can draw on to manage unpredictable and uncertain futures.