Scholars, beginning with Hippolyte Delehaye, have long claimed a distinction between eastern and western customs of relic veneration in late antiquity: westerners left martyrial corpses intact and did not translate them, using contact relics instead, while easterners readily moved and divided these relics. They base this distinction on two papal letters from Pope Hormisdas’s legates and from Gregory the Great that distinguish between Roman and Greek customs of relics veneration. Yet scholars have almost totally neglected one piece of late antique evidence highly instructive for this topic: a letter from Eusebios of Thessaloniki, a contemporary of Gregory the Great, responding to a request from the emperor Maurice to send a corporeal relic of the Thessalonian martyr Demetrios. I argue that Eusebios’s letter demonstrates that the distinction between Roman and Greek customs of relic veneration proposed by the papal letters does not hold in late sixth-/early seventh-century Thessaloniki; furthermore, rather than giving evidence for sweeping, regional patterns, these letters all offer reflections on local, municipal customs of relic veneration in Rome and Thessaloniki in response to local imperial customs in Constantinople.

This study tested whether native Chinese (L1) readers whose second language (L2) was English could activate L2 translations of L1 words during L1 sentence reading. Chinese–English bilinguals read Chinese sentences silently, each containing a target word whose parafoveal preview was manipulated. To test cross-language semantic activation, each target word was paired with an identical, an unrelated and a translation-related preview that shared an L2 translation (e.g., 政黨, party as a political group) with the target word (e.g., 派對, party as a social gathering). Compared to the unrelated previews, the translation-related previews induced shorter target-word viewing times, despite no phonological/orthographic overlap. Furthermore, the highly proficient L2 readers showed earlier priming effects than did the average readers. Our results suggest that bilinguals activate lexical representations in both languages automatically and non-selectively, even when the task requires activation of one language only, and that the L2 lexical activation is modulated by L2 proficiency.

In a contemporary global political economy marked by the increasing semiotization of economic production, the commodification of political communication, and the fusion between media and capital, this special issue turns to the notion of “translation” to further our understanding of the role of language and semiosis within contemporary capitalism. Contrary to its conventional definition as inter-linguistic transfer of semantic meaning, we propose to view translation as a metasemiotic infrastructure for speeding up and scaling up production and for crafting forms of sociality and subjectivity conducive to capitalist valorization. The articles in this collection ethnographically explore the working of translation across registers, channels, modalities, semiotic fields, and ontological orders (as well as linguistic codes). Our goal is to analyze how translation affords the global circulation of standardized discursive protocols and institutional policy bundles, and enables the formation of politico-juridical networks of corporate personhood and (neo-)liberal governmentality. Furthermore, we investigate how translation can be resisted, sabotaged, or made invisible, showing how its semiotic metamarks can be alternatively disguised or highlighted within the regimes of uniqueness and seriality underlying contemporary forms of commodity production. This Introduction provides the theoretical backdrop underlying these diverse contributions.

This article analyzes the interconnected translation processes that led the Paris city council to conceptualize, address, and act upon “homelessness” through counting. By translation, we mean a range of semiotic processes that connect social worlds, their objects, practices, genres, and bodies of expertise. These are usually imagined as separate: For example, auditing and volunteering, science and government, charity and policing, poverty and social hygiene. Our analysis is based on ethnographic data collected in Paris, France, between January and August 2023, during two editions of the Nuit de la Solidarité [Night of Solidarity], a large-scale effort by the city council, in collaboration with numerous volunteers, to count homeless people in Paris. Linking translation scholarship with academic work on quantification and liberal governmentality, we demonstrate that the semiotic process of translation is deeply interconnected with the political work performed by numbers and counting techniques, imbuing them with meaning and ensuring their capacity to exert power. Translation, we show, serves not only to link governance techniques across geopolitical borders but also to integrate various political projects and normalize and naturalize the structural inequalities that define cities like Paris.

Translating emerging health technologies towards adoption and patient benefit requires timely and effective research and development decisions. Early health technology assessment has a key role to play in supporting these decisions. A new consensus definition of early health technology assessment is a welcome contribution to help bring these activities toward wider use in the field. In parallel, the opportunities to perform early health technology assessment activities are increasing as new types of health technologies begin to enter healthcare systems globally. A greater focus on transparency of reporting, improving awareness around how early health technology assessment can impact decision-making, increased resourcing for these activities, expanding training for analysts, and encouraging collaboration between individuals across healthcare systems will be vital to strengthen the uptake of early health technology assessment from this point forward.

The global utility of acceptance and commitment therapy highlights the need for adapting measures that can effectively capture the richness of psychological flexibility. One such instrument is the Comprehensive Assessment of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy Processes (CompACT). We translated the CompACT into Luganda and adapted it for use in Uganda. The original CompACT was translated into the Luganda language and reviewed through a series of evaluations. Nine mental health professionals participated in one-on-one interviews, while a focus group of eight culturally competent laypersons provided further insights. Their feedback resulted in revisions to enhance the instrument’s clarity, relevance, acceptability and completeness. The revised version was then cognitively tested with n = 25 trainees at Makerere University. Input from these various groups was synthesized and triangulated to develop the final version. A total of 23 items were adapted to improve the comprehensibility and completeness of the scale. Overall, respondents deemed the tool clear and acceptable. This study highlights the importance of a rigorous adaptation process, including translation, expert review, cognitive testing and feedback triangulation, to ensure psychological measures remain valid and relevant across cultures. Such an approach ensures accuracy in diverse contexts and provides a model for adapting psychological instruments for non-Western populations.

Through a linguistic anthropological analysis of a corpus of storytelling practices that have emerged from interviews that I conducted with Northern Italian executives (2011–2023), I examine how collective, Made-in-Italy branding identities are (co)constructed and translated through the scalar chronotopic stances that these managers take vis-à-vis both the historicity and the contemporary, artistic uniqueness of their companies. More specifically, I describe how the executives in small Northern Italian family-owned firms use their corporations’ histories to associate moral discourses of cultural values, responsibility, and authenticity with the Made-in-Italy brand. Executives’ narrative shifts translate Made in Italy from a national brand that allegedly represents all goods produced in Italy to more localized, town-based branding identities. To do so, I am inspired by an inter-semiotic approach to translation, one that allows me to study these identification processes from a more fluid and dynamic perspective.

Empathy statements are grammatically regular, performative statements used widely in the therapy and medical industries in the United States and adapted to be used by callers in India’s National Capital Region international call centers to navigate the foreign and emotionally heightened situations workers experience while speaking to customers. This paper shows the performative nature of translation by analyzing the training of empathy in a train-the-trainer training program. By identifying the grammatical structure, enregisterment, and strategic use of empathy statements in scripts, this paper shows how semiotic frameworks of emotion play a vital role in the types of translation necessitated by the mass mediation of the international call center.

Audits of multilingual resources are reporting shockingly poor quality: “less than 50% … acceptable quality.” There is too much translationese in too many of our multilingual resources, e.g., Wikipedia, XNLI, FLORES, WordNet. We view translationese as a form of noise that makes it hard to generalize from a benchmark based on translation to a real task of interest that does not involve translation. Worse, too much of this translationese is in the “wrong” direction. Directionality matters. Professional translators translate from their weaker language into their stronger language. Unfortunately, many of our resources translate in the other direction, from a stronger (higher-resource) language into a weaker (lower-resource) language. In Wikipedia, for example, there is more translation out of English than into English. We recommend more investments in high-quality data, and less in translation, especially in the “wrong” direction.