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Part of
Field Research on Translation and Interpreting
Edited by Regina Rogl, Daniela Schlager and Hanna Risku
[Benjamins Translation Library 165] 2025
► pp. 338–361

Chapter 15
Exploring interspecies translation and interpreting through multispecies ethnography

ORCID logo | University of the Free StateBloemfontein
Against the background of the recent enlarging of translation studies to include the more-than-professional (Tymoczko 2007), more-than-verbal (Petrilli 2016) and more-than-human (Cronin 2017; Marais 2019), this chapter explores the opportunities that accompany multispecies translational research by focusing on multispecies ethnography as a research design. It will provide examples from a recent multispecies translation and interpreting project that involved the application of such a design in an animal welfare context.
By taking an ecosemiotic approach to conceptualising the process of translation and interpreting, this chapter assumes that all forms of semiosis are, in essence, translational processes (Petrilli 2016) that are “shaped by available conditions, encumbered by their history, yet at the same time … partly autonomous and independent” (Maran 2020: 1).
Keywords: multispecies ethnography, translation, interpreting, intersemiotic translation, interspecies translation, ecosemiotics
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Exploring human/non-human relationships in the Animal Turn
  • 3.Semiotics, ecosemiotics and the non-human animal in translation studies
  • 4.First steps towards multi-species ethnography: From paradigm and approach to design for interspecies translational research
  • 5.Description of the research context and its participants
  • 6.Researcher positionality as photographer participant observer
  • 7.Analysing data and ‘finding’ findings with multispecies ethnography
  • 8.Identification of the theme: Agency of meaning makers
  • 9.Findings: Moving away from linguistic and anthropocentric biases
  • 10.Conclusion
  • Author queries
  • Notes
  • References
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