The Moveable Feast: Translation, Ecology and Food

This contribution summarises Michael Cronin's paper on ecology and translation. He investigates the relationship between food production and translation in the Second Machine Age. Starting from the risk of a disappearing professional translator supplanted by machine translation, Cronin moves to the realm of the Slow Food movement in Italy to suggest the growing need of a Slow Language movement that concentrates on food as starting point to establish “a new translation ecology”. In brief, “sustainability, resilience and placedness” should become the keywords for a global communicative reorganisation centred on translation, where humans can re-discover precision and attention for language first of all in the field of food production.