Rethinking translation as epistemic infrastructure: worldmaking and the global circulation of knowledge

Анотація

This article rethinks translation not simply as a linguistic transfer or a culturally mediated act of interpretation, but as an epistemic infrastructure through which knowledge becomes mobile across languages, institutions, and symbolic worlds. Drawing on key contributions from translation studies, world literature, and philosophical discussions of worldmaking, the article argues that translation should be treated not as an auxiliary practice attached to the circulation of knowledge, but as one of the conditions that make such circulation possible in the first place. Methodologically, the study combines conceptual analysis, comparative theoretical synthesis, and a focused illustrative case. It traces the movement of translation theory from transfer-based models toward epistemic mediation, worldmaking, and infrastructural thinking, and tests the analytical value of this framework through the English-language publication of Serhiy Zhadan’s Sky Above Kharkiv: Dispatches from the Ukrainian Front. The article demonstrates that translation does more than transmit meaning or experience across linguistic boundaries: it helps organise the conditions under which texts, concepts, and historically situated forms of knowledge become intelligible, legitimate, and institutionally available in new interpretive contexts. Particular attention is paid to the relation between translation, worldmaking, and the cross-cultural mobility of knowledge, as well as to the role of translation in shaping visibility, authority, and asymmetry within global intellectual exchange. The article concludes that the concept of epistemic infrastructure expands the explanatory reach of translation studies by repositioning translation from a secondary mediating practice to a constitutive condition of knowledge mobility in a multilingual world.