Ecological Translation: Law, Science, Sovereignty

What if humans could speak directly with nonhuman animals? Across law and science, interspecies translation is emerging as a key preoccupation: from legal efforts to grant ‘rights of nature’ to rivers and forests, to AI-powered attempts to decode animal communication through bioacoustics and remote sensing. This article argues these efforts do not merely represent nonhuman entities but actively constitute new forms of political subjectivity of human and nonhuman like. Drawing on Michel Serres, Niklas Luhmann and Cornelia Vismann, I conceptualise ecological translation as the process through which alterity is rendered legible, and a shared ‘home’ ( oikos ) is produced. Law and science are treated as parallel cultural techniques that translate the more-than-human world into governable forms. It is not that something is lost in translation. It is that translation is a cultural technique that reconstitutes the entities it mediates in the process of mediating between them. Ultimately, ecological translation functions as a technology of sovereignty; constructing what counts as ‘Nature’, who may speak for it, and under what authoritative conditions.