Abstract
In a multilingual world, language difference and translation are inevitable
features of travel. How travellers deal with the fact of languages other than
their own, or radically distinct varieties of their own language, has clear
implications for their capacity to engage with or interpret the realities they
encounter. The article explores contemporary English-language travel accounts
where language concerns are the central topic rather than an unacknowledged
by-product of the travel experience. The language concerns are principally
articulated around the plight of minority and endangered languages in Europe
and elsewhere. Using the notions of place, space, the trope of decline and the
necessity of the political, the article investigates how questions of translation
make mobility in a plurilingual globe a highly problematic practice. Particular
attention is paid to how minority languages become reified in the absence of the
possibility of translation.
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