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Questions of public space – and in particular their visual aspects – have been central to debates over public engagement and belonging, but the city’s audible spaces have not received the same attention. What is surprising is that language, itself an essential instrument and domain of the public, the medium through which public discussion takes place, is simply taken for granted. Despite the sensory evidence of multilingualism in today’s cities, there has been little sustained discussion of language as a vehicle of urban cultural memory and identity, or as a key in the creation of meaningful spaces of contact and civic participation. This special issue aims to nourish debate on urban language by introducing the idea of the translational city. What is the difference between the translational and the multilingual city? Multilingualism calls to mind a space of plurality and diversity, with no particular idea of hierarchy or organization. Translation proposes an active, directional and interactional model of language relations. Translation becomes a key to understanding the cultural life of cities when it is used to map out movements across language, to reveal the passages created among communities at specific times. All cities are translational, but there are historical moments when language movements are key to political or cultural reversals.

Publisher: Routledge _eprint: https://doi.org/10.1080/14781700.2014.897641