This article analyzes the interconnected translation processes that led the Paris city council to conceptualize, address, and act upon “homelessness” through counting. By translation, we mean a range of semiotic processes that connect social worlds, their objects, practices, genres, and bodies of expertise. These are usually imagined as separate: For example, auditing and volunteering, science and government, charity and policing, poverty and social hygiene. Our analysis is based on ethnographic data collected in Paris, France, between January and August 2023, during two editions of the Nuit de la Solidarité [Night of Solidarity], a large-scale effort by the city council, in collaboration with numerous volunteers, to count homeless people in Paris. Linking translation scholarship with academic work on quantification and liberal governmentality, we demonstrate that the semiotic process of translation is deeply interconnected with the political work performed by numbers and counting techniques, imbuing them with meaning and ensuring their capacity to exert power. Translation, we show, serves not only to link governance techniques across geopolitical borders but also to integrate various political projects and normalize and naturalize the structural inequalities that define cities like Paris.

In a contemporary global political economy marked by the increasing semiotization of economic production, the commodification of political communication, and the fusion between media and capital, this special issue turns to the notion of “translation” to further our understanding of the role of language and semiosis within contemporary capitalism. Contrary to its conventional definition as inter-linguistic transfer of semantic meaning, we propose to view translation as a metasemiotic infrastructure for speeding up and scaling up production and for crafting forms of sociality and subjectivity conducive to capitalist valorization. The articles in this collection ethnographically explore the working of translation across registers, channels, modalities, semiotic fields, and ontological orders (as well as linguistic codes). Our goal is to analyze how translation affords the global circulation of standardized discursive protocols and institutional policy bundles, and enables the formation of politico-juridical networks of corporate personhood and (neo-)liberal governmentality. Furthermore, we investigate how translation can be resisted, sabotaged, or made invisible, showing how its semiotic metamarks can be alternatively disguised or highlighted within the regimes of uniqueness and seriality underlying contemporary forms of commodity production. This Introduction provides the theoretical backdrop underlying these diverse contributions.

Empathy statements are grammatically regular, performative statements used widely in the therapy and medical industries in the United States and adapted to be used by callers in India’s National Capital Region international call centers to navigate the foreign and emotionally heightened situations workers experience while speaking to customers. This paper shows the performative nature of translation by analyzing the training of empathy in a train-the-trainer training program. By identifying the grammatical structure, enregisterment, and strategic use of empathy statements in scripts, this paper shows how semiotic frameworks of emotion play a vital role in the types of translation necessitated by the mass mediation of the international call center.

Through a linguistic anthropological analysis of a corpus of storytelling practices that have emerged from interviews that I conducted with Northern Italian executives (2011–2023), I examine how collective, Made-in-Italy branding identities are (co)constructed and translated through the scalar chronotopic stances that these managers take vis-à-vis both the historicity and the contemporary, artistic uniqueness of their companies. More specifically, I describe how the executives in small Northern Italian family-owned firms use their corporations’ histories to associate moral discourses of cultural values, responsibility, and authenticity with the Made-in-Italy brand. Executives’ narrative shifts translate Made in Italy from a national brand that allegedly represents all goods produced in Italy to more localized, town-based branding identities. To do so, I am inspired by an inter-semiotic approach to translation, one that allows me to study these identification processes from a more fluid and dynamic perspective.

Fusing the aesthetics of futurity with the lush beauty of the natural world, planned eco-city developments like Forest City and Penang South Islands, both in Malaysia, promise luxury enclaves against climate change and the environmental stressors of existing cities. This article analyzes CGI architectural renderings used to promote and sell eco-city projects in Southeast Asia. Eco-city renderings, we argue, produce semio-capitalistic value by translating the familiar concepts of “green,” “eco-friendly,” and “sustainable” into something far more inchoate: feelings. They do so through their supersaturation with signs of greenness in a design strategy we label “semiotic overdetermination.” Selling “green” as a feeling, eco-city renderings capitalize on present-day anxieties over urban decay and commodify “the ecological” as a rich resource of pleasurable qualitative experiences. The result, we contend, is to reinforce a neoliberal mode of subjectivity that equates consumption with somatics and reduces climate responsibility to individual consumer decisions.