Introduction - Addressing Differences and Inequality within Deliberation

Summary

The introduction chapter presents the theoretical underpinnings of the practice of political translation related to the arena of democracy within grassroots social movements. How shall global citizens make democratic decisions in culturally diverse and multilingual transnational or local arenas? While well-known models of deliberative democracy envision a single, universalist language model, my empirically based model of political translation contends that traditional models were not effective at including all participants in the shared discourse−marginalizing, for example, women and minorities. As a solution, cosmopolitan thinkers promote the idea of a global lingua franca, while multiculturalists prefer vernacular languages as ideal for deliberation within globalized societies. Bridging this disagreement, this introduction suggests that whether a single global language or multiple local languages are involved in deliberations, the need to uncover inequality and bridge difference remains. Political Translation allows for the conceptualization of real existing differences as an empirical resource for deepening democracy.