Clare Hall Colloquium


19.45 Tuesday 28 October

Meeting Room, Clare Hall



The Ethics of Translation

Power, Exchange, and Hospitality


Laurie Zoloth, Ph.D.

Professor of Religious Studies, Bioethics and Medical Humanities,
Northwestern University



Translation may be described as the central act of scholarship across a
variety of disciplines: science, theology, philosophy and ethics.

Scholars are often told that a subsidiary task of all research is
translation: basic science needs to ‘translate’ its theory into
understandable public language, or to ‘translate’ research
into clinical applications, and theologians and philosophers are urged to
‘translate’ philosophy into political and social policy. Bioethicists
‘translate’ abstractions into pragmatic decisions.



What ethical judgments are at stake when we ‘translate’? What is ‘lost in
translation’ when theories of human agency are translated into practices,
or when practices are re-inscribed, or translated into theory?  Where does
the power in the relationship reside?



This short presentation will explore both the underlying moral appeals in
play when scholars ‘translate’ and raise questions about how to do so with
both justice and generosity.

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