12 May 2026
Professor Emily Apter explored the meaning of language justice in the current political sphere in the Department of Interdisciplinary Humanities conference keynote lecture on 7 May.
Professor Apter, Julius Silver Professor of French Literature Thought and Culture and Comparative Literature at New York University, highlighted why multilingualism needs to be valued.
She suggested that translation by machines, rather than by humans, means that languages are viewed through a colonial lens – so the true meanings of words and their historical context are never fully realised.
The right to language, along with the right to plurilingual education, is effectively annulled by straight-to-machine translation.
Professor Emily Apter, Julius Silver Professor of French Literature Thought and Culture and Comparative Literature at New York University
What’s exciting about Professor Apter’s work is the way it asks us to pay attention to what remains untranslatable across different languages, discourses, or ideas. Normally, we think that to avoid doing harm we need to make sure we all perfectly understand one another. Professor Apter makes clear that sometimes this drive to perfect clarity can precisely be the problem.
Dr Timothy Huzar, Lecturer in Cultural Competency Education
In a talk titled ‘Theorizing Global Criticality and the Politics of Just Translation’, Professor Apter showed how forced translation and the erasure of languages can be acts of political violence.
She cited examples from warzones scarred by ‘the territorial markers of forced translation’ – such as Russia changing road signs from Ukrainian into Russian in captured territories. She suggests that the similarity of the languages makes this a more poignant deed of ‘violent sovereignty’.
Border wars are fought not just with tanks and mines, but also with common cognates and homonyms, with words that sound the same but signify differently.
Professor Emily Apter
Drawing on examples from Trumpian discourse, Professor Apter assessed how individuals and communities are supressed through ‘linguistic apartheid’ – the criminalisation or outlawing of a language. For example, in some US states English has been formalised by law as the official language, rather than the assumed language. Professor Apter questioned whether this needed to take place, as it contributes to a rights discourse for the language that is already the majority.
Professor Apter used further cases from the UK – where regional languages operate alongside the de facto language of English – to discuss what constitutes formal protection of a language and what counts as informal protection on the ground.
She also examined how some countries disempower their own languages in favour of English – such as in the Netherlands, Switzerland and Singapore. This shift towards one ‘global language’ is reinforced by rise of large language models (LLMs) in the age of AI, where already prominent languages are spread at the expense of other tongues.
Computational infrastructures resemble independent sovereign states – making their own rules and circumventing legal restrictions wherever possible.
Professor Emily Apter
Professor Apter said the push to replace language courses taught by humans with courses by computers or AI means we miss out on understanding the cognitive processes required for translation and recognising when and why things are untranslatable. This approach removes the possibility of epistemic justice in translation.
Instead, Professor Apter recommended to strive for language dignification against automated technologies and against translation practices that treat language as lifeless.
Lecturer in Cultural Competency Education
Professor Emily Apter explores the idea of 'global criticality' as a rubric for a vision of language politics.
