5. Migration, Mobility, and Being in Translation

Peter Schneck and Julie M. Weise

Forum: Translation, Migration, Narrative

History and Theory 64, no. 3 (2025)

Drawing on an expanded concept of translation as process and practice, this contribution to the “Translation, Migration, Narrative” forum explores how migrants, as described by scholars such as Paul F. Bandia, embody “translated beings” who are marked both by agency and by constraint. We argue that translation serves as a literal and metaphorical framework for analyzing archives of migration by illuminating the interplay between migrants’ identities, their larger social networks, and the legal, cultural, and linguistic translations they enact and endure. The piece begins by developing theoretical insights from two works of literature: Valeria Luiselli's writings about her experiences as a volunteer interpreter for child migrants and Yuri Herrera's novels reflecting on migrancy as a form of evolving self-translation between languages and cultures. These literary perspectives on translation as an essential component of migrant experience emphasize the hybrid, translational experiences of migrants and the paradoxical, but also resilient, nature of their identities and agency. We then bring these theories to bear as methodology and analyze a 1954 document from the archives of South Africa's Witwatersrand Native Labour Association (WNLA) that translated and transcribed Malawians’ messages to their mineworker family members in South Africa. We consider how the lived experience of “being in translation” was both common and differentiated between migrants and their “left-behind” family members. Ultimately, our intervention offers an interdisciplinary approach to migration studies that bridges literature, history, and cultural analysis. This perspective not only underscores how translation practices are essential to the experience of migration but also helps to (re)constitute migration histories, in turn contributing to the archives and narratives that navigate the complex terrain of mobility, identity, and cultural mediation.

High-grade gold ore from the Witwatersrand. Photo by Robert M. Lavinsky.