Abstract

This paper critically examines the epistemic and political complexities of translation within intergenerational dialogue, foregrounding its role in shaping collective well-being futures as highlighted in the special issue call. Drawing on Spivak’s (1988) seminal critique of “translation as betrayal” and Mignolo’s (2011) concept of epistemic pluriversality, it interrogates how ancestral and traditional knowledge is mediated across generational, linguistic, and institutional boundaries in Indigenous, diasporic, and colonially marginalised communities.
Intergenerational dialogue frequently positions youth as epistemic brokers who must translate elder narratives into forms legible to dominant epistemologies prevalent in academic, policy, or digital realms (Tuhiwai-Smith, 2021; Alcoff, 2007). This process often entails epistemic violence or flattening, risking the loss of embodied, affective, and place-based knowledges central to community resilience and identity (Tuck & Yang, 2012). Such dynamics reflect broader structures of knowledge extractivism and epistemicide that the special issue’s focus on structural injustice and transgenerational trauma seeks to challenge.
Through case studies including bilingual storytelling projects, oral history translation into youth advocacy, and digital archiving of indigenous knowledge, the article reveals tensions between accessibility and authenticity. It demonstrates how digital spaces, while potentially enabling, may simultaneously perpetuate colonial logics of control and commodification (Couldry & Mejias, 2019).
Rather than seeking perfect fidelity, the paper advocates for a decolonial ethics of relational translation that embraces non-equivalence, ambiguity, and community co-authorship (Tuck & Yang, 2014). Such practices resist extractivist tendencies and advance epistemic justice by centring community agency and dialogical processes that honour intergenerational knowledge as living, evolving, and inherently political.