20.500.12556/DiRROS-31870 Translating the field Ethnographers observe and engage the field. Theylive with, play with, eat with, dance with, feel with,and, increasingly, write or film with their interlocu-tors. But most of all, they listen and converse. As theyenter the lingual ecology of their hosts through a rangeof practices of communication, ethnographers begin amulti-faceted journey of translation—as do their inter-locutors. Translation—of words, tone of voice, gestures,facial expressions, musical sounds, images, and a wholearray of signifiers—is always an act of interpretation,of translating worlds. Thus, how do we know if, for in-stance, the Tok Pisin bodi corresponds to the modernEnglish body? Furthermore, ethnographers and hostsocieties not only translate one word as entity into an-other and into academic technologies of representation(scholarly writing), they also inevitably translate andtransfix concepts, meanings, and classifications. Thus,language is grounded in cultural practices, ontologies,and epistemologies, which, in turn, are politically andlife-historically situated. As ethnographers, we dependon our interlocutors' gift of translating their world andknowledge to us, while we respond on the grounds ofour own lingual-epistemic-biographical situatedness.Our discussion of translation as a method of inquiry, un-derstanding, and knowledge exchange is based on theview that translation is an inevitable and fundamental relational practice. As such it deals with multiple epis-temological realms in which anthropologists find them-selves before, during, and after fieldwork. We hereunpack the significance of the language/s used in ourfieldwork in Germany, central Australia, and the EastSepik region in Papua New Guinea, demonstratingthrough concrete examples the work of ʻturning overʼwords and worlds. epistemology fieldwork methods indigenous concepts semiosphere translation epistemologija metode terenskega dela domorodni koncepti semiosfera prevajanje true false true Angleški jezik Slovenski jezik © 2026 The Author(s). Neznano 2026-08-13 14:46:35 2026-08-13 14:46:36 2026-08-14 03:48:14 0000-00-00 00:00:00 2026 0 0 str. 64-76 issue 1 Vol. 37 Apr. 2026 0000-00-00 Zaloznikova NiDoloceno NiDoloceno 0000-00-00 0000-00-00 0000-00-00 39:001.8 1035-8811 10.1111/taja.70074 286265347 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/taja.70074 1 062d8cfd-9715-11f1-af5a-001a4af901a5 https://dirros.openscience.si/Dokument.php?lang=slv&id=49533 Australian_J_of_Anthropology_-_2026_-_Telban_-_Translating_the_field.pdf Australian_J_of_Anthropology_-_2026_-_Telban_-_Translating_the_field.pdf 1 DB00C23B37E5775C6D83394AE5D7FD83 c05d80251af8aaeee6a18dc0f965205fbd4fdebd8fa9c05987926aa165c87eb8 bc8e72de-9715-11f1-af5a-001a4af901a5 https://dirros.openscience.si/Dokument.php?lang=slv&id=49534 Znanstvenoraziskovalni center Slovenske akademije znanosti in umetnosti 0 0 0