Translation played a key role in anarchist propaganda at the turn of the 20th century, and most militants on both sides of the Atlantic were involved in numerous translating activities, from and into different languages, throughout their lifetimes. Anarchist resistance culture refused to distinguish between ends and means, and conceived of the principle as inseparable from the act (COHN, 2014). Just as art had to prefigure a better world for the future, so did translation participate in generating those social changes anarchists demanded from their political lives. These activists circulated around the world as political exiles, economic migrants or public speakers (FERRETTI, 2018, 114), so that translation was key to their professional and personal lives. For them, translation was not simply a means to participate in the ongoing international debate on anarchism, but mostly a way to disseminate ‘resisting’ texts and practices by fellow comrades across the world. The translation of Francisco Ferrer’s La Escuela Moderna (1908) into American English is one such example.
First published in Emma Goldman’s journal Mother Earth, in November 1909, under the title “The Modern School,” the translation was reprinted as a pamphlet by Modern Earth Publishing Association as well as by an independent publisher based in Chicago the same year. The work of American poet, translator and activist Voltairine de Cleyre (1866-1912), “The Modern School” was translated from a French version penned by the Catalan pedagogue himself. The Spanish manuscript, composed at around the same time as the French self-translation, remained unpublished during Ferrer’s lifetime.1 Conversely, the French version, titled “La rénovation de l’école,” inaugurated the first issue of L’École rénovée, an ephemeral monthly journal which Ferrer founded in Brussels, in April 1908, before moving its headquarters to Paris, in January 1909. Permanently discontinued in November 1909, immediately after Ferrer’s execution, the francophone journal published the French version of one chapter only – Capítulo IX, “La renovación de la escuela” – of the much longer essay in Spanish. Consequently, de Cleyre’s 1909 translation offered its American audience only a partial and, so to speak, ‘second-hand’ rendition of Ferrer’s radical pedagogy. De Cleyre’s name did not appear as the translator in Goldman’s journal (or in the subsequently published pamphlets), nor was the French source mentioned anywhere.2 The first ‘complete’ translation into English directly from Spanish came out in London, in 1913, the work of Joseph McCabe, a former Franciscan monk who had converted to atheism.3
The case of La Escuela Moderna demonstrates how the traditional binary and unidirectional relationship between source and target text that characterizes the Western model of translation (DELABASTITA, 2008), as well as vertical perceptions of dominant vs. minor tongues (BELLOS, 2012), have to be discarded in the context of anarchist translation. Since classical anarchism (1860-1945) propounded a cosmopolitan, borderless and non-hierarchical idea of the nation, translation was an anarchistic practice par excellence. By stressing the multipartite nature of most translating processes and legitimizing all the languages involved, regardless of their geopolitical status, anarchist translation dismissed any preconceived ideas against indirect, partial or abridged translation to enact a praxis of resistance which was ubiquitous and all-pervasive (BLUMCZYNSKI, 2016).4 As a result, the methodology for the analysis of anarchist translation has to be adjusted accordingly, to include more than one source text (in the case under scrutiny, a Spanish ‘primary’ source text, SST, and a French ‘secondary’ source text, FST) as well as different, albeit quasi synchronous, target texts, TTs (the version first published in Mother Earth alongside those which appeared separately, with only minor changes, as pamphlets). Different challenges have to be faced, such as the impossibility to identify one single ‘original’, or rather the irrelevance of such an identification, as well as instances of ‘originals’ circulated only after the international success of their translation(s) (DERRIDA, 1998).
Notions of authority and the woman translator’s (in)visibility (VENUTI, 1995, 1-34; SIMON, 1996, 14-5) also have to be reconsidered in the context of anarchist discourse. At the time of Ferrer’s death, legislation on copyright, authorship and intellectual property was just starting to set limits to the free circulation of cultural capital. Anarchist militants acted in complete disavowal of geographical, political and linguistic barriers, constantly trespassing those same borders that they perceived as arbitrary, artificial, and ultimately non-existent. In so doing, they contributed to a reassessment of widely practiced forms of translation, such as indirect or relay translation (ASSIS ROSA et al., 2019, 1-16 ; ST. ANDRÉ, 2020, 470-3).5 Often disparaged as a vicarious and secondary practice, translation as enacted by anarchist militants at the turn of the 20th century was a complex intertextual and transnational phenomenon. While it lasted, it favored cross-linguistic and cross-cultural exchange among faraway countries, thus creating an imagined ‘resisting’ community based on voluntary, often anonymous, contributions and mutual, although usually ‘de-authorized,’ textual collaboration (MAINER, 2017, 185-6).
Francisco Ferrer and the Modern School Movement
A self-taught educator and free-thinker, Francisco Ferrer was born on the outskirts of Barcelona in 1859. Starting from the mid-19th century onwards, the city of Barcelona had expanded massively. With migrants arriving from neighboring rural regions in search of fortune, anarchism became the city’s dominant ideology among the working classes (YEOMAN, 2022, 21-2). Ferrer traveled back and forth from France to Cataluña as a railway ticket inspector, thus acquiring his first political and multilingual education. While spending fifteen years in France, from 1885 to 1900, he converted from republicanism to anarchism. Upon his return to Barcelona in 1901, he founded the first Escuela Moderna, an experiment in rationalist and libertarian education with its annexed publishing house that printed non-conventional textbooks and radical pamphlets, mostly in translation. Inspired by the pedagogical theories of Rousseau, Pestalozzi, Kropotkin and Tolstoy, Ferrer believed in shifting the educational focus from instruction to the process of learning, and prioritizing children’s rights by removing any form of coercion, evaluation or punishment from the school system. To Ferrer, State and Church education, as realized in contemporary Spain, had been equally noxious, in that both institutions had perpetuated their own privileges instead of promoting the emancipation of the child from servitude, superstition and prejudice (AVRICH, 1980, 8).
The execution of Ferrer by firing squad in the Montjuïc fortress on October 13, 1909, under the accusation of engineering the Catalonian insurrection against the Moroccan war, triggered a wave of indignation around the world, as the anarchist teacher and publisher, by then a non-resistant and a pacifist, was widely believed to be innocent and a victim of a rigged trial. Demonstrations spread across three continents and a protest movement propagating his educational principles sprouted in the Americas, North Africa and Europe, where a number of Modern Schools were started. Although respected within the anarchist and freethought movements, Ferrer was neither a theorist nor a charismatic orator. Neither was his idea of an Escuela Moderna ‘original,’ as he had drawn extensively on both precursors and contemporaries before implanting it in Barcelona. Paul Robin’s educational experiment at the Cempuis orphanage had been one such influence, alongside the Universités Populaires, which were started in Paris at the turn of the century and soon spread across France, offering free lectures to mostly working-class audiences (AVRICH, 1980, 19-22). The outcry following Ferrer’s death, however, turned the translation of his thought, and educational practice, into a major transnational event.
In the United States, just as in Europe, Ferrer’s execution transformed the man into a martyr for the cause of anticlericalism, ‘integral’ education and social justice (BRAY, 2019, 235-251).6 People of different political stripes, from liberals to socialists, from freethinkers to sex reformers, gathered to protest against state violence; as early as June 3, 1910, the Francisco Ferrer Association was founded. Among its activities, the Association published literature on Ferrer and organized annual meetings on the anniversary of his death. It also prompted the first North-American Modern Schools to open. A staple of anarchist ideology, education was viewed as the means through which the emancipation from ignorance must be achieved; literacy was, in fact, the main road to revolution (YEOMAN, 2022, 131-4). Although some were only Sunday schools and most only lasted a few years, the Ferrer Modern School at Stelton (1915-1953) and the Mohegan Modern School (1924-1941) bore long-lived testimony to the legacy of Ferrer’s pedagogy in the US (IURLANO, 2000, 241-322). Including Esperanto among the subjects taught, some of these Modern Schools even employed the native languages of the immigrant communities in their areas, such as German, Yiddish, Czech, Italian and Spanish (AVRICH, 1980, 34-68).
It was the publication of Voltairine de Cleyre’s translation in the immediate aftermath of Ferrer’s death which created the conditions for the movement to start in the US. The translating project was undertaken and carried out in great haste. It had to ride the wave of international outrage following Ferrer’s court-martialing to rescue his printed material from impending destruction. The Spanish government, in fact, soon proceeded to suppress what was left of the Barcelona publishing house. With unprecedented censorial fury, all its publications were withdrawn from circulation and none of them would have survived were it not for its partial, abridged, indirect translations. As de Cleyre herself admitted:
So far, I am sorry to say, I have not succeeded in getting copies of these [the Escuela Moderna] manuals; the Spanish government confiscated most of them, and has probably destroyed them. Still there are some uncaptured sets (one is already in the British Museum) and I make no doubt that within a year or so we shall have translations of most of them. (“Francisco Ferrer”, 314)
Voltairine de Cleyre’s Translations: An Anarchist Resistance Practice
Voltairine de Cleyre was one of the most radical and passionate American anarchist intellectuals of her time. Although little known today, she was a prolific and versatile writer, producing a number of essays, short stories, poems and public speeches in her short life. On top of that, she was also an active translator from French (a language she had acquired from her father, an immigrant to the US) and Yiddish (a language she learned from her pupils while teaching English to the Jewish immigrant communities in Philadelphia and Chicago). Translation was to de Cleyre a way of disseminating anarchist literature from fellow comrades around the world, but it was also a vehicle for her own creative writing. Deeply interested in the theory and practice of translation, she demonstrated uncommon attention to the syntax, lexicon and phonetics of language(s) as well as to its social and political function. Multilingualism and translation thus became core elements of her own aesthetics, which was indistinguishable from her politics.7
De Cleyre’s major accomplishment as a translator is the American version of Jean Grave’s La Société mourante et l’anarchie (1893), first published in San Francisco in 1899, with the title Moribund Society and Anarchy. After meeting Grave in person in London in 1897, she agreed to translate the notorious book for which the author had stood trial and been sentenced to two years in prison. The translation of Grave’s volume gave her the opportunity to engage in conversation with the French intellectual, express her ideas and even dissent from the author’s positions in the paratextual apparatus (in the added preface and footnotes, she clearly distanced herself from Grave’s communist anarchism) (DE CLEYRE, “Preface”, ii). In so doing, she participated in the transnational discourse on the different forms of anarchism and their actual practicability.
Similarly, the translation of Ferrer’s essay was a way to posthumously interact with the Catalan libertarian pedagogue on the necessity of a secular education. On the first anniversary of Ferrer’s death, de Cleyre addressed a memorial meeting in upstate New York, and later published two essays, “Francisco Ferrer” (1910) and “Modern Educational Reform” (1910), both dedicated to the Catalan teacher. She was also briefly involved with the Chicago Modern School (1910-1911) experiment, which she helped found, before becoming disillusioned and abandoning it.8 De Cleyre and Ferrer shared a professional interest in education (she had been a teacher of English to adults for most of her life; he had developed an interest in pedagogy while in exile in France, where teaching Spanish became his main source of income) and a hatred of the Catholic Church and its authoritarian methods of instruction (she had been educated in a convent in Ontario and received her dose of “hell-fire threats”;9 he was a self-professed atheist).
Like Ferrer, de Cleyre believed that public schools were no better than religious schools, in that they only taught how to rely on “the barbaric relics of a dead time,” forcing obedience on the children instead of encouraging their assertive spirit (“Francisco Ferrer”, 309; 312). She also agreed with him that educational enlightenment should precede political transformation and that a reform of the school system should include the training of the body as well as the mind, the direct contact with nature, the abolition of any form of rigid discipline, and most of all the eradication of that “revolting patriotism […] whereby children learn to be proud of their country, not for its contribution to the general enlightenment of humanity, but for its crimes against humanity.” (“Modern Educational Reform”, 338). Ferrer too criticized the textbooks in use in Spanish schools and, through his own publishing house, printed educational materials, anarchist books and literary translations, while at the same time funding anarchist undertakings in France and Spain. Among the books Ferrer had translated into Spanish for adoption in his schools is Jean Grave’s Les Aventures de Nono (1901), a short poem in prose for the education of children in which “the delights of the land of Autonomy” are contraposed to “the horrors of the kingdom of Argirocracy.”10 In a nutshell, both Ferrer and de Cleyre worked for the creation, in their respective native countries, of alternative narratives that competed with hegemonic historiography in an attempt to subvert and replace it. For this purpose, they drew on and translated a number of works, both theoretical and poetic, by fellow activists around the world, thus contributing not only to the free circulation of ideas, but also the enrichment of their own national literatures.
The First English Translation of La Escuela Moderna
Some unexpected elements come to the fore in an analysis of de Cleyre’s translation based on a tripartite model (FST, SST and ATT). The most striking is a tendency to downsize the belligerent language of the FST and SST. Since de Cleyre was anything but conciliatory in her own writings, the disappearance of the term violence/violencia from the ATT comes as a surprise and can only be attributed to what scholars of corpus linguistics call “universals of translation,” i.e., those linguistic features, such as lexical simplification, explicitation, and normalization, typically occurring in translated rather than original texts.11 As is well-known, with the invention of dynamite in 1866, the anarchist doctrine of ‘propaganda by the deed’ gained momentum while the image of the nihilistic revolutionary started to take shape. The term violence/violencia, therefore, which Ferrer used to refer to state and church education, was commonly associated with anarchism at the time de Cleyre’s translation came out (BRIGSTOCKE, 2018, 76-77). It is possible that the translator stayed away from it in order to avoid its derogatory conflation with anarchism. Not to mention that de Cleyre herself, a strenuous pacifist and non-resistant, abhorred violence. Whereas in the FST and SST the noun appears five times, not even once does it show up in the American version, where it is rendered either as constraint or restraint. The lexical unit is preserved only once in the American translation, when it is used as a verb (to violate). Here follow two examples of the aforementioned pattern:
|
FST |
SST |
ATT |
|
À supprimer les violences |
a suprimir las violencias |
to overcome restraint |
|
La suppression de la violence |
la supresión de una violencia |
the overcoming of some constraint |
Also, whenever the term éducateur/educator occurs in the FST and SST, the person who educates, i.e., the ‘educator,’ is always replaced, in the ATT, by the action and/or process of educating, i.e., ‘education.’ In so doing, the responsibility for the misdoings of pedagogy is de-personalized and abstractly attributed to the discipline itself rather than to its single practitioners. Here follows one example:
|
FST |
SST |
ATT |
|
L’éducateur impose, oblige, violente toujours |
El educator impone, obliga, violenta siempre |
Education is always imposing, violating, constraining |
Additionally, the rhetorical language of Ferrer, as displayed in both the French and Spanish versions, is usually toned down and simplified in the American translation, where highly charged expressions such as “chemin de la vérité/ terreno verdadero” are turned by de Cleyre into the much plainer, non-metaphorical locution “[being] in the right.” Similarly, notice here the following list of three verbs, their powerful accumulative effect substituted in the American translation by just one noun:
|
FST |
SST |
ATT |
|
Eduquer équivaut aujourd’hui à dresser, entraîner, domestiquer |
Educa equivale actualmente a domar, adiestrar, domesticas |
The education of today is nothing more than drill |
On the other hand, the expression “L’émancipation de l’enfant/la emancipación del niño,” with its overtly liberating power, is rendered in American-English as “the deliverance of the child,” which broadens the semantic field, thus creating an ambiguity not intended in the FST and SST.
In another passage, the emphasis of the French and Spanish superlative disappears from the American version, thus diminishing the overall indictment of church and state education in Ferrer’s emphatic diction.
|
FST |
SST |
ATT |
|
instruments plus puissants et plus parfaits de domination |
instrumentos màs poderosos and perfectos de dominación |
powerful and perfect instruments of domination |
Given that de Cleyre was even more acrimonious, if possible, than Ferrer in her attacks against the Catholic Church, her ‘modesty’ in translating “The Modern School” appears unjustified. In her essay titled “Francisco Ferrer”, for instance, she goes on at length to describe the corruption of the Spanish church which, in her words, has acquired its riches through the sale of indulgences, and sarcastically opposes the Virgin of Toledo, with her luxurious robes, to the pugnacious humility of “Our Lady the Workingwoman of Spain, ahungered.” (“Francisco Ferrer”, 319-20) In light of de Cleyre’s vehemently secularist stance, some of the translating choices so far discussed appear inexplicable, and ascribable solely to “universals of translation,” haste, or stylistic idiosyncrasy.
In contrast with the previously mentioned examples, however, there is one case in the ATT of lexical complexification, instead of the more common normalization. That happens when de Cleyre translates the verb dominer/dominar with the American verb to enslave.
|
FST |
SST |
ATT |
|
ceux qui veulent dominer l’individu |
los que quieren dominar al individuo |
those who wish to enslave the individual |
Such a semantic addition to the source text(s) is particularly significant in the context of post-Civil War America as the metaphor of slavery was a favorite one in de Cleyre’s writing. One of her most famous feminist-anarchist essays, in fact, “Sex Slavery” (1890), is entirely constructed around the notion of (female) sex as ‘slavery.’ That the question of slavery, and the relation between language and power, was key to de Cleyre’s thought and action (she had been born a year after the end of the Civil War and her maternal grandfather had been an active abolitionist) is further demonstrated by its resurfacing in the middle of her discourse on education. While discussing “Spanish ignorance,” in fact, she writes:
America has not too much to boast in the way of its learning; but yet it has that much of common knowledge and common education that it does not enter into our minds to conceive of a population 68% of which are unable to read and write, and a good share of the remaining 32% can only read, not write; neither does it at all enter our heads to think that of this 32% of the better informed, the most powerful contingent is composed of those whose distinct, avowed and deliberate purpose it is to keep the ignorant ignorant. (“Francisco Ferrer”, 299)
After this severe condemnation of Spanish schooling, she proceeds in her invective against the Spanish government and church, only to realize, parenthetically – “(save in the case of negro slaves)” – that not even the American government and church were exempt from having “constituted themselves a conspiratical force to keep out enlightenment.” (ibid., 320) The shame of recent American history, guilty of having deprived fellow human beings not only of their right to liberty but also to literacy, thus slips through the net of de Cleyre’s discourse on education, making its implicit premise – the superiority of the American school system over the Spanish – falter. In this way, de Cleyre’s translation of Ferrer’s pedagogy reveals how the potentially normative exercise of power is not exclusive to the ruling classes. Quite the opposite, any use of authority in language – even, alas, the anarchist-feminist translator’s – can involve prejudice and chauvinism. That is possibly why, different from her translation of Grave’s Moribund Society, de Cleyre renounced her authorship here in favor of anonymity. As she laconically wrote sometime later to Alexander Berkman, then editor of Mother Earth: “About the translator's name on my translation, it’s a matter of indifference to me. Do as you prefer.”12
Resisting Hierarchy, (Intellectual) Property, and Author-Ity
A number of theoretical considerations make translation, as enacted by anarchist militants at the turn of the 20th century, a quintessentially ‘resisting’ practice. First, anarchism dismissed the notion of origin, or any deterministic structure of governance, by refusing, at least ideally, hierarchy in its organization. An example of such a practice is de Cleyre’s translation of Jean Grave’s La Société mourante et l’anarchie in whose paratextual apparatus editor, translator and anonymous proofreader all intervene to comment on (or even disagree with) the source text regardless of their different status in the publishing industry. Similarly, the primary source text of de Cleyre’s translation of “The Modern School” is difficult to trace, the search becoming irrelevant in the context of its multiple subsequent iterations. These activists granted the ‘original’ no greater prestige than its derivatives.
Anarchist activists traveled across national borders, engaging with, and publishing journals and papers in host as well as home countries. As Benjamin Franks has noticed, “Anarchist internationalism meant, for instance, that activists in the Philippines, Japan and China were readily engaging with European fellow anarchist writers, translating European writers for domestic audiences, and similarly, publishing in American and French anarchist periodicals.” (FRANKS, 2018, 30) In so doing, they produced what Ordoñez defines “anti-political knowledge,” i.e., a type of knowledge directly generated by practical action and un-mediated by national politics (ORDOÑEZ, 2018, 75). In the process, solidarity and collegiality became instrumental beyond national and geographical borders. More specifically, in translating works whose source text(s) are today difficult (or impossible) to locate, these militants transcended the very idea that originating principles matter (or exist).13 Similarly, the concept of a linear process which moves from an authoritative principle, an archè, and leads to an ultimate end, a telos, is dismissed in anarchist theory just as it is in anarchist translation. Not only is a single source text often hard to find, as in the case just analyzed, but the target text itself is never final, in that any of its multiple incarnations is equally legitimate and has a right to circulate, regardless of where it was produced, in what language, or by whom.
Translation as realized by most anarchists at the turn of the 20th century, including de Cleyre, was always conceived as a plural, non-authoritarian, enterprise. A core concept in anarchist thought, horizontality found in the practice of translation its most fertile soil. By rejecting any top-down idea of single authorship in favor of collective, anonymous, or pseudonymous authoring, (JEPPESEN, 2018, 210) anarchist translation practiced horizontality and decentralization as its privileged way to relinquish authority altogether.14 As Cohn has shown about the newspapers of the Spanish CNT (Confederación Nacional de Trabajo), a great deal of anarchist poetry was signed pseudonymously or anonymously, “as if to answer Michel Foucault’s famous question, ‘What is an Author?’ with a resounding ‘who cares?’” (COHN, 2014, 41). Cohn’s main argument revolves around what is generally perceived as a clear-cut distinction between authors and readers, which, in the scholar’s view, became blurred in anarchist publications. The same process, however, is also true of authors and translators, who, together with editors, publishers, proofreaders, and readers transformed anarchist discourse into a potentially infinite, open-ended dialogue.
In refusing any notion of superior vs. inferior language, culture, or agency, these activists, de Cleyre and Ferrer among them, achieved what Sergi Mainer, commenting on 21st century translations from German into Spanish of Rote Zora, calls “strategic self-de-authorisation.”15 In Mainer’s view, textual practices in contemporary anarcha-feminist translation differ substantially from what are usually regarded as paradigmatic examples of feminist translation, such as textual intervention, translator’s visibility (in the paratext as well as within the text itself), or self-representation (MAINER, 2017, 182). On the contrary, by remaining unnamed, therefore invisible, these translators participated in the meaning-making process, subverting power relationships, facilitating cooperation, refusing hierarchy, ultimately turning translation into an instrument of conversation and contestation. In a similar way, Emily Apter has proposed the notion of “textual de-owning” in translation, to argue for the destabilization of the idea that authors of ‘originals’ be the sole owners of their literary property (APTER, 2013, 304).
Interestingly, de Cleyre’s anonymous, indirect and partial translation of Ferrer’s La Escuela Moderna was ‘plagiarized’ by the Chicago independent publisher Arthur Desmond, a.k.a. Richard Thurland, a.k.a. Gavin Gowrie,16 who reprinted it as a pamphlet without acknowledging her translating effort (or any of its previous publishers), and even tampered with it. At the end of the booklet, Desmond printed the following statement:
(Signed) FRANSESCO FERRER Y GUARDIA.
Shot to death by the tyrants of Spain October, 1909.
While violating any surviving illusion that literary property (be it writing or translating) is in fact ownable, the independent publisher appended to the translated text the misspelled name of the Catalan ‘Author,’ ironically reintroducing the concept of ‘signature’ in a practice which had totally disregarded it. In so doing, he symbolically restored to the deceased author his lost ownership (BARTHES, 1967) while in fact accomplishing the most complete expropriation of cultural capital.
Conclusion
As enacted by anarchist militants at the turn of the 20th century, translation refused verticality to implement circularity. A core concept in anarchist thought, revolution – captured in the metaphor of a continuous revolving motion (GORDON, 2018, 87) – meant, to these activists, the abolition of the state, the suppression of social classes or any form of domination, in favor of a radical transformation of society. In their view, revolution did not mean the substitution of one authoritarian system by another, but the liquidation of social and political oppression altogether. In attempting to achieve this goal, revolution could never be final; rather, it had to be a collectively liberating practice, i.e., a never-ending emancipatory process. By the same token, translation was never a unidirectional emanation from source to target text, or a top-down transfer from author to reader or from major to minor language, but occupied a blended space in which the isolation of cause from effect became virtually impossible.
While discussing what he defines as “ubiquitous translation,” Blumczynski also reaches a similar conclusion, although moving from different premises. Talking about circular configurations, in fact, the scholar stresses how it is not always possible to identify a simple binary relationship in translation. Highlighting the fact that an original only becomes such once it is translated, he also argues that translation is, by default, never finished, complete or final (BLUMCZYNSKI, 79; 81). In so doing, he admits that the transdisciplinarity of translation does not simply mean the trespassing of borders between disciplines, but the recognition that these borders are, in fact, non-existent. Similarly, anarchist translators, editors and publishers practiced transnationalism as a way to abolish barriers, rather than simply infringe them. In their view, the translation of Ferrer’s educational theory and practice into the Americas (and back) was not a way of proceeding from beginning to end, or vice versa, but of keeping the Catalan pedagogue’s thought in motion. Notions of original and derivative thus lost their teleological connotation, welcoming ubiquitous translation as the most effective means to annul geographical, linguistic and cultural barriers.