This session’s title plays on the statement made some time ago by the Bakhtinian Peter Hitchcock: “Translators are the unacknowledged legislators of the world” (1993). Times have changed since then but, for better or for worse, translators continue to traffic in meaning, and profit or suffer from the consequences as the case may be. The session’s participants will offer varying perspectives on this theme and argue that today’s growing acknowledgment of translators’ work may lead to detrimental traffic control or facilitate global circulation of translations, or even allow imaginary and often ludic concepts of translators as part of a constructed creative hyper-network. Michael Epstein has advanced the idea of transpersonal authorship, within which translators obviously fit, by suggesting that “[t]here is so much talk of hypertext now. But what about hyper-authors?” (2000). As meaning traffickers translators stand to be arrested and even killed but also to aid, and more and more often to participate, in the flow of meaning across borders of all kinds be they geographical, political, cultural, societal, technological, imaginary, or all at the same time.
