The Play of Worlds — Toward a Plural Ontology of Relation: 4 Translation as Ontological Interface — The Movement of Sense

If incommensurability marks the divergence of worlds, then translation is the gesture that reaches across it — not to bridge the gap, but to inhabit it. In the relational cosmos, translation is not a transfer of meaning from one code to another but an act of ontological interface: a play between distinct ways of constraining and actualising potential. It is not about correspondence but about coordination — how one world’s rhythm can, for a moment, touch another’s without collapsing their difference.

Traditional metaphors of translation presume stability — fixed meanings, discrete languages, equivalences to be found. But worlds do not communicate through equivalence; they meet through resonance. The translator, in this deeper sense, does not carry messages between domains but tunes into the interstitial field where meanings deform, recombine, and reorient. Translation is a relational improvisation: it sustains communication by accepting that perfect understanding is neither possible nor desirable.

Every act of translation, then, is also an act of creation. When Enlightenment rationality encounters Indigenous cosmology, when poetic imagination refracts scientific theory, or when digital code rearticulates bodily gesture, something new emerges — a third sense that belongs fully to neither world. Translation generates hybrid spaces of potential, partial articulations where worlds learn to breathe together. These are not zones of synthesis but of semiotic elasticity: the capacity of relation itself to stretch without tearing.

Such elasticity, however, demands care. To translate without reflexivity risks domination — the subsumption of one world’s logic by another’s. The colonial project, for instance, functioned as an apparatus of translation without reciprocity: a machinery for converting plural worldings into a single universal frame. A relational ethics of translation begins instead from asymmetry — from the acknowledgement that each world’s coherence depends on limits that cannot be fully traversed. The translator’s task is not to erase these limits, but to make them audible.

In this sense, translation is an ecological act. It participates in the metabolism of worlds, enabling energy and information to circulate across ontological membranes without total assimilation. It keeps the cosmos open — sustaining difference through communication, and communication through difference.

Translation as ontological interface thus reveals the deeper condition of all meaning: that it is always in motion, always negotiated, always transforming as it moves between relational fields. To translate is to play with the edges of the possible — to engage the living tension where sense itself becomes the medium of becoming.