Translating the animal

This article argues that the philosophical exclusion of animals from moral consideration rests less on their supposed lack of language than on a prior refusal to translate them. Reading J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello alongside Aristotle, Descartes, Heidegger, Freud, and Derrida, it reframes the question ‘Do animals have language?’ as an ethical one: by what right do we refuse to render their address legible? Drawing on recent ethology (Bekoff, Meijer) and on the ecological and biosemiotic turn in translation studies (Cronin, Marais), the article contends that responding to animal expression is already a form of translation – one grounded in sympathy rather than reason. Freud’s account of the symptom as a ‘failure of translation’ offers a model of meaning that takes shape before verbal articulation, while Derrida’s critique of Heidegger shows that the line between human ‘dying’ and animal ‘perishing’ is secured only by an appeal to logos. Following Barbara Cassin, the article proposes translation as a hospitable counterforce: not a perfect rendering of the animal, but a refusal of the exclusion that silence has been made to justify.