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With Souleymane Bachir Diagne In the biblical story of Babel, the first human beings spoke a single language, the Adamic language - that of Adam and Eve. But they showed vanity by building a giant tower that reached the sky. As punishment, God destroyed the tower and, above all, he established the multiplicity of languages in order to sow confusion among them, confusion that is called “Babel” in Hebrew. Since then, to understand each other, we must translate. Souleyman Bachir Diagne is a Senegalese philosopher who teaches at Columbia University in New York. In his latest book De langue à langue (Albin Michel, 2022), he explores the political and philosophical issues that translation carries. He rejects the idea that certain terms or certain texts would not be translatable, or not translatable by just anyone, and he draws on the experience of translation to think concretely about the universal. How does translation reflect the unequal relationships that exist between languages? Can it be an act of betrayal or appropriation? Can everything be translated? REFERENCES: Souleymane Bachir Diagne, From Language to Language. The Hospitality of Translation, Albin Michel, 2022 Pierre Bourdieu, The Economics of Linguistic Exchanges, French Language, Paris, Larousse, No. 34, May 1977 Antoine Berman, The Test of the Foreigner. Gallimard, 1984 Barbara Cassin (dir.), European Vocabulary of Philosophies: Dictionary of the Untranslatable. Seuil, 2004 Casanova Pascale, The World Language. Translation and domination, Le Seuil, 2015 Birago Diop, The tales of Amadou Koumba, Fasquelle, 1947 Bernard Dadié, The tales of Koutou-as-Samala, Présence africaine, 1982 Paul Ricoeur, On translation, Les belles lettres, 2016 Subscribe to the ARTE channel / @arte Follow us on social media! Facebook: / artetv Twitter: / artefr Instagram: / artefr