In recent years, critiques of human exceptionalism and extractivism have prompted scholars to reconsider the role of translation as a communicative practice capable of engaging with nonhuman voices. Dominant strands of Western thought, from Descartes to Heidegger, have long reinforced the perceived superiority of humans over other forms of life and expression. Challenging this hierarchy requires not only rethinking human–nonhuman relations but also reconsidering how communication itself is understood within translation studies.

From a semiotic perspective, translation is not merely the transformation of language from one linguistic context to another by human translators or machines. Rather, translation can be understood more broadly as the interpretation and mediation of signs across different communicative systems. Such a perspective opens the possibility of considering how translation might operate beyond strictly human linguistic exchanges. As Irene Pepperberg argues, “interspecies communication would be a possible window on the minds of animals” (181), yet such a window remains partial, inevitably filtered through anthropocentric modes of perception and expression. Within literary discourse, human representations of animal communication may therefore be understood as a form of symbolic interspecies translation that gestures toward nonhuman subjectivity while remaining constrained by human semiotic systems.

In this sense, the translation of nonhuman voice becomes one of the central concerns within eco-translation, as it is closely connected to the rehabilitation of nonhuman subjectivity and the recognition of difference between human and nonhuman modes of being. Yet scholarly attention in translation studies has focused almost exclusively on human voices, leaving the translational representation of nonhuman agents largely unexplored. This panel therefore seeks to examine how nonhuman voice can be conceptualized from post-anthropocentric and non-anthropomorphic perspectives, and how translation might engage with nonhuman expression in ethical and creative ways.