Translating sustainability between development ambitions and ecological limits

Abstract

conceal the conflicts that environmental policy must confront. Development promises circulate through institutional vocabularies that present economic expansion, social inclusion, and ecological conservation as mutually compatible. Their translation requires decisions about what sustainability means, whose knowledge counts, and which qualifications remain visible. This conceptual article examines those decisions through an interdisciplinary synthesis of translation studies, environmental communication, and research on the Sustainable Development Goals. It distinguishes interlingual translation from the broader conversion of knowledge into policy and develops an account of translation as a practice of public accountability. The discussion connects ecological approaches to translation with narrative framing, development studies, and environmental justice. Constructed English–Arabic examples demonstrate how changes in modality, agency, measurement, and temporal reference can alter environmental commitments without producing conspicuous grammatical errors. Particular attention is given to the distinction between sustained growth and ecological sustainability, the translation of conservation terminology, and the representation of community knowledge. The article also examines the environmental and labour implications of translation technologies. It proposes a framework for commissioning, translating, reviewing, and evaluating sustainability communication, with separate criteria for textual accuracy, participation, and ecological evidence. The central argument is that responsible translation should preserve contestable commitments and enable affected communities to question them. Translation cannot itself reconcile unlimited expansion with ecological limits, but it can make the assumptions and consequences of development choices available for multilingual scrutiny. The proposed framework generates research questions for future corpus, reception, and organisational studies.