Translatability as a structural response to epistemic injustice

This paper approaches epistemic injustice through the lens of translation in order to elucidate its hermeneutical and structural dimensions. It contributes to ongoing debates concerning how epistemic injustice might be addressed in structural terms, moving beyond approaches that locate the primary remedy at the level of individual epistemic virtue. Focusing on hermeneutical injustice, the paper endorses a broader understanding that encompasses not only cases of insufficiency but also cases in which available hermeneutical resources are inoperative. It argues that many instances of hermeneutical injustice are best understood not as failures of understanding, but as failures of translation, in which experience is rendered intelligible through interpretive frameworks that distort, domesticate, or neutralise meaning. Drawing on a cross-reading of Walter Benjamin and Antonio Gramsci, the paper articulates the concept of epistemic translatability, understood not as a criterion of equivalence or communicative success, but as a field of relational practices oriented towards the pragmatic construction of mutual intelligibility. On this view, translation produces understanding by operating across conceptual, institutional, material, and political levels. This framework enables a structural account of hermeneutical injustice and supports strategies for intervention that target its institutional dimension rather than individual epistemic virtues.