Introduction. Fruit from a fallen tree. Translation as a blueprint for the post-disciplinary university

The contemporary university is still organized around nineteenth-century principles shaped by the second industrial revolution. These views no longer fit current conditions of knowledge production and use. Over recent decades, digital media, automation, and global communication have altered how knowledge is generated, circulated, and combined across domains. The traditional tree of science no longer accounts for these transformations. Translation has been central to the development of science, culture, and institutions. It operates according to a different epistemological model, one that treats knowledge as relational, transformative, and historically continuous. It enables connection without standardization and change without loss. From this position, familiar academic oppositions become visible as structural artifacts. Divisions between theory and practice, arts and sciences, translation and interpreting organize the institutional field but distort intellectual work. Current curricular responses rely on inertia and metric-based governance. They overlook the multimodal, multilectal, and socially and cognitively situated nature of communication. Understood epistemologically rather than as a discipline, translation can reframe the university as a whole. It accommodates complexity and supports integration, dialogue, and structured openness in an interdependent, post-industrial society.