Natures in Translation: AI, Ethics and Environmental Conservation
The question of who can speak on behalf of the other-than-human world has been central to the development of environmental studies as well as animal and plant studies (Franks 2019; Gagliano, 2013; Imhoff & Quirós, 2022; Kohn, 2013; Marder, 2014; Meijer, 2019; Simard, 2021; Thomsen et al., 2023, You, 2024). As new AI technologies promise to translate animal and plant communications into human language(s), these questions are also of increasing importance to biologists, ethologists, humanities scholars and animal conservation actors. In their promotional and public-facing discourse, AI initiatives such as Earth Species Project and Cetacean Translation Initiative (CETI) envision a future where humans might bridge the communication gap between themselves and non-human species with AI technologies (Bakker, 2022; Rodríguez-Garavito et al., 2025; Rutz et al., 2023). The intellectual, corporate and media narratives articulated around the generative AI technologies involved promise not only to improve human understanding of the natural world, but to also catalyse a cultural shift in how we interact with non-human species and the environment. This interdisciplinary conference explores the ethical implications of AI-assisted animal translation for environmental conservation and human-environmental relations. How might the use of AI to translate more-than-human communication help or hinder environmental conservation practices within a multispecies justice framework?
Translation, whether it takes place across human or more-than-human sign systems, is not a neutral act of transmission or communication, but a situated and relational activity which actively shapes our understanding of difference (Venuti, 2018). When practiced ethically and critically, translation facilitates attunement to diverse voices and expands our cultural repertoires of knowing. However, translation scholars have also revealed the extent to which ‘domesticating’ translation norms and practices can collide with histories of extraction, colonialism, domination and misrepresentation (Inghilleri, 2018; Tachtiris, 2024; Samoyault, 2020, Venuti 2018). More recently, translation and ecosemiotic scholars have turned their attention to the role of translation in mediating ecosemiotic systems and in shaping our relation to the environment (Cronin, 2017; Grass, 2025; Laura Diamanti, 2022; Marais, 2018; Susam-Saraeva, 2025; Grass, 2024; Zengiaro, 2025). In a post-Darwinian historical context where, as David Abram argues, a perception of language as code has been used to argue for the superiority of the human species in relation to other animals, how can we ensure that AI-translation technologies for non-human animals do not reproduce such logocentric hierarchies? (Abram, 1997; Webb 2025) Given that the development of these technologies intersects with broader processes of neoliberalisation of nature in which ecological relations become sites of data extraction, commodification and market‑driven optimisation, how might AI-assisted translation tools serve other-than-humans rather than reinforce human voices and neoliberal designs?
This is not scientists’ first attempt at communicating with other-than-human species (Hogan, 2020; Lilly, 1967). Such communication experiments, often done in controlled settings, relied on logocentric assumptions about what constitutes meaningful communication which led to extensive harm done to non-human animals (Peters, 2020). Framings of AI-enabled animal translation in the media through “first contact” narratives also often overlook the rich and diverse Indigenous knowledge systems that have sought to develop more sustainable, relational means of communication with the non-human world. These knowledge systems that embed other-than-human personhood in language, culture, and practice offer crucial epistemological alternatives to models of extractions which position animals primarily as objects of scientific inquiry or technological intervention (Kimmerer, 2013; TallBear, 2015; Todd, 2014).
In addition, thinkers such as Donna Haraway, Vinciane Despret, Eileen Crist, and Glen Coulthard have similarly challenged dominant Western frameworks of human-non-human animal relations, advocating for modes of attention, co-becoming, and political recognition that foreground interspecies entanglement and multispecies justice. Together, these diverse bodies of scholarship remind us that the question of how to think, speak, and live with animal others can be approached from multiple intellectual, linguistic and cultural traditions across time and place (Celermajer et al., 2021; Crist, 1999; Crist, 2019; Despret, 2016; Haraway, 2016; Heise, 2008; Heise, 2024).
At this conference, we invite perspectives from translation studies, animal behaviour science, philosophy, law, literature, computer science, social science, digital humanities and related fields to address urgent questions relating to the use of AI for environmental conservation purposes. Who has authority to speak for non-human animals? How do these technologies extract, process and interpret data, and what assumptions do they embed about animal communication? What conditions would allow these technologies to contribute to a more equitable listening culture, and how might we identify and address the logocentric or anthropocentric assumptions embedded in their design? What might a more expansive understanding of “listening” at the intersection of environmental conservation, translation studies, critical AI studies and media theory entail? What broader inter-disciplinary framework and collaborations can be developed to tackle these important epistemological, ethical, and ecological questions?
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