Towards a dictionary of urban untranslatables
... contexts. Focusing on phenomena such as Russian ‘ЖКХ-арт’ (municipal utility art), French ‘flânerie’, Indian ‘jugaad’, Spanish ‘tertúlia’, and Argentine ‘merendero’, the authors demonstrate that these concepts resist translation due to their embeddedness in local collective memory and everyday practices. The central thesis is that urban texts are fundamentally ‘untranslatable’ because of their multimodal nature (combining verbal, visual, and spatial elements),...