Already the possibility of English language concepts, in this case the planning concept “route,” to function in a Swedish context is debatable and serves as a starting point for the discussion of this article. However, the transdiscursive potential of the Swedish concept stråk gradually comes into the foreground of the argument and replaces the difficulties of the English concept as the main point of the article. Through reflecting on stråk, this article hopes to shed some light not only on how similar words mean different things in different languages, but also on how this could make us either blind to the possibilities of concepts already available in our vocabulary or blinded by the difficulties of translation. Can the concept of stråk add to our understanding of the lived space of institutionalized human movement, or is its appearance in the Swedish language just a linguistic quirk?
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