Sociology has recently started to challenge the exclusion of nonhuman animals from its object of study. Language, which traditionally served to assert human domination over nature and the other animals, emerges in this context as a key medium through which previously silenced voices can be heard, contributing to devise more respectful ways of coexisting. This article deploys the conceptual and methodological framework of a translational sociology to investigate how the human-animal linguistic divide is presently being reexamined in this light, inquiring into how nonhuman animals are translated into the language of science, the language of justice and the language of literature, as well as pursuing relevant connexions between them. By putting language at the centre of an exploration of human–animal relations, it relates different cognitive, ethical and aesthetic dimensions to gain unique perspectives on complex social phenomena which straddle across the natural sciences, the social sciences and the humanities.
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