An Existentialist Response to Babel Fish

One question that linguistic justice activists and scholars often hear is whether we should continue to worry about linguistic injustice given that rapidly developing technologies will soon provide us with cheap and instantaneous translation. After articulating various iterations of this question, I show that in its most radical form, it can only be answered with the adoption of an existentialist account of linguistic agency. I argue that as opposed to functionalist accounts which focus on communication, identity, or worldview aspects of linguistic agency, an existential account accommodates sentence production as a key feature of linguistic agency. As such, the latter explains why linguistic injustice will continue to exist in the presence of the best conceivable translation technologies. That is, the technology to think in one language and speak in another may allow us to overcome communication and identity-related injustices, but alienation from our own utterances as an underlying cause of linguistic injustice will then become a universal problem for all.