On Translation and Thinking

Earlier this year I went to a fantastic conference at LSU Law on the bicentennial of the 1825 Louisiana Civil Code. ¹ I found almost every panel and speaker interesting. I thoroughly enjoyed it. One of them, the esteemed international law specialist Vivian Curran, in the closing panel, had some interesting remarks about translation.

I got ChatCPT to do a quick and dirty overview:

Q: In the panel here, law professor Viviane Curran makes the following comments. This is from the Youtube transcript so there may be spelling errors. She refers to some someone named “Lakoff”, who is apparently a linguist or a psychologist or both, and whose argument is that thinking is translation, that thinking itself is translation. Can you think of who she means? What is name of the author and what books would have this theory?

A: Viviane Curran is almost certainly referring to George Lakoff, a cognitive linguist whose work intersects with psychology and philosophy. The idea that “thinking is translation” or that thought itself is structured by and through language and metaphor is central to Lakoff’s influential work in cognitive linguistics and conceptual metaphor theory.

Who is George Lakoff?

George Lakoff is a professor emeritus of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. His work explores how conceptual systems and reasoning are shaped by language, culture, and metaphor, particularly through embodied cognition—the view that cognitive processes are grounded in the body’s interactions with the world.

Core Idea: “Thinking is Translation”

Lakoff argues that thinking is deeply metaphorical and that we understand abstract concepts via metaphorical mappings from more concrete or embodied domains. This can be interpreted as a form of cognitive translation—translating experience, perception, and abstract concepts into linguistic forms.

Key Works Relevant to This Idea:

1. Metaphors We Live By (1980, with Mark Johnson)
   • This is Lakoff’s foundational work. It argues that metaphors are not just linguistic expressions but conceptual tools that structure how we think, reason, and perceive the world.
   • E.g., “Time is money”, “Argument is war”—these are metaphorical concepts we use unconsciously to structure thought.
2. Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (1999, with Mark Johnson)
   • Expands the theory of embodied cognition. The idea that all thinking is grounded in bodily experience and structured metaphorically implies that thought is inherently a form of translation—from embodied interaction to abstract reasoning.
3. Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind (1987)
   • Explores categorization and how language reflects mental structures. It ties into the idea that conceptual organization is itself a process of mediation or translation between perception and language.
4. Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think (1996, revised ed. 2002)
   • Less relevant to legal translation but applies Lakoff’s theories to political thought—demonstrating again how different metaphorical frameworks shape cognitive structures.

Relevance to Curran’s Point:

Curran is drawing on Lakoff’s cognitive-linguistic theory to suggest that:

• Comparative law is not just about mapping legal doctrines between systems.
• It is about translating between conceptual worlds—a semiotic and cognitive act, not merely linguistic.
• Legal comparison, like language, involves metaphorical and structural shifts between normative frameworks—thus “thinking itself is translation.”

This approach aligns with contemporary trends in comparative law as hermeneutics, as practiced by scholars like Curran, Pierre Legrand, and others who emphasize the non-neutrality and cultural embeddedness of legal concepts.

Would you like a more formal summary of Lakoff’s theory for inclusion in a legal or philosophical text?

8:32
those of us who are comparitists may think of ourselves and I think of
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myself this way as principally engaging in the activity of translation. I think
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comparison itself is an act of translation. And I wonder how many of
8:52
you uh might agree with me. And to go to a step even more general, if you um
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think of writers like LAKOFF who is
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he is either a linguist or a psychologist or both. Um his argument is
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that thinking is translation thinking itself. But certainly if you think of
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comparative law um it is it is a translation from what might one might
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think of as one semiodic system into another with all of all that that um
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implies.

1.  The Louisiana Civil Code of 1825: Content, Influences and Languages; Past and Future: Returning to my Louisiana Roots; My Failed Libertarian Speaking Hiatus; Memories of Mises Institute and Other Events, 1988–20192025. [↩]