Transforming College Students into Citizens of Planet Earth Through Eco-translation

College students today are mostly alienated from the natural environment. As a result, they suffer from “plant blindness” and “nature-deficit disorder,” putative syndromes that environmental educators have diagnosed and sought to treat with education. In this chapter, I show how educational eco-translation can help not only treat college students but also potentially transform them. I do so by describing a course entitled Eco-translation that I taught at Lingnan University on the 3Fs (the flora, fauna, and funga) of Hong Kong in the fall of 2023. In the course, translation embraced intralingual translation between a specialist’s lingo and a non-specialist’s vocabulary, interlingual translation between Chinese and English, and intermedial translation between visual and textual media. These forms of translation were ways of turning students into citizens of planet Earth, people who can appreciate the non-human creatures in the natural environment and act on the basis of such appreciation. I combined eco and translation into the course title for two reasons. First, ecology is the study of how the 3Fs act and interact, and how these actions and interactions produce the natural environment. Second, I agree with Michael Cronin that translators have a role to play in responses to ecological crises in the Anthropocene.