Federico Madaro
Systemic design has increasingly acknowledged that complex systems are not only constituted through infrastructures, institutions, and stakeholder relations, but also through the vocabularies that render such systems intelligible. This paper argues that translation and terminology should be treated as core systemic design concerns rather than ancillary linguistic operations. Building on the author’s doctoral research (Madaro, 2026) on Chinese urban terminology, the paper examines how cross-lingual knowledge production—particularly the translation of Chinese urban concepts into English—reconfigures the epistemic conditions through which urban realities are described, compared, and governed.
The study introduces the concept of conceptual distortion, defined as the systematic reduction or mis-specification of locally embedded meanings when terms are translated into dominant academic vocabularies. This process is framed as a form of epistemic injustice, drawing on the idea that unequal access to shared interpretive resources constrains the articulation of certain knowledge systems. In the case of Chinese urban studies, widely used translations such as community (shèqū 社区), residential compound (xiǎoqū 小区), or urban village (chéngzhōngcūn 城中村) produce legibility at the cost of flattening historically sedimented, institutionally embedded, and socially differentiated meanings.
Empirically, the paper builds on a triangulated corpus developed within the doctoral research, combining institutional documents, academic discourse, and vernacular language. This is complemented by a visual-elicitation survey that generated over 1,000 unique lexical items, capturing spontaneous naming practices across different urban conditions. Methodologically, the research adopts a scalar centrifugal approach structured around three semantic fields—house, street, and neighbourhood—allowing controlled movement across spatial and conceptual scales.
On this basis, the paper proposes Terminological Urbanism as a systemic design framework that treats terminology simultaneously as empirical evidence, methodological device, and ethical concern. Central to this framework is the notion of a translational gradient, which replaces the search for fixed equivalence with a spectrum of translation strategies, including literal translation, explanatory translation, pinyin borrowing, and annotated translation. This gradient enables reflexive, context-sensitive translational decisions that preserve semantic density and maintain visibility of conceptual differences.
The paper contributes to systemic design in three ways. First, it extends the notion of infrastructure to include vocabularies as infrastructures of intelligibility that organise how systems are perceived and acted upon. Second, it provides a methodological approach for working across plural vocabularies without enforcing premature equivalence. Third, it advances epistemic justice as a design criterion for intercultural knowledge production. Rather than minimising semantic friction, the paper argues for the design of translational infrastructures that render such friction explicit, negotiable, and analytically productive. In doing so, it positions translation not as a preliminary technical step, but as a constitutive operation in the design of knowledge systems.
Keywords: systemic design, translation, epistemic justice, Chinese urbanism, terminology, urban vocabularies