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In May 2017, during the tense weeks leading up to the opening of negotiations on the terms of Britain’s withdrawal from the EU, the European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker delivered a speech in Florence which drew applause from his audience, and scorn from British right-wing media Halfway through his speech, he switched language ‘I’m hesitating between English and French,’ he said, ‘But I’ve made my choice I will express myself in French because slowly but surely English is losing importance in Europe’   The move was mostly gestural – calculated, and delivered with a glint in his eye – but revealing nonetheless: our split from Europe would begin first through language The EU had once been happy to extend itself towards us, and to translate its edicts into our language Now, we would need to do the translating; the burden to understand and to be understood would be ours But why had we ever assumed it should be any other way?   In contemplating Brexit, and its questions of language, identity, nationalism, cooperation and compassion, we found we were in fact contemplating the issues of translation Our roundtable is a chance to grapple with these ideas and to explore how language, and by extension translation, has the power both to let in and keep out Or, as Khairani Barokka describes it, to be ‘absence, sanctuary and weapon’   During the course of the roundtable, participants talked about Brexit, colonialism and xenophobia, representation and accessibility, vulnerability and empathy Alongside a consideration of the work of professional translators, they discussed the often unrecognised (care) work of interpretation that happens in immigrant communities every day They noted the importance of oral cultures and multilingual texts, and the liberating power of not translating a text They recognised that we all live in translation   In her book-length essay on translation, This Little Art, Kate Briggs describes a somewhat similar language ‘switch’ to Juncker’s In Helen Lowe-Porter’s English translation of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, two characters suddenly start speaking French to one another, drawing the reader’s attention to the artifice of their reading experience ‘I come up against the belief I