Epistemological Translation

Epistemological translation is the act of bridging between different ways of knowing and understanding the world. It recognizes that people have diverse cognitive frameworks, cultural backgrounds, and sensory modalities through which they perceive and process information.

Core Principles

Bidirectionality

Epistemological translation flows both ways. It’s not just making technical knowledge accessible to non-technical people—it’s also helping technical people understand user experiences, creative visions, and business contexts. Each direction requires equal skill and respect for both epistemologies.

Preservation of Meaning

Like modality translation, the goal isn’t to simplify or reduce—it’s to preserve complete meaning while changing representation. A visual hierarchy must maintain its full semantic structure when translated to headings. A statistical model must retain its insights when explained to stakeholders.

Examples

• Visual to Non-Visual: Converting visual information (charts, images, layouts) into textual descriptions for screen reader users
• Technical to Non-Technical: Explaining programming concepts using everyday metaphors and language
• Professional Domains: Translating a data scientist’s statistical model into business insights executives can act on
• Cultural Translation: Adapting concepts from one cultural framework to be understood in another
• Abstract to Concrete: Taking theoretical concepts and expressing them through tangible examples
• User to Developer: Helping engineers understand how their technical decisions affect real human experiences

In Practice

When I work as an accessibility coach, I’m constantly performing epistemological translation. I sit with designers who understand visual hierarchy perfectly but have never considered how that hierarchy translates to someone navigating by keyboard—they don’t know that headings create document structure for screen readers. I work with developers who can optimize React hooks but have never thought about how their loading states affect screen reader users—they don’t know about ARIA live regions or how constant updates can disorient someone relying on audio feedback.

Each group has deep expertise in their domain, but their knowledge exists in a different epistemology. My job is translating between these worlds: showing designers how visual prominence maps to semantic HTML heading levels, helping developers understand how their dynamic updates sound to someone who can’t see them.

The AI Opportunity

Large Language Models are uniquely suited for epistemological translation because they’ve been trained on knowledge represented in countless different ways—technical documentation, conversational explanations, visual descriptions, code, metaphors, and stories. They can recognize the same concept across different epistemologies and fluidly translate between them.

With AI, we can encode these translation patterns into reusable ladders that help anyone bridge between different ways of understanding. This is the mechanism that makes building ladders possible—AI can meet you in your epistemology and translate complex domains into terms you already understand, making each rung climbable from your current position.

For example, my alt text generation pattern performs epistemological translation by extracting visual designers’ intentions from page structure and translating them into the semantic representations screen reader users need.

Why It Matters

Epistemological translation is fundamental to equity in the digital age. It challenges the assumption that there’s one “correct” way to understand information and instead celebrates the diversity of human cognition. By building tools that can translate between epistemologies, we make knowledge and capabilities accessible to everyone, regardless of how they naturally think or perceive the world.

See Also

• Building Ladders - The philosophy of creating tools that perform epistemological translation
• Ladders - The tools that embody epistemological translation
• Modality Translation - Translating between sensory modes while preserving meaning
• Alt Text Generation Resource - A practical example of epistemological translation in action