“A los occidentales solo les importa lo que ven”. Percorsi e pratiche di traduzione dell’invisibile fra lavoro, diritto e temporalità nella Córdoba “migrante”.

This paper explores the dynamics of labour law and the subjective experiences of migrants, particularly young Muslims in Córdoba, through the lens of intercultural translation. The research straddles the boundary between law, anthropology and semiotics, deconstructing the dominant rhetoric of integration and employability to reveal how they function as symbolic devices of selection and subordination. Far from being a neutral code, law acts as a normative technology of the body, producing conditional inclusions and hierarchical temporalities, especially in the field of work. In this context, legal categories such as contract, rest, responsibility and productivity are re-examined by migrants through a plurality of cultural grammars that escape Eurocentric codification. The approach of intercultural translation – understood not as a mere linguistic bridge, but as an epistemological and critical device – allows us to bring to light what remains invisible in positive law: the way in which subjects translate and reinterpret norms through their own value systems, religious cosmologies and genealogical memories. Through the life stories of young workers, the research shows how religious elements such as al-ghayb (the invisible) or mas’ūliyya (responsibility) become bridge categories for negotiating recognition, dignity and agency, even at the margins of formal law. In this perspective, work is not only an economic activity, but a space for normative production and the construction of subjectivity. “Making law” then, also means dislocating the dominant symbolic order, rethinking the legal conditions of collective living in light of a plurality of worlds that coexist in the same space-time.