Today’s Penn Humanities Forum seminar discussion centered on Kimberley Thomas’ study of failed water management efforts in Bangladesh. Her “hydro-social” framework reminds us of the difficulties of determining boundaries and “ownership” of fluid cultural artifacts. Because of this fluidity, we face difficulties when we approach a source text thinking we already know what it means. The source might make no effort to be either complex or coy, yet because the translator approaches it with partial or tainted knowledge, the translation ends up misleading and no one understands (at least initially) that the communication misfired. When we embrace the fluid nature of the source text, then identifying these misfires in a translation allows us then to return to the source text to see how we might have also been victims of partial or tainted knowledge.