Translation between disciplines is usually judged by how smoothly a concept crosses over, as though the ideal outcome were a concept that reads identically in its new field. That standard quietly erases what made the concept worth borrowing in the first place: its specific epistemic difference, the particular way its home discipline handles evidence, causality or scale, which is exactly what gets lost when translation aims only for fluency. Trans-epistemology asks for translation that preserves this friction rather than smoothing it away — a concept that arrives in a new field still visibly carrying the assumptions of where it came from. RegimeMutation applies at a smaller grain here than in decolonial theory: successful cross-disciplinary translation mutates the receiving field's own regime just slightly, forcing it to accommodate an epistemic difference it did not previously have to handle, rather than simply absorbing new vocabulary that behaves exactly like the old.

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