This article examines the translated travel journal of Jacques de Morgan, originally written in French in 1884 during his expedition to Malaya to survey land for tin mining prospects and translated into English in 2020 for an Anglophone readership. While such expeditions were embedded within colonial structures of governance and resource extraction, Morgan’s account reveals a more complex process of negotiating boundaries of language, authority, and culture. Drawing on Ann Laura Stoler’s concept of the “interior frontier,” understood as shifting internal boundaries of belonging and differentiation, this paper analyses how Morgan’s position is constituted through three forms of boundary crossing. First, it considers the movement of the journal from its French context to its 2020 English translation, examining how the text is repositioned across temporal, linguistic, and cultural frameworks. Rather than treating translation as linguistic equivalence, it approaches it as textual mobility through which the journal is re-situated within new interpretive regimes and Anglophone scholarly infrastructures. Second, Morgan’s engagement with the British colonial administration, particularly under Hugh Low, demonstrates his navigation of institutional structures required to secure access to mining concessions and field mobility. Finally, his interactions with Malay society, including the adoption of language, food, and clothing, indicate forms of embodied adaptation within the colonial landscape. Read through this framework, the journal reframes interior frontiers as sites where adaptive crossings simultaneously reproduce epistemic asymmetries, rendering the text a space in which colonial knowledge production becomes visible through practices of observation, translation, and encounter. 

Keywords: Jacques de Morgan; tin mining; travel writing; boundary crossing; decoloniality 

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