Nation of Translation – Nation as Translation
Charting Perspectives of Trans-cultural Political Action

Michaela Wolf

To imagine a ‘nation of translation’ which enables the primacy of freedom and justice is, admittedly, tempting. Even if deprived of its utopian agenda, what remains is an explicit political nature of ‘translation’, understood in its wide range of meanings. In Translation Studies, the time has definitively passed that translation was perceived as linguistic transcoding implying equivalence between fixed entities such as source and target text. The view of translation that is growing in relevance in Translation Studies today is instead a cross-cultural cluster concept mostly informed by postcolonial thinking and closely related to what has been labelled under the umbrella term of ‘cultural translation’. In my paper, I will sketch the outlines of these developments in the discipline and will particularly trace the distinctive lines of traditional views of ‘translation’ and some conceptual perspectives going beyond, such as transculturation, hybridity or transmesis. I will particularly focus on ‘translation’s’ contribution as a major political agent in the shaping of cultures, emphasizing its subversive practices. This will help to elaborate the concept’s potential for a stronger politically informed agency and to privilege the view of ‘translation’ as a shaping force in trans-cultural political action.

Michaela Wolf

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