Translation as a Discourse of History

Through translation texts are made available to the readers of cultures other than the one in which they were produced, but this function of translation is far from neutral. Indeed, translation is a form of cultural practice and, for this reason, it is necessary to examine the conditions under which such texts are made available. In attempting to do so we are led away from a definition of translation as the accurate reproduction of original texts to that of translation as the regulated transformation of original texts, the substitution of "regulated" for "accurate" insisting on the existence of criteria governing the relations between texts and cultures, and the substitution of "transformation" for "reproduction" underlining the fact that an original text and its translation are dynamically connected to each other, precisely through the criteria governing their relations, rather than in a static, predetermined relation of equivalence. Translation makes visible the existence of such criteria and in so doing contributes to an awareness of the elements underlying one's own culture, conditioning the definition of one's collective self in terms of (and very often in denial of) another, the other.