Cultural Misrepresentation through Translation

Abstract

The space of intercultural communication is bound to make translation the par excellence site for the negotiation, understanding and/or contestation of the relationships of power and knowledge across cultures. In these intercultural encounters, translation has played a decisive role in the formation and/or deformation of cultural realities through systems, the master discourses, of representing the foreign (other) for the local (self). In the process of translation, a master discourse, the product of a specific cultural context where translation takes place, is used as the medium for the exchange of cultural goods, most importantly literary ones. Drawing on a number of translation instances, this article examines the lack of innocence of translation as the medium of intercultural communication.