ABSTRACT
All forms of translation are implicated in the reproduction of existing ideologies; they are also opportunities for resisting, challenging, and creating alternatives to prevailing beliefs and attitudes about similarity and difference. Whether communicative acts are interrogated as micro- or macro-level phenomena, the visible and audible presence of the processes and products of translation in the social and cultural life of multicultural societies, and in other contact zones created by globalization, re-opens the issue of hospitality publically and politically. Acts of translation are an important outward, visible sign that the principles of recognition and inclusion are valued within and across communities, societies, and nations when formulating frameworks of social and economic justice; they play a vital role in accommodating the uniqueness of particular cultures and diffusing the psychological impact of recognition denied in multicultural contexts. Resistance to the maintenance or expansion of provisions for translation services in the public sphere spurred on by popular movements or government policies clearly works against such objectives. The foundations of this resistance may result from the fear that translation encourages too much transnationalism at the expense of assimilation or, more bluntly, from the xenophobic impulse to suppress diversity and promote exclusion.
