ABSTRACT
It was only a question of time until cultural studies “discovered” translation. After all, the globalization of culture means that we all live in “translated” worlds, that the spaces of knowledge we inhabit assemble ideas and styles of multiple origins, that transnational communications and frequent migrations make every cultural site a crossroads and a meeting place. These ideas have become the accepted truths of our contemporaneity. The hybridization of diasporic culture and the mobility of all identities-including gender-are central to the concerns of cultural studies. These contestatory sites of identity have sharpened awareness of the cultural authority of language, and of the position of the speakers within dominant codes. Languages are understood to participate in the processes by which individual and collective selves are fashioned; the “weight of linguistic and cultural histories,” “old tales and new tongues” are brought to bear on the relations between self and other (Arteaga 1994: 2). At present, however, translation is most often used by cultural studies theorists as a metaphor, a rhetorical figure describing on the one hand the increasing internationalization of cultural production and on the other the fate of those who struggle between two worlds and two languages. Women “translate themselves” into the language of patriarchy, migrants strive to “translate” their past into the present. Translation, as a tangible representation of a secondary or mediated relationship to reality, has come to stand for the difficulty of access to language, of a sense of exclusion from the codes of the powerful. For those who feel they are marginal to the authoritative codes of Western culture, translation stands
as “a metaphor for their ambiguous experience in the dominant culture” (Castelli 1990:25). It is this ambiguity, the sense of not being at home within the idioms of power, that has led many women, as well as migrants like Salman Rushdie, to call themselves “translated beings” (Rushdie 1991:13).
