ABSTRACT
Liu's insistence that we historicize the creation of competing universal equivalents of translation: if what Liu theorizes as universal equivalents are to be found anywhere, it seems, they must be found at the heart of translation quality assurance (TQA). It takes as authoritative guide to the double-binds of TQA the work of Juliane House, through the link she herself draws between translation and the double-bind. Translation is constituted by a 'double-binding' relationship both to its source and to the communicative conditions of the receiving linguaculture. The overt/covert distinction "goes some way towards getting out of the double-bind", and so on. House seems to mean by the double-bind simply that the translation is tied or pulled in the usual two directions, without the kind of numbing or paralyzing dialectics that Gregory Bateson theorizes as the nightmarish ecosis of schizophrenia. She is only able to maintain her Popperian idealization of TQA by repressing the Batesonian conflicts.
