ABSTRACT
We may wonder to what degree it is legitimate to convey the sense of newness and/or cultural distance that is always experienced in the act of reaching out to a foreign text. To what extent is newness necessary? When does newness become exoticism? Current debates on translation and the representation of foreign cultures, translation ethics, postcolonial translation and the reception of the translated text cannot avoid the issue of exoticism, yet difference remains a thorny issue that is easily oversimplified.
There are two opposing trends in contemporary translation regarding difference. One, mostly theoretical, aims to highlight difference and go beyond the devouring, allegedly ethnocentric attitude that naturalizes or domesticates the foreign text. At the other end, texts from so-called ‘exotic’ cultures, such as specimens from Arabic literature, are translated in such a way that exoticizing practices and expectations are consciously avoided or counteracted. Both attitudes can be highly controversial once they go beyond university debates and enter the jungle of real-world readership.
Beyond the dichotomy of estrangement versus familiarity, the investigation of the intricacies of cultural representation requires an eclectic approach. Self and Other are just the surface of many mechanisms at work in the act of reading a text – all texts, and not only those that are foreign and exotic, although I shall focus on these as they are particularly 44illustrative. Using interdisciplinary tools, especially cognitive, semiotic and critical linguistics, this essay explores the intertextual qualities of difference and how they help create identity and authority in texts and their receptors.
