ABSTRACT
The central aim of the anthropological enterprise has always been to understand and comprehend a culture or cultures other than one's own. This inevitably involves either the translation of words, ideas and meanings from one culture to another, or the translation to a set of analytical concepts. The European explorers and travelers to Asia and later the New World were always being confronted with the problem of understanding the people whom they were encountering. Gesture and sign language, used in the first instance, were soon replaced by lingua francas and pidgins, and individuals who learned these lingua francas and pidgins became the translators and interpreters. The values of the local culture are a central aspect of most of the cultural phenomena which anthropologists try to describe, and these may differ from and be in conflict with the values of the target culture. How to make that difference comprehensible to audiences is the major question at issue.
