ABSTRACT
The chapter examines the politics of literature from the perspective of the politics of translation. It argues that translation is political because it is, by definition, a collective practice. To put it differently, nobody translates alone—for the simple reason that the very core of translation is an encounter with alterity that the translator tries to share in a different language. In order to explain this theoretical point, the chapter examines four areas of interest in contemporary translation studies. First, it takes account of the effects of globalization on the production of “world literature.” Then, it highlights the recent concern with the translator’s presence in wars, zones of conflict, and the histories of racial capitalism. As a next step, the chapter examines the effects of the rise of machine translation on the contemporary politics of translation in the digital age. And, finally, it turns to a recent philosophical debate about the problem of what has been called the “untranslatable.”
