ABSTRACT
The premise of this special issue is a question: What can the concept of minority bring to the practice and study of translation? I understand ‘minority’ to mean a cultural or political position that is subordinate, whether the social context that so defines it is local, national or global. This position is occupied by languages and literatures that lack prestige or authority, the non-standard and the non-canonical, what is not spoken or read much by a hegemonic culture. Yet minorities also include the nations and social groups that are affiliated with these languages and literatures, the politically weak or underrepresented, the colonized and the disenfranchised, the exploited and the stigmatized. The terms ‘majority’ and ‘minority’ are relative, depending on one another for their definition and always dependent on a historically existing, even if changing, situation. “Minorities”, write Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, “are objectively definable states, states of language, ethnicity, or sex with their own ghetto territorialities” (1987:106).
