ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book considers the relations between translating and minority, setting out from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's poststructuralist theories of language and textuality. The question of minority is the focus of a small but growing body of research in translation studies. For many minorities, translation has been compulsory, imposed first by the introduction of colonial languages among regional vernaculars and later by the need to traffic in hegemonic lingua francas to preserve political autonomy and promote economic growth. Minor cultures are coincident with new translation strategies, new translation theories, and new syntheses of the diverse methodologies that constitute the discipline of translation studies. Minor translation strategies evoke not an authorial personality or psychology but a linguistic community, an ethnicity, a gender, or sexuality. Catford's seminal linguistic theory of translation formulates the most generalized concepts of equivalence and 'shifts' between the foreign and translated texts.
