Introduction

The medievalist, by virtue of the discipline, continually inhabits, practices, works with, negotiates, evaluates, and interprets translation and its several manifestations. The medievalist has, above all, to be generously open-minded, critically, culturally, and linguistically; translating the Middle Ages is a continuing conversation, both with and across past cultures and present practices. Ricoeur also sees translation as properly defining not only relations between different languages, but between different registers from within "the same linguistic community". The broadening of translation as a category to include all forms of linguistic communication, within, as well as across, languages, together with the self-conscious critical investigation of metaphors for translation, would seem to confirm the trend Eliot Weinberger identifies in a witty and aphoristic lecture on his own work. Translation studies are increasingly sensitive to the effects of linguistic diversity and of cultural materialism.