ABSTRACT
The fundamental concern has been with the influence of the majority or minority status of a language on translation practice and conceptualization. Translation is a central and inescapable fact of the economic, scientific and cultural life of a minority language. A language may be displaced from the public sphere and increasingly marginalized in various areas of life because of invasion, conquest or subjection by a more powerful group. The relational and dynamic nature of minority status is of fundamental importance for translation studies as it points to the fact that all languages are potentially minority languages. An important reason for factoring in minority status to any consideration of translation is that theoretical claims are relativized by the specific circumstances of translation practice in a minority culture. An important defence of translation-as-diversification is the contention that a basic right of a language community is to be able to live a full life in the minority language.
