ABSTRACT
Translation has gained a central importance in accounts of contemporary cosmopolitanism, which emphasise global interdependence and the interaction between different traditions. In this context, it becomes necessary to formulate a politics of translation that questions some idealist assumptions about translation that are present in the sociological literature, specifies translation as a fundamentally ethnocentric act, and formulates relevant strategies to confront this inherent ethnocentrism in order to open up translation to the difference of the other. Such politics consists in an extension of an ethics of translation based on linguistic hospitality, so that cultural asymmetries, inequalities and conflicts at a wider social level are addressed and normative responses to them can be devised from a cosmopolitan perspective.
