ABSTRACT
I hope this brief trip through anthropological and museological writing on translation will have shown that translation studies need not be defensive about working with translation ‘in the narrow sense’. It may be a narrow sense, but it surely isn't a narrow thing or object of study. Translation in the narrowest sense is inextricable from an immense range of complex problems that go right to the heart of cultural difference. Yet neither do we need to shy away from translation ‘in the wider sense’. Not only are some of the wider senses less distant from interlingual translation than they might first appear, but the more abstract uses of the term can themselves be fertile sources for our thinking on translation narrow or wide. Let me retrace my steps to list some of the areas that I believe could be fruitful for translation studies.
