Introduction

Despite feminist, postcolonial, and queer “turns” in translation studies, there has been no similar critical race turn. The Introduction discusses the “unbearable whiteness of translation” in the West in translation studies and the literary translation profession. Translation studies scholars, literary translators, and authors translated are overwhelmingly White, but the whiteness of translation in the West is not a problem of demographics alone. The Introduction presents several concepts from critical race studies to demonstrate how norms of translation theory and practice usually understood as race-neutral are actually shaped by ideological and structural frameworks that privilege whiteness and work to maintain white supremacy. The Introduction argues that translation’s reckoning with race must involve pervasive transformation of translation theory and practice and the structures of research, education, and publishing in which they operate.