ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the nature of otherness and also explains the difficulty of taking charge of others. Welcoming a guest is an encounter between beings of different orders: the divine, the faraway, the unlimited and inconceivable are welcomed into the human domain. All cultural systems revolt in the face of their own contingency, and thus produce instruments that confirm their identity. While the construction of the identity of cultures generates its shadow of alterity and otherness, cultures also develop techniques to deal with and understand that which is different. The chapter summarizes this set of cultural techniques with the term "translation". Whoever may reflect on the other will better understand what is specific to them. If people managed to discover what seems different to them and why it is so, they would know more about what constitutes them, what is part of them and what is most familiar to them.
