The Self and the Other: Translatibility and Cultural Mediation in Global Times

As criticism has shown in recent years, the term ‘translation’ encompasses −among its philosophical ramifications− the relation with the ‘other’, the negotiation between one’s own language and culture and those of the other. We can interpret the recent transformation in the concept of translation as an attempt to translate ‘the other’. The relationship between subject and object has always been a key issue in the displacement inherent to the notion of translation. But the recent paradigm shift in translation sees it as the object of a new cultural framework proving cultural translatability at odds with a resistance to our essentialist notions of the ‘self’ and the ‘other’: what we are (or think we are) and what we are not (or think we are not). From that point of view, cultural (un)translatability is at the root of the concept of identity as a cultural construct. Translation, in its confrontation between the same and the different (the other in oneself, presence and absence), and in its constant negotiation with Otherness, gives us not only a metaphor for intercultural relations themselves, but also a remarkable means of getting close to and analysing cross-cultural relations.