Rethinking translation in the 21st century

2009

In the latest decades the concept of translation has dramatically changed: we have gone from absolute equivalence to a widening of the definition of this field which sometimes reaches unforeseen limits. Translation certainly reflects the kind of society which produces it and, thus, it is hardly surprising that a culture like the western one – contradictory, hybrid and enriched thanks to migration but at the same time burdened with problems arising from cross-cultural clashes – offers a definition of translation as a never-neutral and ethically-complex process. The different current theories provide much help when pondering over these issues and reflect the choices which we, translators, con…