A collection of essays which represent the different strands of work being undertaken in the field of translation studies. The book reflects the shift in emphasis away from a more descriptive form of translation to the view that translation occupies a central position in the development of culture.

Introduction - Proust's grandmother and the "Thousand and One Nights"; the "cultural turn" in translation studies; translation - its genealogy in the West; translation, text and pre-text; "adequacy" and "acceptability" in cross-cultural communication; translation and the consequences of scepticism; translation in oral tradition as a touchstone for translation theory and practice; translation, colonialism and poetics - Rabindranath Tagore in two worlds; culture as translation; linguistic polyphony as a problem in translation; linguistic transcoding or cultural transfer? - a critique of translation theory in Germany; theorizing feminist discourse/translation; translation and the mass media; translating the will to knowledge - preface and Canadian literary politics; translation as appropriation - the case of Milan Kundera's "The Joke".