From Language to Language. The Hospitality of Translation

In this engaging humanist text, a renowned Senegalese philosopher explores the power of translation to bridge cultural divides. Informed by his own multicultural background-African, French, and American-Souleymane Bachir Diagne interrogates the practice of translation in this thoughtful text. Although translation often produces a relationship of profound inequality between dominant and dominated languages, it can also be a source of dialogue and exchange, including in situations of asymmetry, particularly regarding colonialism, where the interpreter becomes a true cultural mediator.
To praise translation, "the language of languages, " is to celebrate its plurality and equality, because to translate is to give hospitality in one language to what has been thought in another. It is to create reciprocity, a shared sense of humanity, and to imagine a positive version of the Tower of Babel.