From Language to Language: The Hospitality of Translation

A renowned Senegalese philosopher explores the power of translation to bridge cultural divides in this engaging humanist text.

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 their plurality and their 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.