Burning the House Down: Translation in a Global Setting

The paper examines the situation of translation in the contemporary world, particularly with respect to the changes in the political economy of developed and developing societies. It is argued that the nature of the changes impinge directly on translation and translation finds itself at the heart of the new informational economy, which in turn has implications for the relationship between translation and the global media. The paper looks specifically at the position of interpreters who frequently find themselves in news-gathering activities and whose specificity as embodied agents needs to be acknowledged in intercultural research.