Caste and Cultural ‘Others’: Understanding the Ethics of Translation and Representation

This article tries to analyse the role of ethics in contemporary approaches to Translation Studies because the question of ‘who’ translates ‘what’ and ‘how’ becomes even more important in the context of pervading social (caste-based) hierarchies and linguistic inequality. When the constitution of Dalit selfhood in literary pieces written in the vernaculars undergoes the interpretation stage (reception and translation thereof), the ‘authorial justice’ brought about by authentic life experiences based on lived vernacular reality becomes prone to politicization. For this reason, the question of the translator’s identity, geographical location and hierarchal categories such as white/brown/black and Dalit/non-Dalit/non-Indian become more visible to the reading public, while sensational, marketing and commercial reasons dictate which author/text/language gets chosen for translation and publication.