Intercultural mediation, intercultural communication and translation

The role of translator as intercultural mediator has received greater attention in translation studies since the ‘cultural turn’ of the 1990s. This paper explores the question of intercultural mediation as an activity in intercultural communication and the ways this applies to translation. It takes as its starting point the idea that mediation is fundamentally an interpretive act, through which meanings that have been created in one language are communicated in another. The paper seeks to understand how the practices of intercultural mediation are realised in translation and argues that mediation is a process that involves aspects that are internal to the translator (mediation for the self) and aspects that are oriented to the reader of the target text (mediation for others), which are, in turn, linked through selective processes of determining what resources are needed to enable a target text reader to understand a source text meaning.