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Communication Is Translation
(So Please Mind the Gap)

What you are reading is a translation. It began as a lesson in one of my classes, replete with slides, and now I have turned it into a book chapter.

No, that’s not right. It began much earlier. My lesson reworked a keynote talk I gave at a conference, and my keynote reworked an opaque theoretical article I published in the International Journal of Communication.¹ And that article reworked Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding model to see what it had to reveal about translation. (For that matter, so does this chapter.) And Hall’s model reworked Marx’s take on political economy in the Grundrisse. (And the Grundrisse reworked older versions of political economy, which reworked . . . which reworked . . . which reworked . . . )

In other words, there is no single point of origin. What you are reading is the result of one long series of transformations and substitutions: encoding/decoding substitutes for the Grundrisse; my article substitutes for encoding/decoding; my keynote substitutes for my article; my lesson substitutes for my keynote; and now, this chapter substitutes for my lesson. It is a translation. It could not be otherwise.

It is no coincidence I’m describing it as a translation. My purpose here is to demonstrate the strategy of the parallax view by asking what would happen if cultural studies scholars talked about translation. Or, more to the point, what would a theory of translation look like if it were grounded in the field of cultural studies? The answer I give is as performative as it is expository. That is, the logic that shapes my answer also applies to this chapter itself, in that it shapes its form. Like every other form of discourse, this chapter participates in an economy of substitution—of trading words, sentences, and ideas for other words, sentences, and ideas. When I speak of translation, that trading is what I mean, and in that respect, my opening examples are strategic: they show how translation works before I even say what I think it is. The examples I choose in the sections that follow are also strategic: they illustrate a key relationship between signs by moving between semiotic systems (for example, between words and pictures or between formal and informal linguistic registers).

So what, then, is that relationship? What exactly is translation? To answer that question, I propose three axioms:

1. To use a sign is to transform it.
2. To transform a sign is to translate it.
3. Communication is translation.

In the following sections, I approach these axioms by providing two parallax views. I begin by describing an early model of communication—the sender-message-receiver model—developed by electrical engineers in the 1940s as a way to improve the telephone networks they were building. Then, to work through these axioms, I peer at the sender-message-receiver model from a different angle, the one provided by Stuart Hall’s “Encoding/Decoding.”² It serves as the basis for a materialist approach to semiotics, which in turn provides the conceptual tools to take a new look at “Encoding/Decoding” itself. The point is to pry open the act of speaking and responding to see how signs are transformed when we use them. Taking my cues from Hall, whose essay has had a profound impact on scholarly notions of politics, I finish by arguing that the transformation and substitution of signs opens up a space for a politics of invention, where we can rethink our relation to cultural others so that people we once feared can find their place in the communities we claim as our own.

Sender-Message-Receiver

One of the most influential models of communication developed from efforts by electrical engineers in the 1940s to find ways to make telephones work better. They were asking a technical question, namely how to overcome the noise that interfered with the transmission of information, especially as telephone lines got longer and noise increased. They wanted to calculate the point where signals were transmitted with maximum efficiency, but they had to balance efficiency with redundancy. The most efficient transmission would be one where each element of a message is sent once, but only once. The problem is that the channels used for transmission introduce extraneous signals. If each element is sent only once, the receiver has no way to know whether it has been corrupted because there is no way to confirm that the message received is right. (The receiver would have to ask “Did you say . . . ?” and then repeat the message, thus sending it more than once.) Think of the children’s game of telephone, where one person whispers a message to a second, who whispers it to a third, who whispers it to a fourth, and so on.³ It’s an efficient system (each person whispers the message once), but the message the last person receives is always garbled. And since there is no feedback from one person to the next, the last person cannot know for sure whether (or where) it is garbled until the first person tells everyone what she or he said.

One solution to this problem is to build in forms of redundancy, especially in the form of feedback, although doing so makes the transmission less efficient. Imagine again our game of telephone. If the second person repeated the message back to the first, making sure to get it exactly right, and then the third person repeated it back to the second, and the fourth to the third, and so on, the message would likely be less garbled when it arrived, but it would take much longer for it to work its way down the line.

To solve the problems they faced in the 1940s, engineers proposed the sender-message-receiver model. Claude Shannon published the first iteration in 1948, which Warren Weaver helped popularize in the years that followed. A transmitter, they said, transforms information into a message that can be sent through a channel like a copper wire. The receiver then transforms the message back into its original form. Or, to use Weaver’s terms, “The function of the transmitter is to encode, and that of the receiver to decode, the message” (figure 4).⁴ But just as in the example above, no transmission is exact. There is always noise, and it takes feedback from the receiver to the transmitter to be confident the information is transmitted correctly, or at least that any corruption is kept to a minimum, as Shannon showed with a set of mathematical formulas for determining the optimal levels of efficiency and redundancy.

Although this model has been influential in communication theory, it has drawbacks. The most important, from a cultural studies point of view, is that the “semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem.”⁵ In other words, Shannon was concerned only with the reliable transmission of information, which for him could be any set of symbols, whether they were imbued with meaning or not. He was not concerned with content, which could be “fsd jklrwiouv kldf sa” (a string of letters I produced by smashing my fingers on the keyboard) just as well as “To sleep, perchance to dream.” In either case, the engineering problem remained the same. (Weaver, to be fair, did address the possibility of meaning in his efforts to popularize Shannon’s model. “The formal diagram of a communication system,” he wrote, “can, in all likelihood, be extended to include the central issues of meaning and effectiveness.”)⁶

The question of meaning would be Stuart Hall’s point of de­par­­ture, the pivot around which he would walk to see the sender-message-
receiver model from a new perspective.

Theoretical Foundations: A Materialist Approach to Semiotics

The axioms I propose above have two starting points: materialism (a philosophical stance that grounds analysis in people’s lived experience) and semiotics (the study of how meaning functions).⁷ The materialism comes, as mentioned in the introduction, from Stuart Hall’s reaction to the sender-message-receiver model in his essay “Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse,” better known in its revised form, “Encoding/Decoding.” Hall argues that television programs are only one moment in a circuit that links producers and viewers in a specific social context. The meaning with which they imbue a program is grounded in this context.

The encoding/decoding model, in fact, is an application of Marx’s political economy, as laid out in his introduction to the Grundrisse.⁸ Marx’s insight was that production and consumption were not independent moments in the circulation of commodities but were, on the contrary, mutually constitutive—one could not exist without the other. On the one hand, to give an example, the objects a cobbler produces become a pair of shoes in a meaningful sense only when someone puts them on her or his feet. In this way, the act of consumption is implicated in the act of production. On the other, the cobbler produces shoes in such a way as to influence how people wear them, by altering materials and styles to create a demand. In this way, production is implicated in the act of consumption.

Hall extends this analysis to television. He describes the moments of production and consumption—“encoding” and “decoding”—as mutually constitutive. (Note the common language with Shannon and Weaver.) Producers encode certain meanings into shows, but viewers do not necessary decode them as intended. Nonetheless, the moments of production and consumption are linked in that producers anticipate viewers’ reactions, and viewers interpret shows in part based on their knowledge of producers. The shows themselves are complex signs that link producers and viewers, who also operate within a shared social context.

In short, production and consumption are linked in a relationship of mutual dependence. Hall frames these forms of mutual influence as a circuit, which he illustrates in figure 5.

Note that I have adapted the figure Hall presents in the earlier version of his essay (from 1973), which differs from its better known counterpart (in “Encoding/Decoding” from 1980) in one important way: it has an arrow that runs from the factors that influence decoding to those that influence encoding. In other words, it completes the circuit by making the influence of decoding on encoding explicit.

Also note the way Hall’s diagram looks like the sender-message-
receiver model, but all stretched out and twisted. Shannon and Weaver were concerned with how a channel transmitted information. Hall is concerned with how a program becomes a channel, or better yet a medium, for transmitting meaning. But he also draws the idea of transmission into question. Shannon and Weaver were concerned with the steps a transmitter took to encode information and the steps the receiver took to decode it. Hall breaks the moments of transmission and reception down by looking at the factors that shape them, relative to people’s frameworks of knowledge, the structures of production in which they are embedded, and the technical infrastructure available to them. By peering at the sender-message-receiver model from a different angle, one where meaning predominates, he helps us see that Shannon and Weaver’s primary question—how can we transmit information with the least distortion?—is not the right question at all, at least not if we are concerned with meanings that are contested.

Hall’s attention to the factors that influence encoding and decoding, which all relate to the material conditions of textual production and meaning-making, is what makes his model materialist. Nevertheless, the psychological aspects of meaning—how programs evoke ideas for viewers—remain unclear. Hence my second starting point, the idea of a sign. Here I draw on American philosopher Charles Peirce, who says,

A sign . . . is something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity. It addresses somebody, that is, creates in the mind of that person an equivalent sign, or perhaps a more developed sign. That sign which it creates I call the interpretant of the first sign.⁹

Consider my stick-figure heroes in figure 6. The star spoken by Hero 1 (on the left) is the sign because it evokes something for Hero 2 (on the right). And the ideas it evokes for Hero 2 are also signs, as they evoke still more ideas, which evoke more, and more, and more. (My image cannot capture the full chain of associations.) This is what Peirce means when he speaks of the interpretant.¹⁰

It is useful to make a distinction here between the material and subjective aspects of the sign. On the one hand, there is the material side—the specific patterns of vibrating sound that hit our eardrums in the case of a word, for instance, or the patterns of light and sound in the case of a television program, or Hero 1’s star.¹¹ On the other, there is the subjective side—what a speaker or producer hopes to evoke by using a given material sign (a word, a TV program, etc.), and what that material sign evokes for a listener or viewer, as in the case of Hero 2’s chain of associations. The subjective aspect of the sign consists in the string of interpretants evoked by the material sign.¹²

Axiom 1: To Use a Sign Is to Transform It

How does a materialist approach drawn from Marx’s political economy and from 1970s-era reactions to a 1940s-era engineering problem relate to the idea of a sign made up of material and subjective parts? As Hall demonstrates, the televisual sign links producers and viewers. Its meaning is a point of negotiation between them, which is shaped by their knowledge and expectations of each other. But this negotiation over meaning is not unique to television. V. N. Vološinov, in Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, argues that we negotiate the meaning of every sign. He gives the example of a word:

A word presents itself not as an item of vocabulary but as a word that has been used in a wide variety of utterances by co-speaker A, co-speaker B, co-speaker C and so on, and has been variously used in the speaker’s own utterances.¹³

So when Hero 1 on the left uses a sign (figure 7), Hero 2 on the right responds by taking into account how Hero 1 used it (figure 8). If Hero 2 uses it again, it is with the earlier exchange in mind, at least partially.

But we are more than just reactive: when we talk to people, we are also predictive. As Mikhail Bakhtin points out:

When constructing my utterance, I try actively to determine this response [that is, the response of the person I am talking to]. Moreover, I try to act in accordance with the response I anticipate, so this anticipated response, in turn, exerts an active influence on my utterance (I parry objections that I foresee, I make all kinds of provisos, and so forth).¹⁴

In other words, just as TV producers (according to Hall) shape their programs in partial anticipation of what viewers will think, we shape our utterances (whatever form they might take) in partial anticipation of how others will react. (And we do so in a given social context, to return to Hall’s model.)

Thus our heroes continue to pass a word back and forth, each time reacting to what the other has said and taking that reaction into account. Perhaps they have a discussion. Perhaps Hero 2 is really a jerk, or maybe just clumsy with Hero 1’s feelings. Maybe Hero 2 is not really a hero at all (figure 9). So Hero 1 leaves, while Hero 2 calls after Hero 1 in vain (figure 10).

And, finally, Hero 2 is left to replay the scene, to figure out what went wrong. The sign means something for Hero 2 that it did not mean before. At the beginning of the conversation, it did not evoke regret or puzzlement, and now it does (figure 11). This is what I mean when I say “to use a sign is to transform it.” The material aspect of a sign may remain the same over the course of an exchange, but the subjective aspect does not. And if the material aspect is one side of a sign, and the subjective aspect the other, then the pair has changed. The sign—the pair together, as a unit—is different from what it was before.¹⁵

Axiom 2: To Transform a Sign Is to Translate It

And so we arrive at my second axiom: to transform a sign is to translate it.

Perhaps this axiom appears counterintuitive or based on a notion of translation that I have had to wrangle and contort. In fact, the opposite is true. What do I mean by translation? Exactly what it means in a conventional sense—the substitution of one sign (or one set of signs) for another. We transform signs by using them: their subjective dimension changes because Hero 2 has to take into account the use by Hero 1, something Hero 1 did not have to do. Thus the transformed sign substitutes for the sign that came before. The change might be small (in fact, most of the time it is), but we can also imagine more dramatic cases, such as when Hero 1 tells Hero 2 something life-changing, and Hero 2 must make sense of a new configuration of their symbolic universe. (By “symbolic universe” I mean the ordered set of beliefs people have that shape how they make sense of objects and events.) Think of Luke Skywalker in The Empire Strikes Back.¹⁶ The sign father changes dramatically when he learns who Darth Vader really is.

Or think of how the sign translation has changed for you since the beginning of this chapter. As you think of questions you want to ask and points you want me to clarify, you are taking into account what I have said. The chain of associations—that is, the interpretants—the sign translation evokes for you has grown. Perhaps not dramatically, but it is larger nonetheless. The subjective aspect of the sign has changed, which means the material/subjective pair as a unit has changed. I have substituted a new use of the term for an older use. At the risk of being too clever, I would say I have translated translation.

Axiom 3: Communication Is Translation

Here we arrive at my third axiom: “Communication is translation.” In all truth, the first two axioms form a syllogism, from which the third derives. If we use a sign, we transform it. If we transform a sign, we translate it. Therefore, if we use a sign—that is, if we communicate—we translate it. In other words (what a revealing phrase—“in other words”), communication is translation.

In some ways, this assertion is not new. George Steiner, in his influential book After Babel, argues,

Any model of communication is at the same time a model of translation, of a vertical or horizontal transfer of significance. No two historical epochs, no two social classes, no two localities use words and syntax to signify the same things, to send identical signals of valuation and inference. Neither do two human beings.¹⁷

Paul Ricoeur, in On Translation, goes further. Because the sign I use never evokes the exact same thing for you as for me, we constantly misunderstand each other. We say what we have to say, but then we also have to explain what we mean. Sometimes we have to explain our explanation, until we are as satisfied as we can be that we have gotten our message through:

It is always possible to say the same thing in another way. . . . That is why we have never ceased making ourselves clear, making ourselves clear with words and sentences, making ourselves clear to others who do not see things from the same angle as we do.¹⁸

Language is reflexive, and tant mieux—if we could not talk about what we mean, especially when we see that our point has not gotten through, communication would grind to a halt.

Note, however, that Steiner and Ricoeur make an assumption that I do not. They presume there is an active agent, someone thinking about the meaning of signs, in that they are explaining, “When I said X, what I really meant was . . . ” In effect, they are translating X by “say[ing] the same thing in another way.” But if each use of a sign transforms it, then there is no need for an active agent. Transformation and translation take place whether we think about what signs mean or not. Hero 1 says “*” and Hero 2 adds that use to their series of interpretants, so when Hero 2 says “*” it is not an identical sign (figure 12).

A Politics of Invention

Why dwell on this seemingly minor point? As Stuart Hall showed with television, the gap between the producer’s intended meaning and the meaning a show evokes for a viewer is the condition of possibility for acts of resistance. Because we are intelligent human beings, and because we have our own experience which differs from that of the people who produce television, we do not have to agree with what we see on TV. In fact, we can take what we see and arrive at radically different—and equally plausible—interpretations as we reconfigure meanings to match with our experience and meet our expectations.

That idea of resistance leads me to a further observation: the gap between signs is productive, something we can put to use. We must (as the London Underground reminds us) mind the gap. How do we do that? That question is the point of this book, which approaches it as an empirical question: how have people put that gap to use? How have they used it to persuade others to see the world differently? These questions get to the heart of what rhetoricians, drawing on Aristotle, describe as invention (or inventio in Latin), by which they mean the generation of arguments.¹⁹ It is one of five steps in the process of crafting a persuasive speech, the other four of which include arranging arguments (dispositio in Latin), matching them stylistically to the audience (elocutio), remembering them (memoria), and finally delivering them effectively (pronuntiatio). (We will explore Aristotle’s notion of invention in more depth in chapter 3.)

Aristotle says that rhetoric is the art of persuasion, or “the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion,” and rhetorical invention is the ability to find the right words in a particular context.²⁰ In this sense, persuasion is contingent on circumstances, which change from one situation to the next. It is grounded in the moment of speaking and therefore not knowable in advance. It is a matter of mastering different tools that help you think on your toes.

My contention is that the gap between a speaker’s sign and a listener’s sign is a space where we can practice a specific type of invention. Cultural translation, as a number of people have observed, has a certain utopian potential.²¹ For instance, it opens up the possibility for acts of hospitality by allowing us to speak against the hegemonic norms of identity that prevent people who appear different or foreign from joining “our” group, whichever it is. It is a matter of identifying the “available means of persuasion.” This act is fundamentally creative, and it has important ethical implications.

Let me illustrate with an example, which comes from Bertolt Brecht, by way of translation studies scholars Boris Buden and Stefan Nowotny.²² In his poem “The Democratic Judge,” Brecht describes an Italian immigrant to the United States who is applying for citizenship, although he does not speak English. The man stands before the judge, and the judge asks him questions about the United States as part of a citizenship test. “What is the eighth amendment?” the judge asks. “1492,” he answers because he does not understand.

The setting of the exchange is symbolically important. The applicant is asking for admission into a new national community. It is the culmination of a long process of asking—from immigration, to integration (in different senses, as he does not speak English), to finally making a formal request. Thus when he is refused, according to Buden and Nowotny, it is a literal refusal of his symbolic request, one more refusal on top of all the others he has faced since arriving in his new home.

So the man returns later, and the judge asks another question. “Who was the winning general of the Civil War?”

Again the man answers, “1492.” Again, he is refused.

He returns a third time, and the scene repeats itself. “How long do presidents serve?” “1492.”

But something happens for the judge. It is a moment of invention. When the man returns a fourth time, according to Brecht:

The judge, who liked the man, realised that he could not
Learn the new language, asked him
How he earned his living and was told: by hard work. And so
At his fourth appearance the judge gave him the question:
When
Was America discovered? And on the strength of his correctly answering
1492, he was granted his citizenship.²³

The judge looks at the situation and assesses it. He looks at the tools available to him. He is a judge, so he cannot break the law, but he takes pity on the man and decides the United States would be better for having him as a citizen. Given those constraints, he contrives a question—one that is in line with all those he has already asked, although today it would be a bit anachronistic—that the man can answer. The judge has worked within the constraints imposed on him to make a stranger no longer strange, a new member of the national community.

Buden and Nowotny say that the judge has found “a correct question” for “a wrong answer.”²⁴ The judge has taken advantage of the gap between one use of the sign 1492 and the next. Over the course of his interactions with the man, the sign 1492 has come to have a richer set of interpretants. In each case, but especially in the question that sets up the final, “correct” use, he has taken his previous interactions with the man into account. Hence the expanded set of associations (figure 13). What is important is that the judge finds a way to make the evolution of the sign’s meaning productive—it becomes a tool in an act of inclusion. It is not hard to think of other situations where such invention has value, or where scholars can use this idea to gain insight into our interactions with groups who are marked as “different” or “foreign.”

Conclusion: The Logic of Substitution-Transformation

In this chapter’s introduction, I wrote that this chapter is a translation, a reworking of a lesson, which reworked an article, which reworked . . . which reworked . . . which reworked. . . . Why have I made the same argument more than once? What is the value of the repetition? What does this version offer that older versions (or past links in the chain) did not?

One answer to these questions is relatively superficial. My earlier elaboration relied on a deductive mode of reasoning.²⁵ It was a series of literal and implied “if-then” statements. I crafted the version you have just read to rely more on induction—I proceed by examples and build to my conclusions from there. I hope this version achieves a different effect—I hope it left blanks that you filled in. In short, I hope it demonstrated invention as much as explained it.

Another answer goes still further. In this chapter’s introduction I also wrote, What would a theory of translation look like if it were grounded in the field of cultural studies? The answer I give is as performative as it is expository. That is, the logic that shapes my answer also applies to this chapter itself, in that it shapes its form. How does this logic apply? This question and these statements are signs, by Peirce’s definition, in that they “stand to somebody for something in some respect or capacity.” Their use here differs from their use in my introduction, if I have succeeded in my translation, because they evoke something new for you. The first time, I had hinted at but not laid out the logic of transformation-substitution. You had to take my assertion on faith. Now, I hope, it stands on its own merits.

This logic is what authorizes the theoretical moves I make in the following chapters. The parallax views I produce or describe depend on the multiplicity of meanings of any given sign, which comes about because of the transformation signs undergo with each use. We can gaze at meaning from another angle because signs always mean more than what the people who use them intend, a semiotic excess that provides an excess of perspectives, if we choose to explore them.

In sum, the questions of invention that follow from this conception of translation are ones I think we should be asking in the fields of communication and cultural studies. If we develop a theory of translation that responds to our concerns, and if we bring the tools we have developed to bear on such a theory, we can conceive new approaches to politics and ethics. In a world where the forces of globalization are constantly accelerating, and where we come into greater and greater contact with people unlike ourselves, few tasks could be as important as this one.

But nothing guarantees our success, and as I write in the next chapter, the same logic of transformation-substitution can close off the very potential that invention seems to open up.

1 Kyle Conway, “Encoding/Decoding as Translation.” But even this genealogy is not quite right. There is an intermediate step: an earlier version of this chapter appeared as “Communication Is Translation, or, How to Mind the Gap” in Palabra Clave 20, no. 3 (2017): 622–44. It is reproduced here with the kind permission of the journal.

2 See Stuart Hall, “Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse,” and “Encoding/Decoding.”

3 My Canadian students call this game “broken telephone.” That name seems better suited to the way messages break down.

4 Warren Weaver, “The Mathematics of Communication,” 13.

5 C. E. Shannon, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” 379.

6 Weaver, “Mathematics of Communication,” 14.

7 Note how this use of the term materialism (which derives from Marx’s work) differs from our everyday sense of materialism as an undue focus on material goods at the expense of relationships with people that fulfill us on a deeper level. This is one point where I must ask my students—my first readers—to remember that I am using the word differently. Otherwise, this discussion is likely to be confusing.

8 Karl Marx, “Introduction,” in Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, esp. sec. (2).

9 Charles Peirce, The Philosophy of Peirce: Selected Writings, 99.

10 If my heroes bring to mind Randall Munroe’s brilliant webcomic xkcd (https://xkcd.com), then they are signs and xkcd is their interpretant.

11 Peirce would call this material sign the representamen. For an overview of Peirce’s terminology, see Floyd Merrell, “Charles Sanders Peirce’s Concept of the Sign,” 29–39.

12 This distinction between “material” and “subjective” signs needs clarification. First, it looks like Ferdinand de Saussure’s distinction (in Course in General Linguistics) between signifier and signified, but it is not. Strictly speaking, Saussure’s signifiers are “sound images,” whereas material signs exist in the world outside speakers’ psyches. Similarly, Saussure’s signifieds are concepts evoked by sound images, but they do not operate in a chain, as in Peirce’s conception. Second, I have chosen not to call material signs “objective” (as the inverse of “subjective”) because the term would be misleading to the degree it implied that the meanings of materials signs were fixed. Finally, this distinction is only heuristic. V. N. Vološinov (in Marxism and the Philosophy of Language) demonstrates that material conditions always impinge on our subjective experience of language, so much so that language is a material fact that exists outside of speakers’ individual psyches.

13 Vološinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, 70.

14 Mikhail Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, 95.

15 My formulation here seems to suggest a constantly expanding interpretant, but that’s not necessarily the case. People stop using signs in certain circumstances, too. Meanings can contract, as chapter 4 shows in the case of the phrase fake news before and immediately following the 2016 U.S. election.

16 Irvin Kershner, dir., The Empire Strikes Back (1980).

17 George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation, 47.

18 Paul Ricoeur, On Translation, 25–27.

19 We tend not to use invention this way in everyday speech. I anticipate that one challenge for my students will be to accept that the term means something other than what they expect. My use of this older sense risks falling into the trap I describe in the first paragraph of the introductory chapter, namely, that it will have no place within their pre-existing symbolic universe. That is, if they read it as invention in a contemporary sense—say, some scientific innovation for which one might receive a patent—the argument I’m presenting will be confusing. They will need to set aside what they know to see the term from a new angle.

20 Aristotle, Rhetoric, book I, part 2.

21 Most notably, Homi Bhabha makes this argument in The Location of Culture.

22 Boris Buden and Stefan Nowotny, “Cultural Translation: An Introduction to the Problem.”

23 Brecht, quoted in Buden and Nowotny, “Cultural Translation,” 206–7.

24 Ibid., 207.

25 Conway, “Encoding/Decoding as Translation.”