Translation is a mystery, both service and craft. We put our faith in it, as we put our faith in diplomacy. While translators go about their work with invisible care, jokes about translation gone wrong plug the odd spots of newspapers and magazines. After Babel, we readily believe

Eager to become the leader of international communist movement, the Chinese dictator Mao Ze Dong launched a fanatic and radical economic movement —Great Leap Forward—in that year.  Mao’s goal was to make China an industrial power by surpassing the United Kingdom and

Signposts:

As long as there shall be stones,
The seeds of fire will not die

Lu Xun, December 1935
Cited in Seeds of Fire, Chinese Voices of Conscience
Eds. Geremie Barme and John Minford
Far Eastern Economic Review Ltd., 1986

Letting a hundred flowers blossom

Language clearly can be a barrier to common cultural ground in shared cultural spaces.  In a festival that I coordinated in Indonesia last year, the language differences and lack of interpretation meant that there was little possibility of sharing cultural ground; in fact, there