Page-Fort puts numbers to American disinterest in translation, urging readers to pick up translated works, to expand their horizons. Croft wants to encourage readers by putting translators’ names on the front cover for reasons of transparency and trust. Those are both valid causes, yes, but I think translation will only really thrive when the issues raised in Patel and Youssef’s “All the Violence it May Carry on its Back” are genuinely and recurrently addressed.

Patel and Youssef write: “An ethical approach to translation requires understanding enough about linguistic power hierarchies to take chances on destabilizing dominant forms of English, and deny them the unquestioned privilege of making the whole world in their image.” Translators should not only be aware of English’s oppressive, colonial history but prepared to acknowledge it, to wrestle with it. Translators should be eager to destabilize—willing to break—dominant, oppressive, “standardized” forms of English; to lean into new ways of saying things, into things that “sound weird” to some readers. Maybe some translators will overlook the inherent power dynamics and do this simply in order to bring something different to English readerships. But I hope that others will do so because they “feel the same debt to the source language, the same desire to do it justice,” that one translator in the article mentions.

Translation has catered to English for so long that many English translations offer little new and nothing exciting. Not surprisingly, very few are interested in reading them. Perhaps the way to create real interest in translation is to take down the standard-English border control and finally let another language freely, truly sound.

-sharon