In recent years, we have come to understand translation as exceeding the exact reproduction of a text from one language into another and as intimately intertwined with new forms of textual and cultural production. Arguing against models of translation as pure fidelity to an original text, Walter Benjamin asserts in “The Task of the Translator” that translation is, at best, a contingent and provisional way of coming to terms with the foreignness of languages, given that even the most painstaking fidelity in the translation of individual words can never reproduce fully the meaning they have in the original text.1 Far from merely transmitting subject matter or content, a translation addresses the mode of signification of the source text by touching, perhaps caressing, to add a slightly queer touch, “the original lightly and only at the infinitely small point of the sense, thereupon pursuing its own course according to the laws of fidelity in the freedom of linguistic flux.”2 Here Benjamin is asking us to allow the source text to touch and affect in new ways our own language, or the language into which we are translating, and to inhabit difference by and through language. This textual caress incites translation as an act of re-creation, which produces in the target language an echo, not a mere copy, of the original, hinting at the utter impossibility of equivalent correspondence between the source and translated text. As Benjamin writes, the translator's task lies in “aiming at that single spot where the echo is able to give, in its own language, the reverberation of the [original] work in the alien one.”3 These echoes and their reverberations, and the multiple potentialities of translations and/as counter-translations as they intersect with the social, historical, and cultural conditions that produce them, remain at the heart of contemporary translation studies, of what Gayatri Spivak has referred to as the translator's task of tracing “the very moves of languaging.”4 This complicates and transforms the original text, and creates new conditions of its reception in the target language, while simultaneously queering the target language and culture by both displacing and broadening its semiotic circuits and intertextual modes of signification.The actual contingency of translation in terms of its varying and shifting relation to the source text beyond semantic equivalence and transparent communication, and the ability of the translated text to continue to accrue, as Laurence Venuti explains, meanings and values that may differ from those invested in the source text,5 expose translation not only as a socially mediated and ideologically constructed practice, but also as one that is potentially dissident and resistant to unimpeded correspondence between languages. Catherine Porter, in the introduction to the published versions of papers presented at the Presidential Forum on translation studies she organized at the Modern Language Association in 2009, reminds us that translation is a multidimensional site of cross-lingual correspondence on which diverse social tasks are simultaneously performed.6 This relational focus, what Emily Apter describes as “the places where languages touch,”7 indeed an echo of Benjamin, is not reducible to maintaining a hierarchical opposition between original and translated text, nor does it assume that languages are self-contained within, or limited to, discrete national borders. Translation not only crosses linguistic and national divisions, but, as Apter argues, also reveals their limits by giving us glimpses of languages touching in zones of non-national belonging, perhaps at the very edge of mutual unintelligibility;8 indeed, at the spaces in between and beyond discrete linguistic and national borders. As I have argued elsewhere, the work of translation crosses social categories as well, producing new, hybrid forms of meaning and new knowledge through these very encounters, even calling into question the very borders themselves, linguistic or otherwise, at the point at which they are crossed.9 Writing at the nexus of language, culture, politics, and translation, and speaking of hybridity as an effect of all translation work, Alfonso de Toro indicates that he prefers the term translation over the more commonly used term in French, traduction, since the latter, he argues, is linked in a rather limited way to the linguistic and semantic domains of working across languages but are part of the broader term translation, where various cultural systems, in addition to language, intersect, converge, and transform. De Toro writes: Par le terme de “translation,” on peut entendre un processus culturel très complexe: un processus médial, social et pragmasémiotique dans les domaines de l'anthropologie, de l'ethnologie, de la philosophie, de l'histoire, des médias, de la gestualité, du corps et de divers systèmes discursifs…. La stratégie de la translation met en évidence la “recodification,” la “transformation,” la “réinvention” et “l'invention” de l'énonciation véhiculant divers systémes culturels (langue, religion, mœurs, savoir, organisation sociale, nature, etc.). De cet acte naissent de nouveaux systèmes culturels qui se concrétisent dans un processus sémiotique de codification, de décodification et de recodification, de déterritorialisation et reterritorialisation, de production et de mise en scène avec de nouvelles fonctions.10(By the term “translation,” one is able to understand a very complex cultural process: a medial, social, and pragma-semiotic process in the areas of anthropology, ethnology, philosophy, history, media, gestures, the body, and various discursive systems…. The strategy of translation highlights the recoding, transformation, reinvention, and invention of the utterance conveying various cultural systems (language, religion, morals, knowledge, social organization, nature, etc.). The act of translation leads to new cultural systems realized through a semiotic process of codification, of decoding and recoding, of deterritorialization and reterritorialization, of production and mise en scène with new functions.) Because language is a social invention and ideologically layered, working across languages through translation will always already produce an array of new codifications, textualities, and cultural meanings, as well as deterritorializations and reterritorializations of discursive and cultural spaces, rather than simply repeating what is thought to be given in the original text in another linguistic code. Indeed, Derridean theories of meaning indicate strongly that language itself works by a process of translatability, whereby one signifier continually replaces, and simultaneously displaces, another through an endless play of signification in the absence or deferral of a final meaning. In translation work, this suggests a sort of epistemological pause, or an attempt, according to Apter, citing the late critic Barbara Johnson, to allow contradictory meanings to emerge and come into play, so that one learns to pay more attention to that which gets lost in translation and to activate translation as a way of doing theory rather than as performing a mere philological exercise.11 But attention to that which gets lost in translation, to that which cannot be contained within the new textual space that is the translated text, is not superfluous residue to be discarded, but is a site of supplementarity and difference, that is, a space of indeterminacy that also points to the possibilities of translation as a queer praxis.Attending to translation as a site of knowledge production, to sites of heterogeneity and nonreciprocity between source and target languages, and to the possibilities for difference, raises questions beyond the practice of translation as facilitating communication across languages, shedding light instead on the extent to which translation operates as a highly dissident and politically transgressive act. As Laurence Venuti reminds us, translation is not exempt from its configuration within power relations between dominance and marginality. Should translation, he asks, serve to domesticate the linguistic and cultural difference of the so-called foreign text by making these forms of otherness intelligible in the target language; or, to what extent should the translator resist an ethnocentric reduction of the foreign text to the values of the target language culture by putting deliberate pressure on those values through inscribing linguistic and cultural difference in the very act of translation itself?12 Venuti acknowledges that a resistance to the domestication of the foreign text should not essentialize the foreign, but that its value is always strategic, depending on the cultural formation into which a text is translated. In this way, he argues, translation, as an inscription of alterity, rather than of homogeneity, can enable the disruption of target-language cultural values that reinscribe ethnocentrism, racism, cultural narcissism, and neo-imperialism (not to mention misogyny and homophobia), and through this process of textual dissidence serve the interests of more democratic geopolitical relations.13 By attempting to inhabit the otherness of the source text when we work across languages and cultures, by bringing to light the slippages of signification that cannot be accommodated in accordance with the predominant cultural values of the target language, translation becomes a transgressive practice that disrupts and challenges, producing new, unassimilable circuits of linguistic and cultural difference. Speaking to this directly, Gayatri Spivak urges us “to supplement the uniformization necessary for globality” by resisting translation as a tool of globalization that reduces all linguistic performance to equivalence and by thinking of ourselves, as translators, as the custodians of the world's wealth of languages rather than as “impresarios of a multicultural circus in English.”14 Here translation becomes a site of social activism against the capitalistic conveniences of monolingualism, especially with respect to English, which demand the homogenization of linguistic differences in a globalized world. If we understand translation as a transcultural and mediating practice, it seems important to pay attention to the multiple strategies available for moving a text from one language and culture to another while being careful not to lose sight of the ideological inflections and cadences that are imbricated within a textual and cultural practice like translation and operate in the very spaces where disparate languages and cultures intersect and collide.With these issues in mind, this special issue extends contemporary debates in translation studies by exploring the gender and queer politics of translation across multiple languages and cultural contexts from the early modern period to the present day, and by engaging the very queerness of translation work in the various forms of relationality and difference between source and target languages and cultures. The articles contained herein will also be asking some of the following questions: How do we work with translating terms for naming genders and sexualities in comparing texts and cultures of the past which may not be translatable to modern understandings of gender or to contemporary understandings of gay, lesbian, bisexual, or queer difference? How might we work with the specificity of queer, which has its origins in western Anglophonic cultures, when translating texts from non-Anglophonic and non-western contexts? How has translation functioned as a site of social change when dissident forms of sexuality in certain source texts, considered to be foreign to a particular target culture, become part of, and challenge, that culture's official discourses through the dialogical processes of interlingual transfer and cultural exchange? What new translation issues arise when we work within postcolonial cultures, for example, where terms for same-sex sexual desires may not be inscribed discursively in indigenous languages, or, if they are, may have emerged under a different set of material, ideological, and cultural conditions, such as colonial and the of and How do and differences the translation of gender and This in attention to the and that emerge in translating gender and sexual when working across various languages, cultures, and the the articles in this issue are not only with gender and sexuality as of in translation studies, but or in various ways translation studies may be through the of queer while the monolingualism, and Anglophonic of contemporary queer studies, new spaces of dissidence in both of gender and sexual in translation work will new sites of knowledge production, as well as in social and as the articles in this issue while attention on the complex and ways in which gender and sexuality are inscribed in different which becomes or when one works in and through only a single language. But if translation the of facilitating communication across languages, when it is to a rather limited on what is thought to be it is important to the very queerness of translation work rather than its in the play of the signifier in to the of correspondence between languages and to expose and differences between cultures. 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