Author G. N. Devy is useful here, to call attention to the challenges monolingual and monocultural thinkers face, who produce ideas of translation as anomalous, problematic, and/or characteristic of loss and degradation: “It is natural for the monolingual literary cultures of Europe to be acutely self-conscious of the act of translation. The Indian consciousness, on the other hand, and in a crude manner of differentiating, is itself a ‘translating consciousness.’ The act of shifting form one dialect to another, from one register of speech to another, of mixing two or three languages within the span of a single sentence does not seem unnatural to it” (135-136).
Like Devy, I am arguing, “If translation is a metaphysical enigma, it is yet a powerful political weapon” (136).
The concept of ‘translating consciousness’, and of communities of people possessing it, are no mere notions. In most third world countries, where a dominating colonial language has occupied a privileged place, such communities do exit. In India several languages are used as if these formed a continuous spectrum of signs and significance. To conceptualise this situation is beyond European linguistics, which is based, largely on monolingual views of language” (141).
see: Devy, G. N. In Another Tongue: Essays on Indian English Literature, edited by Wolfgang Zach, Vol. 4, Frankfurt am Main/Peter Lang, 1993.