Introduction: emancipation, secret histories and the language of hegemony

One of the key ways in which translation intersects with politics is by providing increased accessibility to information and services. ‘Politics’ is a space of oppositions between systems and individuals, hierarchy and equality, police and emancipation, that is always subject to contestation and expansion. Both in a restricted and an expanded sense, the interaction between ‘translation’ and politics has been a constant throughout history. In different circumstances, the translation into another language of official documents and web pages, and even road signs, can affect a sense of national or local identity. While translation can serve to include, it can also exclude. Translators can exclude material that they deem ‘unfit’ and thus stop target language readers accessing aspects of a text. There is a rich body of work on the relationship between translation and politics, yet it tends to belong to a ‘secret history’ of translation studies. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book