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Contrary to common undeclared pedagogical assumptions in translation skill classes that ‘faithfulness’ to the source text is the highest good guiding translation exercises, I draw from Begriffsgesc...

This paper establishes a critical dialogue among three kinds of cross-national activities: translation, the Olympic Games, and international relations. All three activities involve interstate amicitia —where traduttore/traditore cannot be clearly distinguished, and where amity/enmity cannot be easily set apart. My discussion of the structural similarities among these three kinds of cross-national activities intersects with my examination of the historical connections of the Olympic Games to translation and international relations. The essay also seeks to shed new light on international relations via Translation Studies, and to demonstrate how international politics can be examined as the “politics of translation” in action.

This essay begins by analyzing how Hegel and Honneth’s theory of recognition would seem to lend support to insurgent terrorists’ struggle for the right to self-determination. Insurgent terrorism looks like a concretization of what Honneth calls the moral protest of the oppressed against the powerful. Insurgent terrorism also resembles the politics of recognition in that it challenges the legitimacy of the forces owned by the state, seeking public recognition instead for the legitimacy of their own cause. Precisely because what matters uppermost to terrorists is public recognition for their cause, terrorists are eager to seize the mass media to champion their ideas. This essay will end, however, by pointing out major differences between insurgent terrorism on the one hand, and Hegel and Honneth on the other. Key words: Colonialism, Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Fredrich, Honneth, Axel, imagined community, (insurgent) terrorism.

Due to the power differentials between insurgent terrorists and the state, the former typically challenge the latter’s authority, that is, its legitimacy, rather than its military power. Since terrorists and the state compete for the claim to justice and rightfulness, it is not surprising that many of their fights are carried out through language. At the center of Howard Barker’s Credentials of a Sympathizer is the quarrel between the British government and the Irish Republican Army over the status of the IRA captives as “criminals” or “political prisoners.” My paper examines how the IRA’s authority has been hijacked even before the language battle can begin. By mobilizing a range of “symbolic capital” such as upper-class manners and language, and by manipulating the complex meanings and connotations attached to different cultural artifacts, the British negotiator Gildersleeve sets up the British as civilized and refined, in contrast to their “violent and low-bred” adversary. By setting up the con...