There comes a point in time when words leap out of their conventional boundaries and embrace different shades of meaning. Something similar has happened to the word “translation”, which, long ago meant a linguistic substitution of meaning from a Source Language (SL) into a Target Language (TL) (Catford, 1965). Today it stands as a fundamental principle describing just about any interaction between two languages, cultures or objects. John Sturrock (1990:996) notes:

If Sturrock (1990) and Talal Asad (1986) see ethnography as an act of translation, Tejaswini Niranjana (1992) and Eric Cheyfitz (1991) employ it as a metaphor of the Empire. Their postcolonial writings focus on understanding inequalities and slippages in colonial relationships through translation. Homi Bhabha (1994) and Salman Rushdie (1991), on the other hand, seek to articulate hybrid intercultural spaces and identities through the term ‘translation’—Rushdie refers to his tribe as “translated men”(1991:17). Looking at this widening rubric, it is clear that “our perception of translation has changed profoundly in the last decade or so” (Holmstrom, 1997:4–5).