Literary theorists have been analysing the importance of identity in recent decades, both in regard to the characters in books and to the people who write those works. For example, what is the nationality, ethnicity, religion, ideology, sexuality, gender or ability of a character or an author and how does it impact the way they write or are written about and how does it affect our understanding of the person and/or the text (e.g. see Bennett and Royle 2009, pp. 179, 199, 216, 234)? In translation studies, more recently, questions that have been raised include the following: Which authors get translated and why? Which authors are left only in their own language or in a select few other tongues? Who gets to become a translator and through what means? Who is invited to translate a given work and why are they considered the right or most appropriate translator for that particular text? Are there ways of challenging the choice of texts to translate and people to translate them? How does translation complicate ideas of nationality or other forms of identity? As Wilson notes, citing Peter Newmark, the ‘views and prejudices of the translator, which may be personal and subjective, or may be social and cultural, involving the translator's “group loyalty factor,” which may reflect the national, political, ethnic, religious, social class, sex, etc. assumptions of the translator’ (2009, p. 54).

In this section, I will focus on some aspects of identity on a larger scale. I am not fully inclusive here due in part to word count restraints and in part because of a lack of research. An example of a missing topic is how someone's sexuality might affect how and what they translate, and how translation in turn might impact on understandings of sexuality; but perhaps what is explored here can inspire ideas about additional aspects of identity and their intersection with translation.

4.1 Translation as a form of Building National, Cultural and/or Linguistic Identity

Rita Kothari and Krupa Shah state that ‘[t]ranslation in the twentieth century has acquired this new role – of fostering group pride and history and also of enacting linguistic and cultural identities’ (2019, p. 140).