Translation/Deconstruction: a Jacques Derrida´s Legacy

Abstract

My proposal here is to approach translation from the viewpoint of a deconstructive language theory with the aim of highlighting what I call a Jacques Derrida´s legacy. For him there is a great affi nity between translation and deconstruction: the fi rst inexorably speaks more than one language (Derrida, 1998). It is the very case of thinking the context of translation as a crossroads of languages and the task of the translator - who fi nds himself caught between the need and the impossibility of saying everything – of giving a meaningful account of the text translated. It is worth saying that there is no possibility of intervention outside language and that there is no purity in any metalanguage, which only strengthens his debate around écriture, around what in that concept breaks with the representational view of writing as simulacre. It therefore breaks with the notion of translation as a copy and repetition of the same. Keywords: Derrida. Translation. Simulacre. Legacy.