Why does translation matter? Or does it? And who should care to know? The answers are more interesting than we might at first think. The filming of a novel, and a multinational company’s diverse advertising strategy for the one product in different countries, involve issues of translation just as much as an English version of a sonnet by Petrarch. These days, translation has outgrown its status as an illegitimate child of literature, to become a way of discussing any exchange between languages and cultures, and appropriately so, given that the word itself derives from the Latin translatio, which simply means ‘carried across’.

In this comprehensive sense, translation is a process that we all encounter daily, whether we read books or not. Indeed, as Octavio Paz says, when we learn to speak, we are learning to translate, for any attempt to communicate, even with someone in the same language, involves interpreting the non-verbal world in words. Translation is of vital importance to everyone.