General Editorial

           The Editorial Board is pleased to place in the readers’ hands the second issue of the online journal, Translation Today. This has been long in coming for a variety of reasons which we will not go into here, the overwhelming reason however being that the journal is impelled by an urge to further writing on translation and of actual translation which are distinctly above the mediocre. Even while guarding against the possibilty of such journals having a high mortality rate, one has to ensure vintage quality. Entry to the Hall of Quality has per force to be uncompromising. We promise greater regularity in the frequency of issues as word about the journal spreads. This issue focuses primarily on translation as it interfaces with postcolonialism. We know now that translation studies as a discipline has spread its tentacles far and wide, encompassing anything from human ontology to the machine although at the same time scholars have, very legitimately, averred that the legitimacy of TS as an (autonomous) academic discipline is open to question. Primarily because TS has no theoretical questions of its own and even if it does, one takes recourse to other fields of enquiry for their answers. Although, despite vehement protestations to the contrary, translation as a phenomenon is essentially the question of equivalence, language and Linguistics, the focus, as Rajendra Singh (to appear) avers, has shifted to applying theories from literary and cultural studies to the sociopolitical aims and the fate of possible objects of translation and of its actual products. The received perception is that postcolonialsm and translation are umbilically bonded, which is reflected in.the guest-editor’s remark below that ‘translation is the essential premise of postcoloniality’ “In its fascination with postmodernism”, however, as Rajendra Singh (ibid) rightly points out, “TS seems to ignore the questions that could potentially constitute a site for its possible autonomy, atleast till some other science can absorb it or TT can establish itself as the ultimate unifying theory, an unlikely prospect” Yet we thought a debate on how translation interfaces with postcolonialism was worth a shot. Hence this issue. The general Editors take pleasure in thanking Anjali Gera Roy for taking pains to organise a seminar in Kharagpur on ‘Translation and Postcolonialism’ in IIT, Kharagpur whose peer-reviewed proceedings this issue carries.
.

Udaya Narayana Singh & P.P. Giridhar
General Editors