In the light of the above discussion we are in a position to say that all literary translations do not have a critical function. For translation to perform the role of literary criticism, the language should already have a clearly defined literary field with its own internal dynamics. To use Pierre Bourdieu's term, only when a field of cultural production is well established in a speech community can translated texts accomplish the critical function which, to a great extent, may be subversive in its orientation. Bourdieu writes:

..the social microcosm that I call the literary field is a space of objective relationships among positions…and one can only understand what happens there if one locates each agent or each institution in its relationships with all the others. It is this peculiar universe, this 'Republic of Letters', with its relations of power and its struggles for the preservation or the transformation of the established order, that is the basis for the strategies of producers, for the form of the art they defend, for the alliances they form, for the schools they found, in short, for their specific interests.
(Pierre Bourdieu 1993:181)

We shall come back to this inclusive view of 'literary field' to review translation as cultural production.

In his study of the German reading public, A. Ward (Book Production, Fiction and the German Reading Public 1740-1800 by A. Ward OUP, 1974) suggests that the average middle class reader prefers works which are 'within his own experience and range of emotion, reflecting his own interests and not conflicting with the demands of his morality' (1974:133). The idea of foreignizing translation implies certain translating strategies. These strategies operate in a culture where various centres of power exist simultaneously. These centres of power organize discourses by canonizing or marginalizing them. Schleiermacher who in 1813 advocated foreignizing translation recognized the fact that this kind of literary translation could flourish only in languages which were "freer, in which innovations and deviations are tolerated to a greater extent, in such a way that their accumulation may, under certain circumstances, generate a certain characteristic mode of expression".

Lawrence Venuti has commented that Schleiermacher's concept of foreignizing translation is marked by 'bourgeois individualism, cultural elitism, Prussian Nationalism and German universalism' (Venuti 1995: 115). What is pertinent to our discussions is that what is foreign in a foreignizing translation performs a revisionary act within the target language. Since these translation strategies recover or reassemble discourses from within the target language, they reconstitute literary discourse. It was pointed out above that Malayalam rarely translates texts from Anglo-American culture. The foreignizing translations in Malayalam can be seen to make a careful selection of foreign texts. Is there an attempt to resist the hegemony of English or at least the cultural values embroidered in Anglo-American texts? The literary discourses favoured by the middle-class and the working class reproduce the hegemony of the prevailing value system. In the choice of foreign texts and in their rendering into a Malayalam in a manner which resists the hegemony of prevailing or popular taste, the elitist literary translation in Malayalam clearly address a chosen few, largely the creative writers in the language and those whose sensibility finds the existing cultural products limited and limiting.