This slighted fact affects postcolonial translation, both in the utilitarian way that books from Latin America, Thailand, or Senegal are received in the West, and in the very different sense in which vintage colonial prejudices spill over into the racially innocent annals of the State Department, the Cold Warriors, and for that matter, Le Carr 's novels. And yet, one reaches a sense of that intermeshing of alien languages not by conflating them but by bringing their peculiar inflections up to the surface. Such differences do not in the end obliterate a common premise or similar social function. Both were a matter of otherness, of radical difference and suspicion, but both marshaled a different vocabulary, a different list of specialists, and a different audience tuned in to particular inflections of the incommensurable. It is only by making these inflections aware of one another again that my opening statements acquire the right meaning.
Translation is a problem of belief.
My attempt to look at the colonial and the Cold War in terms of translation is an effort to avoid arresting the inquiry in a technical, overly discursive argument about linguistic equivalences or approximations. My invocation of the term conversion may thus seem to place me securely in Lyotard's camp. Actually, I am implying that the binaries he wishes to get beyond are really forms of debate. Far from being precluded by discourse, they are continually reproduced where they seem least likely to appear. Crossing over into another's phrase regimens entails the recognition of the interestedness of knowledge.