Betraying empire: Translation and the ideology of conquest

In a bid to prompt discussion of the engagement of translation studies with issues of politics and language ideologies, this article compares the practice of translation between the Spanish Habsburg and contemporary US empires. It focuses on what they have in common - an enduring attachment to logocentrism, or a metaphysics of the sign - and shows how the practice of translation alternately enables and disables this metaphysic from functioning in such disparate areas as Christian conversion, counter-insurgent warfare and the work of the Summer Institute of Linguistics.