Global cities constitute, according to Sassen, a worldwide grid of strategic places, a new geography of centrality that cuts across national borders and the traditional North–South divide (1998: xxv). Significantly, the global city, 'with its vast capacities for controlling hypermobile dematerialized financial instruments and its enormous concentrations of those material and human, mostly place-bound, resources that make such capacities possible' (2000: 218), contains dynamics of both mobility and fixity. It is this articulation of the spatialities of the global and the national that constitutes the global city into what Sassen calls an analytic borderland, a frontier zone which requires its own theorization and specification (2000: 220).

The conception of the global city as a frontier zone, a key place for the articulation of the global and the local, for the organization of the material infrastructures that make globalization possible, introduces an important theoretical move in globalization theory. If we have dedicated here some space to the discussion of what is primarily an account of economic globalization it is because we believe that Sassen provides a general framework within which it is possible to theorize basic processes, such as translation, that intervene in the material production of globalization. Moreover, we will maintain that translation, as a key infrastructure for global communication (Held et al., 1999: 345),5 can also be conceived as an analytic borderland where the global and the local are articulated, and is thus, in cultural globalization, the equivalent of global cities in economic globalization.

We mentioned above Raymond Williams' characterization of cultural practices as themselves material production. In this context, Lawrence Venuti has also argued that 'Translation exposes a fundamental idealism in philosophy by calling attention to the material conditions of concepts, their linguistic and discursive forms, the different meanings and functions they come to possess in different cultural situations' (1998: 106). This analysis will thus consider translation as a material precondition for the circulation of meaning on a global scale. Only by challenging its invisibility, which obscures the social conditions under which translation is performed as well as its role in mediating between cultures, will the mechanisms of cultural globalization be more fully understood.

Furthermore, if globalization is defined as increased connectivity (see the first, introductory section to this chapter), it is possible to identify a basic similarity between globalization and translation when we remind ourselves that 'translation is all about making connections, linking one culture and language to another, setting up the conditions for an open-ended exchange of goods, technologies and ideas' (Cronin, 2003: 41). An exploration of the processes of global connectivity on a concrete, material level is the fundamental contribution of translation to an understanding of the nature of globalization.

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