The story of Babel asks us to wonder why there should be differences when once there was unity – and, it would seem, expresses a yearning for that lost universality. This question, most puzzling when language is taken primarily to be a vehicle for the making of (potentially) true statements, becomes less mysterious when the social and political pragmatics of language are taken into view. Sociolinguistics has long recognized, for instance, that distinctions of language construct social boundaries and constitute hierarchies. The need for translation, in this light, is not simply an unfortunate, even contingent, by-product of our fallen state, but displays speakers’ and listeners’ political insistence on their distinctiveness from others. As Judith Irvine and Susan Gal (2000) have argued, boundaries between languages do not simply reflect differences of social or political identity, nor is the very existence of such boundaries merely a "linguistic" fact. Rather, the constituting of identities involves ideologies about language differences, including shifting perceptions

about the very existence of boundaries. Moreover, it is clear that boundaries do not simply separate but also hierarchize. Linguistic differences are rarely if ever neutral, but typically involve both ideological and practical relations of encompassment, subordination and dominance (Silverstein 1998).

In the postcolonial context, these basic semiotic problems underlie arguments about efforts to reclaim local linguistic identity and discursive powers from the effects of colonial domination. On the one hand, a modernist and developmentoriented position tends to stress the view that a standardized national language is a vehicle of the movement toward universality, bringing peoples together in a global ecumene. Indeed, a supposedly "richer" language should provide resources for the improvement of one that is more "impoverished." To some extent, the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe (1994 [1975]) draws on both views in his argument that African writers should use English because it allows them to communicate across Africa and with the world at large.

An opposed position stresses the ways in which translation offends against the self-possession of the speaker. More specifically, translation requires some sort of explication or contextualization that is not necessary in the original, and so offends against the shared tacit knowledge that defines intimates. Explication performs an act of interpretation on words that had been left to the recipient to interpret and can thus appear as a form of aggressiveness. In colonial situations, the Western claims to understand and master indigenous others that are enacted through translation may be crucial to the everyday workings of power. Here the claims of universality mask and legitimate a historically specific set of political relations. Thus the reinstatement of opacity between languages becomes a means of resisting domination and fostering autonomous agency.