In this context, the translation of local terms is an attempt, however flawed, to specify cultural principles. Meanings are given as though they were largely constant and predictable, sometimes with contextual information that shows the extent and variety of observed variation. Instead of dealing with translations as devices of art for the purpose of releasing the text from its dependence on prior cultural knowledge, as a literary translator would do, ethnographic translations are attempts to explain the cultural knowledge that local actors bring to their interpretations of each other's actions. My old mentor, the late classicist Philip Vellacott, once wrote that the purpose of a translation from the (ancient) Greek was achieved when the reader threw it away and began to learn the language of the original (1954). In the case of ethnography, this charming conceit is at best an impracticable dream: imagine thousands of anthropologists all "set down" in the coral reefs of the Trobriands. And so the ethnographer, returned home and writing up, has to devise means of making the trip seem quite unnecessary – to be an authoritative guide to the reader.

There are those who view all anthropology as a form of translation. But whether they view ethnography as a practice of translation (Beidelman 1970; Crick 1976; Geertz 1973) or contest that characterization as expressing a hegemonic relationship with the world (Asad 1993), anthropologists are, willy-nilly, engaged in a project that requires some degree of understanding of what translation entails. Their access to key data is through languages of which they have variably competent understandings; their discourse is littered with attempts at contextualization of the kind that would drive any lexicographer to despair; and their choice of key terms veers between expressions of modest uncertainty about the validity of their translations and implicit but unmistakable claims to epistemological authority.

Here, I propose to explore these issue by discussing the representation of "other meanings" in ethnographic description. I shall approach this from two angles, that of my reading of colleagues’ and predecessors’ attempts and that of my own difficulties as I moved among different genres. I shall try to deal especially with what I consider to be two central issues: first, the intractable problem of intentionality as this is related to etymological history; and second, the politics of translation (as well as transliteration). I shall especially take advantage of the fact that, as I have primarily worked in various forms of modern Greek to date, I am dealing with a language with a richly documented past.

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