Introduction

Abstract

The practice of translation and role of translators have become central in the contemporary world. While the practices of translation in the past were reserved for cultural and national elites who needed to bring classical texts, such as the Bible or Greek classics, into their own culture, translation today permeates everyday life and various aspects of society, becoming one of the most important features of the multilingual world. This is especially relevant in a European context which is historically constituted as a space of cultural and linguistic differences and where translators always played an important role. But only in the last decades, with the institutional organization of Europe, a need for translation has gained new political and social dimensions. Current debates on the cultural and political identity of Europe, on a common European language, on different linguistic heritages in Europe etc., touch, in one way or another, the principle of translatability and therefore the possibilities (and limits) of exchange between cultures on the European continent. The linguistic and idiomatic plurality of Europe shows that its cultures are already in process of translation, translated or product of translation, inevitably entangled in other cultural horizons