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ore a translation cannot be judged according to mathematics-based concepts of semantic equivalence or one-to-one correspondence. Appeals to the foreign text cannot finally adjudicate between competing translations in the absence of linguistic error, because canons of accuracy in translation, notions of “fidelity” and “freedom”, are historically determined categories. Even the notion of “linguistic error” is subject to variation, since mistranslations, especially in literary texts, can be not merely intelligible but significant in the target-language culture. The viability of a translation is established by its relationship to the cultural and social conditions under which it is produced and read. This relationship points to the violence that resides in very purpose and activity of translation: the reconstitution of the foreign text in accordance with values, beliefs and representations that preexist in the target language, always configured in hierarchies of dominance and marginality, always determining the production, circulation, reception of text. Translation is the forcible replacement of the linguistic and cultural difference of the foreign text with a text that will be intelligible to the target-language reader. This difference can never be entirely removed, of course, but it necessarily suffers a reduction and exclusion of possibilities. Whatever difference the translation conveys is now imprinted by the target-language culture, assimilated to its positions of intelligibility, its canons and taboos, its codes and ideologies. The aim of translation is to bring back a cultural other as the same, the recognizable, even the familiar; and this aim always risks a wholesale domestication of the foreign text, often in highly self-conscious projects, where translation serves an appropriation of foreign cultures for domestic agendas, cultural, economic, political. Of course, at the same time, foreignizing translation method could never be entirely free of domestic values and agendas. If the foreignizing strategies deviated too widely from prevailing domestic values in the reception of archaic texts, for example, especially scholarly annotation and fluent discourse, omitting annotations can of course signal the cultural difference of the foreign texts, insisting on their foreignness with all the discomfort of incomprehension. On the other hand, it is important not to view either the strategy of domestication or foreignization as simple inaccurate translations. Canons of accuracy and fidelity are always locally defined, specific to different cultural formations at different historical moments. A ratio of loss to gain inevitably occurs in the translation process and situates the translation in an equivocal relationship to the foreign text, never quite faithful, always somewhat free, never establishing an identity, always a lack and a supplement. Domesticating and foreignizing methods are thus viewed as the most effective way to control this equivocal relationship and produce versions adequate to the source text. Therefore, neither domestication nor foreignizaton should be adhered to rigidly and the practice of either should partly depend on the constrained factors mentioned above. The relationship between them is one of unity of opposites. III． Translation strategies can be defined as “foreignizing” or “domesticating” only in relation to specific cultural situations, specific moments in the changing reception of a foreign literature, or in the cha