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e sense obscure, and the construction ungrammatical, or even harsh. But in practice, critical categories like “fluency” and “resistancy”, “domesticating” and “foreignizing”, can only be defined by referring to the formation of cultural discourses in which the translation is produced, and in which certain translation theories and practices are valued over others. In the light of translation history, the canons of translation underwent changes, requiring a translation to be both fluent and exact, to make for vivid and compulsive reading, but also to follow the foreign culture, especially hegemonic culture more closely. The case shows that the aim of translation is not to assess the “freedom” or “fidelity” of a translation, but rather to uncover the canons of accuracy by which it is produced and judged. Fidelity cannot be explained as mere semantic equivalence: on the one hand, the foreign text is susceptible to many different interpretations even at the level of the individual word; on the other hand, the translator’s interpretive choices answer to a domestic cultural situation and so always exceeds the foreign text. This does not mean that translation is forever banished to the realm of freedom or error, but that canons of accuracy are culturally specific and historically variable. Thus the translators’ different motives and methods used in translations can be more fully understood in the context of their other work, their lives, and their different historical moments. IV． Translation is, of course, a rewriting of an original text. All rewritings, whatever their intention, reflect a certain ideology and poetics and as much manipulate literature to function in a given way. Rewriting is manipulation, undertaken in the service of power, and in its positive aspect can help in the evolution of a literature and a society. Rewritings can introduce new concepts, new genres, new devices and the history of translation is the history also of literary innovation, of the shaping power of one culture upon another. But rewriting can also repress innovation, distort and contain, and in an age of ever increasing manipulation of all kinds. On the one hand, translation wields enormous power in the construction of national identities for foreign cultures, and hence it potentially figures in ethnic discrimination, geopolitical confrontations, and colonialism terrorism war. On the other hand, translation enlists the foreign text in the maintenance or revision of literary canons in the target-language culture, inscribing poetry and fiction, for example, with the various poetic and narrative discourses that compete for cultural dominance in the target language. Translation also enlists the foreign text in the maintenance or revision of dominant conceptual paradigms, research methodologies, and clinical practices in target-language disciplines and professions, whether physics or architecture, philosophy or psychiatry, sociology or law. The study of the manipulative processes of literature as exemplified by translation can help us toward a greater awareness of the world in which we live. It is assumed that English culture has already attained a significant level of development, presumably in classical and romantic literature, which must be protected from foreign contamination and imposed universally, through a specifically English foreignization of world literature. Obviously this is not the case. In general, it can be said that Anglo-American culture has reaped the