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18 The Translator’s Invisibilityendless chain (polysemous, intertextual, subject to infinite linkages),it is always differential and deferred, never present as an originalunity (Derrida 1982). Both foreign text and translation are derivative:both consist of diverse linguistic and cultural materials that neitherthe foreign writer nor the translator originates, and that destabilizethe work of signification, inevitably exceeding and possiblyconflicting with their intentions. As a result, a foreign text is the siteof many different semantic possibilities that are fixed onlyprovisionally in any one translation, on the basis of varying culturalassumptions and interpretive choices, in specific social situations, indifferent historical periods. Meaning is a plural and contingentrelation, not an unchanging unified essence, and therefore atranslation cannot be judged according to mathematics-basedconcepts of semantic equivalence or one-to-one correspondence.Appeals to the foreign text cannot finally adjudicate betweencompeting translations in the absence of linguistic error, becausecanons of accuracy in translation, notions of “fidelity” and“freedom,” are historically determined categories. Even the notionof “linguistic error” is subject to variation, since mistranslations,especially in literary texts, can be not merely intelligible butsignificant in the target-language culture. The viability of atranslation is established by its relationship to the cultural and socialconditions under which it is produced and read.This relationship points to the violence that resides in the verypurpose and activity of translation: the reconstitution of the foreigntext in accordance with values, beliefs and representations thatpreexist it in the target language, always configured in hierarchies ofdominance and marginality, always determining the production,circulation, and reception of texts. Translation is the forciblereplacement of the linguistic and cultural difference of the foreigntext with a text that will be intelligible to the targetlanguage reader.This difference can never be entirely removed, of course, but itnecessarily suffers a reduction and exclusion of possibilities—and anexorbitant gain of other possibilities specific to the translatinglanguage. Whatever difference the translation conveys is nowimprinted by the target-language culture, assimilated to its positionsof intelligibility, its canons and taboos, its codes and ideologies. Theaim of translation is to bring back a cultural other as the same, therecognizable, even the familiar; and this aim always risks awholesale domestication of the foreign text, often in highly selfconsciousprojects, where translation serves an appropriation of