While no topic in the past decades has been as central to translation studies as power, no national form more troubles this topic than the particularities of the minor. Especially when considering the imposition of Soviet-style regimes in the smaller nations, the terms in which we discuss power in translation must change. Stemming from the same understandings of Foucauldian knowledge-equals-power readings that drive broader currents in literary studies, the focus on power has a particular utility in translation. It offers a means to change the discussion of translation from simplistic questions of accuracy and freedom in representation to broader contextual questions such as patronage, ideology, and the construction of identity. Yet, of all scholars, we in translation studies—who insist on the differences between Brot and pain—should be the most wary of the “equals” sign, of losing our focus on the particularities of different types of power. For example, the project of revealing the ideological implications of translation choices, the unmasking of the translator as a political actor, seems less than revelatory when discussing a period of censorship in which the state already reads ideologically. As these translators knew, their works participate in a terribly unbalanced power dynamic, in which the state's discourse is seconded by extralinguistic coercive power. Moreover, the translation scholar's ideological readings may reproduce the state's politicization of culture, reducing the translator's work to an effect of power (either resistant to or complicit with). Most progressive translation-studies politics would want to avoid collusion with arbitrary imprisonment, censorship, and labor camps.

This chapter argues that translation was central to the imposition of the Soviet-style regime in Romania, and therefore, some aspects of translation have to be accounted for in ideological terms. When resistance occurred, however, it took different forms than those described in models developed for major cultures. In fact, major-minded translation theory accurately describes the major-minded Soviet discourse, not the minor discourse of the Romanians and others undergoing colonization. The broader point is not just to revise “one of the weaknesses of the early stages of the cultural turn in translation studies[:] …