The Politics of Translation: International Relations in the Third Space

This paper examines the politics of translation in contemporary International Relations (IR). Specifically, it compares and contrasts Kenneth Waltz’s Theory of International Politics with its Chinese edition, to see what has been produced and/or dismissed in the process of translation. Situating its argument primarily within postcolonial theoretical framework, this study argues that such translation creates what Homi K. Bhabha calls the Third Space of enunciation—a subject position belongs to neither the original nor the target language. As an interdisciplinary study, the present study considers International Relations as a form of knowledge exchange and focuses on how certain “Western” ideas are communicated and/or appropriated to “non-Western” audience, in general, Chinese students, in specific, through translated textbooks. In doing so, it attempts to provide a more bottom-up approach to contemporary IR scholarship which is largely reduced to the study of realism, constructivism, and liberalism.