A Double-Edged Sword : Indigenous Translation Under Colonization in Taiwan

For as long as Taiwan’s Indigenous peoples have been colonized, translation has been a double-edged sword, a weapon not only of rule but also of resistance. Over the past four hundred years, a series of settler states and state-allied institutions, particularly the church, have translated to enhance social control, but in certain periods Indigenous peoples have translated to defend their rights. Indigenous scribes translated to defend their property rights from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. Indigenous activists have translated to defend their human rights since the 1980s. Over the past four decades, there has been a flowering of Indigenous linguistic and cultural translation. This flowering has occurred with direct and indirect state support, but has to be understood in the context of continuing colonization.