Translation is an ideological and historical notion involving an agent, the translator. As such, it should be linked to contemporary patterns of subjectivity, of which métissage seems the most appropriate. Métissage should not be confused with mixture, which implies fusion, or with hybridity, which produces a new unit. Rather, it is an assemblage of affiliations and identities which is never fixed once and for all and in which the different parts retain their identity and their history. In a similar way, the translated text exists through its difference from the original, and the original makes known and legitimizes its own existence only in and through the translation. Thus and ethics of métissage constitutes a basis for a politics of translation.