This essay investigates the way in which translation embodies paradigms of cultural difference. This theme has been the overwhelming concern of translation from French to English over the last century and a half and has endowed the task of the Canadian translator with a strong collective dimension. The author proposes to isolate a number of moments in Canadian translation which can be seen as guided by differing conceptions of cultural difference and its relation to language. These moments (the classic translations of novels by Sir Charles G.D. Roberts and by William Hume Blake at the turn of the century; the translations of the joual dialect in the Quebec novel of the 1960s; translation and experimental fiction in the 1980s and 1990s) are not intended as markers in a continuous historical advance. They are constructions whose role is to expose the way translation strategy must negotiate between the ideological demands of social discourse and the exigencies of literary language.