All literary texts evoke metonymically the larger literary and cultural contexts from which they emerge. Issues raised by the translation of texts from postcolonial cultures set in high relief the metonymics of translation, thus challenging theoretical approaches to translation based on binary classifications (e.g. literal/free; domesticating/foreignizing; formal-equivalence/dynamic-equivalence; adequate/acceptable; fluent/resistant). Because dominant-culture audiences are unfamiliar with the culture, literary traditions, and language of texts of colonized peoples, translators of such texts are in the paradoxical position of "telling a new story", even as they rewrite a source text. Constructing texts that metonymically stand for the literature and culture of such marginalized peoples, inevitably privileging certain metonymies over others, translators create images of their source cultures in a sensitive process having important ideological implications.