This essay (1992) constitutes a feminist intervention into postcolonial translation issues. But it is also a working translator’s manifesto, a record of the complex intentions that motivated Spivak’s versions of the Bengali fiction writer Mahasweta Devi. Spivak outlines a poststructuralist conception of language, a linguistic model that is much needed by translators of Middle Eastern and Asian literatures. She criticizes Western translation strategies that enact a realistic representation of the literature in the Third World, but devoid of the linguistic, cultural, and geopolitical differences that mark them. Spivak is aware of the contingency of cultural political agendas, whether couched in theoretical statements like her essay or in translation strategies. Different social situations can change the political valence of a translation.