In this 1993 essay Appiah argues that literary translation does not communicate the source author’s intentions, but tries to create a relationship to the linguistic and literary conventions of the translating culture that matches the relationship between the source text and its originary culture. A literary translation can proliferate meanings and values, which, however, remain indeterminate in their relation to the foreign text. Appiah indicates that the indeterminacy is usually resolved in academic institutions, in pedagogical contexts. He cites a translation project that evokes the asymmetries in the global cultural and political economy: an English version of an African oral literature, proverbs in the Twi language. He acknowledges that the political significance of this translation would not be the same in the American academy as in the English-speaking academy in Africa. Whatever the location, however, a political pedagogy is best served by what Appiah calls a “thick” translation, i.e. a translation which uses an ethnographic approach to the source text.