This interview discusses translation and/ as power from the point of view of a public intellectual: a prominent Romanian philosopher and media personage who compares post-totalitarian conditions in Eastern Europe and South Africa. A theoretician of social dialogue in the tradition of Husserl, Heidegger and Péguy, Sora discusses the role of the intellectual in bridging cultural difference and in addressing the problematic of alterity and sub-alternity in postcolonial times. Referring to his own publishing and translating experience under the draconian censorship of Stalinism, Sora regards translation as intercultural dialogue to have been a powerful form of resistance to oppressive regimes, as well as a moral force that helped erode the credibility of non-dialogic ‘marxist’ practices behind the Iron Curtain.