The use of English is commonly taken to be one of the distinctive features of globalization and Anglophone cultural hegemony. Is the appearance of the fictional translator in English writing an indication of deliberate resistance to “the global parochialism of Anglophone monoglossia”? Or are these imagined translators weak echoes of the same ‘questions of colonialism and cultural hegemony’ raised by Third World postcolonial plurilingual writers, writing in the language of the ex-colonizer? Are these characters the authors’ wistful attempts to construct a bilingual consciousness denied them through assimilation? These are the overarching questions that this paper will attempt to answer by looking at the fictional translator as a character and linguistic presence in writing in English through an examination of Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient (1992), David Malouf’s Remembering Babylon (1993), and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated (2002).