What use are translators in a globalised post-modern Babel Tower?

Translation can be used for bad or good purposes, to impose or fight capitalism, to share or deny knowledge. Yet, this book will demonstrate the impossibility of translation, its lies, its enslavement to the system, and its active role in the subjugation of a global subaltern class. This book acknowledges the impossibility of the translator s task, and concludes with an exhortation to give up and abolish the practice of translation: let us call this exhortation the No-Translation Proposal. We may try to make this Babel Tower a more comfortable home, where we can understand each other without linguistic negotiations by being our own mediators, where individuals are endowed with the opportunity to gain direct access to the originals in order to dismiss elitist circles of privileged mediators who have been trained to unnecessarily filter meanings on their behalf. If translations are removed, originals will speak for themselves, and readers, empowered to become text explorers, will rely on a virtual unlimited heritage of first-hand sources of knowledge, rather than partial, restrained, and derivative mediations: if peoples could share it all, that would be real cultural democracy.