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In Alberta v. Hutterian Brethren of Wilson Colony, the Supreme Court of Canada reconfigured its approach to section 1 of the Canadian Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms by holding that the final step of the R. v. Oakes test—the requirement of proportionality between a measure's salutary and deleterious effects—provided the critical framework for its analysis. The author suggests that the Court's emphasis on the last step of the Oakes test was not the most appropriate response to the specific minimal impairment argument Alberta presented. Alberta argued that the reason it could not safely offer an exemption from its licence photo requirement to Hutterites who objected to photos on religious grounds was because Syndicat Northcrest v. Amselem restricted government inquiries into the sincerity of religious beliefs. Ontario intervened in support of Alberta's concerns. Although the Court did not address this minimal impairment argument, the author argues that it reflects an unnecessarily strict reading of how Amselem's guidelines would apply in this context. In support, the author presents an exemption that would have cohered with Amselem and achieved Alberta's safety objectives. The author then argues more broadly that the provinces' concerns in Hutterian Brethren demonstrate the critical role the minimal impairment step of the Oakes test plays in generating solutions to clashes between laws of general application and minority religious practices. The Court's new emphasis on the proportionate effects test, in contrast, may unfortunately discourage both parties from formulating potentially innovative alternatives.

Understanding literary translation as part of a power game has led to renewed interest in issues of censorship in translation. In an effort to untangle the intricate relations between formal law and (internalized) norms, this essay will focus on voluntary or self-imposed censorship in areas where formal censorship (i.e., legislated law, religious law) is not strictly enforced. It will first briefly describe certain aspects of formal censorship in Israel, then present cases in which the borderline between formal censorship and self-censorship seems blurred. Two particular cases will be examined: one has to do with the attitude of translators towards the use of the words “pig and pork,” the other with the Committee established by the Ministry of Education in the 1960s to censor obscenity in literature. These cases will help shed light on the deep roots of self-censorship mechanisms and the reduced need for formal censorship when subordinate groups or individuals feel that working with the consensus is more beneficial than working against it. The case of a book banned in the Orthodox community—and therefore pre-censored for translation—will examine another aspect of censorship, that of the corrective measures applied when voluntary self-censorship is not exercised.

Keywords: (self-)censorship, pig/pork, obscenity, hegemony, mainstream/periphery, reviewers, (auto)censure, cochon/porc, obscénité, hégémonie, centre/périphérie, critiques

Abstract« Le don et l'abandon » : the Trace of Translation in the Stainless Writing of the Concept — This paper questions the ascendancy of the concept over the realm of expression and meaning. The impossibility which threatens the requirement of translation as vector of meaning assigns it rather as a creative agent of sense in a dimension whose open-ending, virtually infinite, is closely related to the finiteness of the human being. This is the limit of the concept and the starting-point of any poetics in its transgression of the normativity implied in language processing. This is also the frontier which is explored by translation, exceeding by the way the ancillary function of preserving the univocity of reference between a source-language and a target-language. Translation is essentially "performative" : it generates sense. The universal dimension of this performance is not regulated by the unity of the concept, but opened by the uniqueness of form, the one which emerges from the incompleteness of a singular language called for in its relation to the foreign. Translation has not to communicate something, but to reveal the very essence of communicability.

AbstractHebrew Translations of Palestinian Literature — From Total Denial to Partial Recognition — The present paper describes Hebrew translations of Palestinian literature written in the West Bank and Gazza Strip and the Palestinian diaspora and their gradual progress from total denial to partial recognition within the Hebrew cultural polysystem. The preface is followed by three sections: the attitude of Israeli Hebrew culture to translations from Palestinian literatures from the 1950s up to the present against the historical background of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; the publication of translations of particular works by particular writers; Hebrew stage performances of adaptations of translated Palestinian literature.

AbstractThis paper explores the writing of Haitian writer Edwige Danticat from a perspective of (im)migration and translation which is different from that elaborated by Eva Hoffman in Lost in Translation. By contrasting the traumas suffered by both authors and the way they deal with it, different conclusions can be reached concerning the theory of self they propose. Hoffman is resigned to translate herself in order to fit into the American context but never gets over the loss of her Polish self. Danticat, who realizes upon her arrival in New York that she was already a translated being, delves into the Haitian collective past for the creation of fictional characters who find in the translation of their selves the strength to live in two languages and two cultures without abandoning their personal and collective past.

Keywords: Haitian Diaspora, immigration, trauma, translation, self, Diaspora haïtienne, immigration, traumatisme, le moi