Contra responsive to the traditional outlook which regards a translator as a vacuum uprooted from the context, this paper adopts an interdisciplinary approach by applying Hayden White s historiographical convictions on interpretation and ideology to literary translation. White defines ideology as an on-going process of code-making. Like a translator, a historian decodes and recodes the already encoded material. Like White who gives a narrative base to man s life, this paper takes translation as a textual process in need of critical scrutiny. The paper argues that a translator s performance is unavoidably monitored by his/her interpretative powers which are ideology-oriented. The paper ends up by suggesting ways to avoid, or at least delimit, the possibilities of this reduction in the process of translation.

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