Power relations shape who is silenced and who is heard. Power relations within an interpretive community regulate who gets to speak, who is listened to and what knowledge comes to represent that community to outsiders.

In contrast, my sense of an interpretive community makes power relations more central to the act of communication and translation. It is adequate to plug ideas into Google Translate and see what comes out of the other end. In this sense, linguistic communities are apolitical -the power dynamics that affect all aspects of communication fall from view. This perspective overlooks the political implications of the terms of belonging to a particular linguistic community.

Here one need only translate Portuguese into English or vice versa for the members of each linguistic community to access the worldview of the other. This understanding of language itself as the bedrock linguistic communities underlies commonsense understandings of translation. A linguistic community is often seen a site of social equality where speaking a shared language ostensibly fosters similar values, ideas and a common worldview. When it comes to communication and language, I further distinguish between a linguistic community and an interpretive community. In this sense, community is a specific site where language as a set of ideas and of communicative practices occurs. Community can also serve as an important site for generating antiracist and feminist analyses of social injustice. In my own work, I return to the idea of community as one important site that organizes the connections between unjust social institutions and the ideological discourses that reproduce them. As systems of power, they organize unjust social institutions and practices.

: Sexism and racism are not just ideologies but also encompass tangible social practices.

: What are the dynamics of sexism and racism through language? So, my answers reflect my sense of how issues of translation play out in my intellectual production. While I am less familiar than I would like to be with Translation Studies a field of formal study, I have thought a great deal about issues of translation within my own work. Patricia Hill Collins : Thank you for this invitation to discuss how aspects of my work might inform Translation Studies. I believe that your reflections on these topics would be very fruitful in our debates on them, given that few Black women scholars talk about these subjects. Dennys Silva-Reis : Yours would be a very important contribution to Translation Studies in Brazil and a stimulus for our work in anti-racism in the academy and in the translation field.

Patricia collins black feminist thought