Just the other day I was pondering over our profession, as I usually do, and some concepts I have exposed elsewhere in this very same forum (http://www.english-spanish-translato...as-formas.html) --with the popularity my threads usually have. In that thread I spoke about something called khôra, some kind of receptacle which filled with meaning to produce the things in the world. If any of you found that idea interesting at all, maybe you'd like to check (if you haven't) the movie Zelig by Woody Allen. It is not the same thing, but shares a lot of similarities with the other idea.
The premise of the story is quite simple: Leonard Zelig is a neurotic little man who can't help becoming other people. Whenever he's around Jewish people, he becomes a Jew, when he's around Chinese people, he's one more Chinese guy. He's treated by Eudora Fletcher, a Freudian psychologist, who tries to get the "camaleon man" to become a regular human being. She only achieves her goal (or she is close to achieving it) when he falls in love with her and she is around. (Needless to speak about the profound psychological insight of such a premise). Now, I wonder, wouldn't that, at some point identify the translator too, that becoming someone else for a while but only achieving something similar to an identity when finding a field he or she identifies with? I don't know if calling it love is the right way to go, because that little word is full of problems and usually constitutes a euphemism for other things, but that would be the way desire is invested.