The paper examines the problem of translation in Jacques Derrida’s philosophy. He observes an antinomic structure in translation, whose poles are translatability and untranslatability, necessity and impossibility of translation, fidelity and treason, sharing an universal language and exclusivity of the singular idiom. Derrida underlines also an economy of translation, a practical exchange between what is one’s own and the other’s, between words of different languages. But since a perfect equivalence is impossible, translation happens only as a gift, as an unexpected and unconditioned event. Translation is a gift that puts in motion the process of writing and offers the original the possibility to live on. In conclusion the paper suggests a proximity between translation and philosophy or, in a more specific way, between translation and deconstruction.
