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According to Venuti (1992: 6), poststructuralist thinkers like Derrida and de Man, mainly under the influence of Benjamin's works, explode the binary opposition between original and translation which causes translators to be invisible. Before the emergence of poststructuralism, structuralists like Saussure, defined language as the scientifically examinable world of symbols constituting the linguistic system and social structure within which the individual is socially shaped. The structuralists believed that 'language is constructed as a system of signs, each sign being the result of conventional relation between word and meaning, between a signifier (a sound or sound-image) and a signified (the referent, or concept represented by the signifier)' (Roman, 2002: 309). Later, Barthes, an early poststructuralist, claimed that 'signifiers and singnifieds are not fixed, unchangeable, but, on the contrary, can make the sign itself signifying more complex mythical signs as intricate signifiers of the order of myth' (Roman, 2002: 310). This shift of idea from structuralism toward poststructuralism resulted in extreme revisions in different domains of language, for example, developing of 'the death of author' thinking which later found its way into Translation Studies. From instability of the signifiers and signifieds, Barthes concludes that reading texts in terms of authorial intention or what we think the author meant by such and such a statement, and referring the source of meaning and authority of a text back to its author (as the creator of that text) is no more acceptable (Royle, 2003: 7). Barthes argues that 'since writers only write within a system of language in which particularized authors are born and shaped, texts cannot be thought of in terms of their author's intentions, but only in relationship with other texts: in intertextuality' (Roman, 2002: 311). In the absence of the author, Barthes explains, the readers (a translator could be one of them) interpret texts by setting them against their backdrop of known words and phrases, existing statements, familiar conventions, anterior texts, or, in other words, their general knowledge which is ideological; and the meaning of a text becomes what individual readers extract from it, not what a supreme Author put in. (Hermans, 1999: 69) ' "The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author", Barthes bravely declares' (ibid).

Derrida, another poststructuralist, draws attention from the signifieds to the chain of signifiers, as Roman (2002) explains:

• Derrida takes the structure of sign from Saussure, but transforms it into a fluid entity, whereby meaning and writing consist solely in signifiers. Signifiers refer only to each other and meaning becomes unstable since any deferral to yet another signifier implies a difference in an endless chain of signification. This is the meaning of the French term diffйrence (from the French verb diffйrer, with its polysemantics of to differ and to delay), or Diffйrance, a neologism created by Derrida particularly to express the indeterminacy of meaning. (p. 311)

According to Venuti (1992), poststructuralist thinkers believe that the original is itself a translation, an incomplete process of translating a signifying chain into univocal signified, and this process is both displayed and further complicated when it is translated by another signifying chain in a different language. The originality of the foreign text is thus compromised by the poststructuralist concept of textuality. Neither the foreign nor the translation is an original semantic unity; both are derivative, consisting of diverse linguistic and cultural materials, making meaning plural and differential (p. 7). In the same way, neither the author nor the translator as a reader of source text possesses the authorial power to definitely determine the meaning; and the 'authority' will always remain collective due to endless circle of signification.Poststructuralist textuality redefines the notion of equivalence in translation by assuming from the outset that the differential plurality in every text precludes a simple correspondence of meaning, and a ratio of loss and gain inextricably occurs during translation process (Venuti, 1992: 7-8). Similarly, Carbonell (1996) points out that, since the nature of the context of signification in both the source and target cultures is heterogeneous, meaning changes unavoidably in the process of translation and there will be always possibility of contradiction between the author's intentions and the translator's (p. 98). But why have such relativism and perspectivism result not in a state of complete anarchy and unintelligibility? According to Toury (2000), 'Cognition itself is influenced, probably even modified by socio-cultural factors' (p. 119). A translator, just like an author, is not simply a 'person' but a socially and historically constituted subject. As mentioned earlier, translators interpret texts by setting them against their backdrop of known words and phrases, existing statements, familiar conventions, anterior texts, or, in other words, their general knowledge which is ideological. This knowledge allows them to interpret the text and at the same time limits the range of their interpretation as Robinson aptly notices:

• Translators [.] are those people who let their knowledge govern their behavior. And that knowledge is ideological. It is controlled by ideological norms. If you want to become a translator you must submit to the translator's submissive role, submit to being possessed by what ideological norms inform you.

(qtd. in Calzada-Pйrez, 2003: 7)

What brings de facto the individual interpretations close together is the likeness of the intertextual and ideological configurations the individuals are located in. Translators are hardly (maybe never) aware of ideological factors governing their process of the source text interpretation

Toury (1999: 18) admits the difficulties of determining the role of socio-cultural factors which unconsciously affect the translator's behavior:

• One thing I would not venture to do [.] is tackle the intriguing question of how, and to what extent, the environment affects the workings of the brain, or how the cognitive is influenced by the socio-cultural, even though this would surely make an invaluable contribution to our understanding of translation.

Nevertheless, sometimes it becomes extremely difficult for a translation scholar to justify whether the ideological discrepancies observed between the source text and the target text are results of the translator's subconscious ideological interpretation or of his/her intentional ideological intervention which will be discussed in the following paragraphs.