ALAN Riach picks up from his essays on Niyi Osundare and African anglophone literature to ask a few pertinent questions about the virtues of translation and migrant identities, and what is “translation” anyway? THE African writers we looked at a fortnight ago are accessible to those of us who read only English but we can’t simply ignore the indigenous languages beyond English, any more than we can forget Scots and Gaelic. Imperialism suppressed languages in Africa as it did in Scotland, and linguistic imperialism sums up all other kinds. Understanding this is essential if we have any worthwhile hope for a new Scotland, so it applies very forcefully to Michael Fry’s assessment of Gaelic in Scotland, “We need more than political gestures to save Gaelic culture” (The National, April 20) and to the powerful letters in response to it from Jim Finnie, Derrick McClure and George Pattison, “Gaelic is only a ‘dying’ language because it was beaten out of us!” (The National, April 22), not to mention the egregious pontifications of the “comedian” David Mitchell on his “soapbox” in 2010. (A good exercise in combining mathematics and intellectual interpretation would be to count the number of errors and insults in this recording’s three minutes and 45 seconds.)