This article analyses the issues raised by the definition of two prototypical intercultural collaborations, one grounded in consensus and the other in compromise, which have fostered competing conceptions of participatory citizenship in contemporary multilingual and multicultural democratic societies. Specifically, the first objective is to examine the role of literary translation, henceforth called upon to serve two social contracts that advocate, respectively, cultural assimilation based on the trivialization of power relations in the name of equality, and cultural integration based on the importance of acknowledging inequalities to ensure the visibility, vitality and, at times, survival of minority communities. We take as an example the role of literary translation in the evolution of the difficult relations between Québec’s Francophone majority and Anglophone minority since 1976, more particularly in the cultural revitalization the latter has experienced over the past twenty-odd years. Thus, the second objective is to call into question a well-oiled reading of the history of these power relations that, by positing the emergence of a tradition of translation predicated on consensus, is founded less on fact than on perceptions, ambient discourses and received ideas construed as truths. The rereading proposed here exposes the real compromises which these “truths” erase, as well as the role of literary translation as concession in the cultural revitalization of the Anglophone communities. Bibliometrics provides us with a heuristic tool to attain these objectives, with the additional benefit of creating a much needed link between the history of translation, which focuses on empirical facts, and translation studies, which focuses primarily on discursive constructs.