Based on the notion that diasporas can challenge national narrations and the discourse of nation, this paper examines the fluid nature of diasporic identity and the practice of cultural translation represented in Susan Choi's The Foreign Student. Ahn Chang, one of the protagonists of the novel, is a diaspora who escaped from the war-torn and occupied South Korea. Chang's diasporic identity is marked by the fact that he adopts a 'pragmatic philosophy of survival' both in South Korea and in America; he neither aligns himself with North Korea nor supports South Korean (and American) government. Chang, as a skilled translator, realizes that translation itself belongs to 'the zone of intentional misinformation,' and it always creates a by-product, 'a third thing.' In fact, the third thing is the unexpected yet creative product of the translational act which can create the interstitial space of linguistic/cultural communication. Focusing mainly on the way translation constitutes Chang's identity formation, and the scope translation develops and improves the communication between the two protagonists, Chang and Katherine, this paper argues that the very failure of translation helps open the new space of an 'ethics of differences' or an 'ethics of translation.' As Chang and Katherine understand and respect each other's linguistic and cultural differences, their acts of translation open up a new site of cultural communication and translational collaboration. As diasporas themselves point to the very forceful and void nature of nationalism, hybrid and heterogeneous nature of cultural translation unmasks the transparent assumptions of cultural supremacy and cultural imperialism.