The Cultural Turn in Translation

The cultural turn reframed translation as a culturally and ideologically situated practice of rewriting, shifting attention from linguistic transfer to power, patronage, and identity.

Definition

The reorientation of translation studies that treats translation as a culturally embedded form of rewriting shaped by ideology, patronage, and the receiving culture's poetics.

Scope

This topic covers the 1990s reorientation of translation studies associated with Susan Bassnett and André Lefevere, who argued that translation cannot be understood apart from the cultural and political conditions of its production. It treats Lefevere's notions of rewriting, patronage, and poetics, the analysis of how translations construct images of foreign cultures, and the offshoots of the turn into gender, postcolonial, and ideological approaches. The treatment is conceptual and locates the turn within the broader history of the discipline.

Core questions

• How do cultural and political forces shape what is translated and how?
• In what sense is translation a form of rewriting?
• How do patronage and dominant poetics constrain translators?
• How do gender and postcolonial perspectives extend the cultural turn?

Key theories

Rewriting, patronage, and poetics

Lefevere's account of translation as one form of rewriting that, alongside criticism and anthologizing, is steered by patronage and the dominant poetics of the receiving culture, thereby shaping the reputation of works and authors.

Translation and cultural construction

Bassnett and Lefevere's claim that translation actively constructs representations of source cultures, so that the unit of study should be culture rather than the isolated text or sentence.

History

The phrase 'cultural turn' was used by Bassnett and Lefevere in their 1990 collection to signal a move beyond linguistic and descriptive models toward the study of translation in its cultural context. The turn fed into gender-aware translation studies (Sherry Simon, Luise von Flotow) and postcolonial translation theory, broadening the field's concern with power and ideology.

Debates

Culture versus linguistic rigour

Some scholars worried that the cultural turn's emphasis on ideology and context risked sidelining close textual and linguistic analysis, prompting later calls for a balanced engagement with both.

Key figures

• Susan Bassnett
• André Lefevere
• Sherry Simon
• Maria Tymoczko

Seminal works

• bassnett1990
• lefevere1992
• bassnett2014

Frequently asked questions

What is the 'cultural turn' in translation studies?

It is the shift, prominent from the 1990s, toward studying translation as a culturally and politically embedded practice rather than a purely linguistic operation.

What does Lefevere mean by 'rewriting'?

Rewriting is any reworking of a text for a new audience—translation, criticism, anthologies—through which dominant ideologies and poetics shape how literature is received and remembered.