Source — Liu, "Cultural Turn of Translation Studies and Its Future Development"

Title: Cultural Turn of Translation Studies and Its Future Development
Author: Lisheng Liu (School of Foreign Languages, Shandong University / Xuchang University, China)
Publication: Journal of Language Teaching and Research, Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 94–96, January 2010 (peer-reviewed academic journal; Academy Publisher; doi:10.4304/jltr.1.1.94-96)
URL: https://www.academypublication.com/issues/past/jltr/vol01/01/15.pdf
Type: secondary / academic survey article — sympathetic-but-critical stance: presents the cultural turn as a genuine advance, then argues (its own Section II.C and Section III.A) that the paradigm over-corrected by neglecting linguistic analysis.
Accessed: 2026-08-29 (fetched directly as a PDF and read in full, not via a search-engine summary)

Extract

Page numbers below are the article's own PDF page numbers (94–96).

"Since the term cultural turn of Translation Studies proposed by Snell-Hornby was advocated by Bassnett and Lefevere in the anthology of 'translation, history and culture' compiled in 1990, the school of Translation Studies began to tackle translation problems from their different cultural perspectives." (p. 94) — the term itself is attributed to Mary Snell-Hornby, but the book that "advocated" it and gave the movement its launching point is Bassnett and Lefevere's edited volume Translation, History and Culture (1990).
"Susan Bassnett and André Lefevere as the advocate of cultural turn of translation studies plays a leading role in the novel research paradigm, together with the theory of 'patronage, poetics and ideology' proposed by André Lefevere." (p. 95)

"Susan Bassnett and André Lefevere introduces many new concepts, including 'history', 'function' and 'Rewriting' in Translation Studies and claims that translation should adapt to cultural requirements." (p. 94)
"Within this paradigm, translation is regarded as rewriting which can introduce new concepts, genres, techniques and motifs, etc. as explained in the famous book Translation, Rewriting and the Manipulation of Literary Fame. Therefore, the history of translation is one of literary innovation and one of shaping one culture by another." (p. 95) — the article cites this Lefevere book as 1993 (a Routledge reprint; the work is more commonly dated 1992, per Routledge's own publisher page — see Gaps).
Susan Bassnett is also credited (separately, p. 94) with "a detailed explanation about one of the four areas of translation studies, i.e. translation in the target culture," and later (p. 95) as one of the advocates, with Spivak, Niranjana, and Trivedi, of the postcolonial approach to translation studies.

The literary system is constrained by a "dual mechanism": professionals inside the system (critics, reviewers, teachers, translators) and "the patronage outside the literary system which includes the powers that can further or hinder the reading, writing, and rewriting of literature." (p. 95, citing Gentzler 2004)
Lefevere's own definition of patronage, quoted directly: "any kind of force that can be influential in encouraging and propagating, but also in discouraging, censoring and destroying works of literature." (p. 95, quoted via Gentzler 2004)
Patronage is "differentiated or undifferentiated." The third factor named is the dominant poetics, "including the literary devices and the concept of the role of literature." (p. 95)
Direct Lefevere quote on how the three factors interact: "on every level of translation process, it can be shown that, if linguistic consideration enters into conflict with consideration of an ideological and/or poetological nature, the latter tend to win out." (p. 95, cited as "1993:39" — the article's reference list gives this as Lefevere, Translation, Rewriting and Manipulation of Literary Fame, London: Routledge, 1993 — see Gaps on the 1992-vs-1993 date)

The article treats feminist and postcolonial translation studies as direct 1990s extensions of the cultural-turn paradigm, not as separate movements: feminist translation studies "begins to examine the social-cultural processes that determined woman's inferior status in society" and treats language itself as a site where women have been silenced (p. 95); postcolonial translation studies (naming Spivak, Niranjana, Bassnett, and Trivedi as advocates) analyzes "asymmetrical power relations in the postcolonial context" and argues translation "has played an active role in the colonization process" (p. 95).

"There is [a] trend of regarding the cultural approach of translation studies as the whole while overlooking the linguistic analysis when it widens its study scope to incorporate external factors by surpassing the linguistic approach." (p. 95)
Its conclusion (p. 96): the cultural turn "reveals cultural attributes of translation and widens... its research scope. However, it overlooks the linguistic aspects and regards the external study as the whole of translation studies, which tend[s] to make the translation study culture-determined... turning the focus upside down." The article's own proposed remedy (a "reductionist," translator-cognition-focused paradigm, drawing on cognitive/corpus/computational linguistics) is a 2010 argument specific to this author, not a consensus view — reported here as this source's own position, not as settled fact.
Separately (p. 96), the article frames "the translation studies from 1990s, especially after the cultural turn," as taking "deconstruction as its theoretical basis" and denouncing "logocentrism" — i.e. situates the cultural turn within a broader deconstructionist intellectual moment, not just a translation-studies-internal shift.

The article gives Lefevere's Translation, Rewriting and Manipulation of Literary Fame a 1993 publication date in its reference list, while other sources (e.g. Routledge's own publisher page) date the first edition to 1992; this is very likely a citation-list error (possibly conflating the 1992 first edition with a 1993 reprint) rather than a real second edition — treat "1992" as the book's date until a primary bibliographic record is checked, and do not treat "1993:39" above as pointing to a different, later book.
The article does not name Lawrence Venuti or discuss domestication/foreignization at all — its account of the cultural turn covers Bassnett, Lefevere, Snell-Hornby, Even-Zohar, Toury, Lambert, and Hermans, plus the feminist and postcolonial extensions, but not Venuti's specific contribution. Venuti's inclusion in "the cultural turn" as this project uses the label rests on other, tertiary sourcing (see the Wikipedia source pages), not on this article.
This is a single secondary academic article from a lower-profile journal (not one of the field's major venues), with its own argumentative agenda (the "reductionist," translator-cognition proposal in Section III.B); its historical claims about Bassnett/Lefevere/the 1990 dating are treated here as reliable (they match the independent Wikipedia sourcing), but its editorializing about the cultural turn's flaws is this author's own view, attributed as such.