Source — Wikipedia, "Translation studies" (cultural-turn section)
- Title: Translation studies (article section on the "cultural turn" / "cultural translation")
- Publication: Wikipedia
- URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Translation_studies
- Type: tertiary — neutral encyclopedic stance; unauthored/crowd-edited.
- Accessed: 2026-08-29
Extract
- The cultural turn "was sketched by Susan Bassnett and André Lefevere in Translation – History – Culture" and represented an opening of translation studies to exchanges with gender studies, postcolonialism, and cultural studies generally — corroborating the Liu 2010 source's dating and attribution independently.
- "Before the 1990s, translation scholars tended to form particular schools of thought, particularly within the prescriptive, descriptive and Skopos paradigms. Since the 'cultural turn' in the 1990s, the discipline has tended to divide into separate fields of inquiry" — i.e. the cultural turn marks a shift from a small number of competing overarching theories (including the equivalence paradigm this project has already ingested — Jakobson, Catford, Nida) toward a more fragmented, multi-strand field.
- Separately, the article's own term "cultural translation" (distinct from, but related to, "the cultural turn") is traced to Homi Bhabha's reading of Salman Rushdie in The Location of Culture — denoting "the process of transformation, linguistic or otherwise, in a given culture," a distinct and later strand this project has not otherwise ingested.
- Lawrence Venuti appears on this page under a separate "Ethics" heading rather than folded into the "cultural turn" discussion itself; the passage there covers "the differences between source and target language and culture when translating" without linking Venuti explicitly to the Bassnett/Lefevere cultural-turn narrative.
Gaps in this source (flagged, not filled here)
- This page's own structure keeps Venuti and "the cultural turn" apart; other tertiary sourcing (e.g. general translation-studies overviews, the "Lawrence Venuti" and "The Translator's Invisibility" source pages) treats Venuti as part of the same broad post-1990 shift toward attention to cultural/ideological factors, but this specific source does not make that link explicit. This project's new concept page treats Venuti as part of the same broader movement while flagging that this particular source keeps him formally separate — see that page's own notes.
- The article does not explicitly state that the cultural turn "displaced" or was a direct reaction against Jakobson/Catford/Nida's equivalence paradigm by name; the connection drawn on this project's concept pages between the two is this project's own synthesis, built from the Panou 2013 source (already ingested) describing the general shift away from equivalence theories and this source's account of the cultural turn's 1990s timing.