《culture and translation》.pdf

Chapter 1 Culture and Translation SUSAN BASSNETT Why did Translation Studies take a Cultural Turn? Along time ago, in 1990 to be precise, André Lefevere and I were writing an introductory chapter to a collection of essays entitled Translation, History and Culture (Bassnett Lefevere, 1990). We wanted to draw attention to changes that we believed were increasingly underpinning research in translation studies, changes that signalled a shift from a more formalist approach to translation to one that laid greater emphasis on extra-textual factors. The study of translation practice, we argued, had moved on and the focus of attention needed to be on broader issues of context, history and convention not just on debating the meaning of faithfulness in translation or what the term ‘equivalence’ might mean. The kind of questions being asked about translation were changing: Once upon a time the questions that were always being asked were ‘How can translation be taught’ and ‘How can translation be studied?’ Those who regarded themselves as translators were often contemp- tuous of any attempts to teach translation, while those who claimed to teach often did not translate and so had to resort to the old evaluative method of setting one translation alongside another and examining both in a formalist vacuum. Now, the questions have been changed. The object of study has been redefined; what is studied is text embedded within its network of both source and target cultural signs. (Bassnett Lefevere, 1990: 11–12) When we wrote that, we were mindful of a split between linguistic approaches to translation and literary ones, and we sought to challenge both as too narrow and prescriptive. Translation studies had been devel- oping as a distinct discipline through the 1980s, employing methodologies that drew upon research in linguistics and comparative literature and we felt, a