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1、Culture and TranslationSUSAN BASSNETTWhy did Translation Studies take a Cultural Turn?A long time ago, in 1990 to be precise, Andre 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 a
2、ttention 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
3、 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 wer
4、e always being asked were How cantranslationbe taughtandHowcantranslationbe studied?Thosewhoregarded themselves as translators were often contemptuous of any attemptsto teach translation, while those who claimed to teach often did not translateand so had to resort to the oldevaluative method of sett
5、ing onetranslationalongsideanotherandexaminingbothin aformalistvacuum.Now,thequestions have been changed. The object of study has been redefined; whatis studiedis textembeddedwithinits networkof bothsourceandtargetcultural signs. (Bassnett & Lefevere, 1990: 11-12)When we wrote that, we were mindful
6、of a split between linguistic approaches to translation and literary ones, and we sought to challenge both as too narrow1and prescriptive. Translation studies had been developing as a distinct discipline through the 1980s, employing methodologies that drew upon research in linguistics and comparativ
7、e literature and we felt, along with many other people working in the field of translation, that the time had come for increased employment of the tools of cultural history and cultural studies. Looking back, our introduction appears both na?ve and simplistic, for translation studies developed so ra
8、pidly in the 1990s and now occupies such a solid place in the academy that there is no longer any need for special pleading. The arguments we sought to present that translation plays a major role in shaping literary systems, that translation does not take place on a horizontal axis, that the transla
9、tor is involved in complex power negotiations (mediating between cultures, as it were), that translation is always a rewritingof an original have been taken much further by scholars such as Michael Cronin (1996; 2000), Edwin Gentzler (1993/2001), Lorna Hardwick (2000), Theo Hermans (1999b, 2006), Te
10、jaswini Niranjana (1992), Douglas Robinson (2002), Sherry Simon (1996), Harish Trivedi (1993), Elsa Vieira (1999), Lawrence Venuti (1995; 1998b) and many others. Translation studies has become an accepted academic subject and books, journals and doctoral dissertations appear faster than one can read
11、 them all, and at the heart of most of the exciting new research are broad questions about ideology, ethics and culture.Even in 1990 we were by no means the only translation scholars arguing the case for a cultural turn. The move to broaden the object of study beyond the immediate frame of the text
12、had started long before, with the work of the Polysystems Group inspired by Itamar Even-Zohar (1978), Gideon Toury (1978) and James Holmes (1978). In Germany, Canada, Brazil, France and India, arguments similar to ours were being presented, albeit from different perspectives, as translators and tran
13、slation scholars set about the task of redefining the importance of translation in literary history, tracing the genealogy2of translation in their own individual cultural contexts, and exploring more fully the ideological implications of translation and the power relationships that are involved as a
14、 text is transferred from one context to another.Polysystems theory was primarily concerned with literary translation, but other translation scholars whose work included the non-literary were pursuing parallel paths. The skopos theory, for example, developed by Hans Vermeer, Katharina Reif (Rein & V
15、ermeer, 1984) and others, postulates that the objective or function of a translation determines the translation strategies to be employed. Hence the translators subjective takes precedence, and the function that a translation is meant to fulfil in the target culture enables that translator to make certain choices. This is a far cry from source-focused theories of translation, and can also be said to reflect a cultural turn. Summarizing translation studies in the 1980s and 1990s, Edwin Gentzler writes:The two most important shifts in theoretical de
