Recommended Reading: The Postcolonial Turn in Literary Translation Studies: Theoretical Frameworks Reviewed, by Bo Pettersson (University of Helsinki)

"In 1990 Susan Bassnett and André Lefevere, two towering translation studies scholars, famously announced what had been under way for some time: the "cultural turn" in translation studies. In brief, they envisaged that "neither the word, nor the text, but the culture becomes the operational ‘unit’ of translation" (Lefevere and Bassnett 1990: 8). The collection in which their piece appeared (Bassnett and Lefevere 1990) has recently been hailed by Edwin Gentzler (1998: xi), one of the leading synthesizers of translation theory, as the "real breakthrough for the field of translation studies" - which is true in the sense that it epitomized what is sometimes termed "the coming of age" of the discipline. In the 1990s translation studies has in many ways been informed by this cultural turn, which, as Bassnett (1998: 132-133) has shown, includes a rapprochment between cultural studies and translation studies, due to their related efforts to understand the process and status of globalization and national identities. This focus, together with the veritable explosion of postcolonial studies in literature in the last few years of the millennium, has entailed that the cultural turn in translation studies increasingly has become intercultural or multicultural. More specifically, owing to the wide-ranging interest in postcolonial literature and criticism, it might be termed the postcolonial turn."

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