Culture and cultural translation are not the same thing. Culture is the whole way of life of a community - its language, customs, values and art. Cultural translation, in the narrower sense used in translation studies, is the practice of carrying culture-specific elements from one language into another. But in postcolonial theory the term has been stretched much further, and not everyone agrees with that stretching. This essay, based largely on Harish Trivedi's critique, explains the difference and the debate.
Translation's rise and the cultural turn
Over the last few decades, translation has become a more prolific, more visible and more respectable activity than perhaps ever before, and alongside it a new academic field - Translation Studies - has gathered remarkable momentum. Its modern rise can be traced to distinct moments: the wave of Russian fiction translated into English from the 1890s to the 1930s (the "Russian fever" that swept up Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence), and then, in the 1970s and 1980s, the translation of Latin American and East European literatures, which transformed global expectations of what literature could look like. An earlier parallel was the "Oriental Renaissance" of the late eighteenth century, when Charles Wilkins, Sir William Jones and other orientalists began translating from Sanskrit - though that discovery led more to comparative philology than to an interest in translation itself.
The interaction of language with culture expanded the horizons of translation studies and liberated it from the purely mechanical tools of linguistics. Words that proved untranslatable were recognized as culture-specific: kurta, dhoti, roti, dharma, karma, maya could no longer be treated as simple equivalents of shirt, trouser, bread, religion, deeds or illusion. Gradually, not just words but whole languages came to be seen as specific to their cultures.
Bassnett, Lefevere and the cultural turn
Susan Bassnett and André Lefevere gave this development its name - "the cultural turn" - in their 1990 book Translation, History and Culture. Bassnett later declared comparative literature dead in the wake of postcolonial literature's rise. Meanwhile, Cultural Studies grew from Eurocentric beginnings to international stature, yet, as Trivedi notes with disappointment, the two interdisciplinary fields never properly interacted - perhaps because translation always deals with at least two languages while cultural studies works mainly in one, English.
Bassnett proposed a four-point agenda: how different cultures construct their images of writers and texts; how texts become cultural capital across boundaries; the politics of translation, especially what Lawrence Venuti called the "ethnocentric violence of translation"; and a pooling of resources between the disciplines. The agenda remains largely unfulfilled.
"Cultural translation" in the postcolonial sense
Trivedi then turns to a newer use of the term "cultural translation", which he argues should not be confused with the old-fashioned sense of carrying a text from source to target language. This new sense, still absent from the encyclopedias and anthologies of translation studies, is in his view a dangerous trend - one that promotes monolingualism and monoculturalism and would flatten a diverse world into a monolithic one.
Homi Bhabha, in The Location of Culture (1994), discusses Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses as an instance of cultural translation - even though the novel was written in English and is read in English, not in any translation. Trivedi objects: what Bhabha describes is the condition of the postcolonial diaspora, the "transnational as translational" - but that is not translation, it is human migrancy, and it deserves its own word.
The Kureishi and Lahiri examples
Trivedi cites Hanif Kureishi, born in England to one British and one Indian/Pakistani parent, who writes about new British immigrant communities. Against Bhabha's claim that cultural translation answers the needs of immigrants, Trivedi argues such writing answers a hegemonic Western demand. He similarly discusses Jhumpa Lahiri, born in London to Bengali parents and raised in America, whose fiction covers both Indians in America and Indians in India. Lahiri has admitted her knowledge of India is limited; in that sense, her representation of India is itself a "translation" of India - and, as she has said, almost all her characters are translators, since they must make sense of the foreign to survive.
Trivedi's objection
Trivedi's worry is that using the word "translation" for these phenomena dilutes the discipline of translation studies. For the experiences Bhabha describes, he suggests words like migrancy, exile or diaspora - not "translation". He is equally uneasy about Susan Bassnett's description of Edwin Gentzler's Contemporary Translation Theories as "effectively also a translation" because it renders complex theory into accessible language. For Trivedi, translation must retain its core meaning - the carrying of text between languages - or the term loses all precision.
Conclusion
Culture is what a community lives; translation is how texts travel between languages; and "cultural translation" sits contested between the two - either a precise tool for handling culture-specific words and ideas, or, in the postcolonial usage Trivedi criticizes, a metaphor stretched so wide that it risks meaning nothing at all.
