ABSTRACT
This chapter begins by distinguishing between cultural translation as something to do and cultural translation as something to study or describe. Then it examines four approaches, broken down heuristically by period. In the 1950s, anthropologists were concerned with doing cultural translation by explaining their informants’ symbolic worlds to their readers. In the 1980s, they adopted a reflexive approach focused on the role of power in anthropological discourse. In the 1990s, postcolonial scholars began to treat cultural translation as an object of study, using the term to describe transposition in addition to linguistic re-expression to ask how minority communities challenged hegemonic notions of identity. Finally, by the 2010s, scholars began to synthesize these approaches. For each of these periods, this chapter breaks down the types of claims scholars make (interpretive and critical), the evidence they produce (re-expression of ideas, observations, and signs of social change), and the criteria they use for evaluating evidence and claims (resolution of contradictions, plausibility, reflexivity, and ideological coherence).
