ABSTRACT
In academic speech, it might appear to mean the substitution of cultural referents in a form of translation “oriented towards the target culture, what may be called reader-oriented or ‘domesticating’ translation”. For some, cultural translation is a form of “alchemy” that “opens up a space of the national in-between, the gold of hybrid and mobile identities amid the catastrophes of war and terror”. British social anthropologists were the first to speak of cultural translation – or translation between cultures – in the 1950s. The publication of Writing Culture marked a turning point in the way anthropologists talked about cultural translation. The most prominent scholar associated with the term in postcolonial studies is Homi Bhabha, who uses cultural translation as a tool to analyze Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses. Ideas of cultural translation have evolved as scholars in different fields have adopted and adapted the concept.
