Translation is a cultural phenomenon and thus everything associated with translation is connected to culture. As such, translation studies cannot be treated apart from culture and the various sciences of culture. Accordingly, this book starts out by examining the connections between culture studies and culture, in order to bring out, later on, the substantial connections between the discussions concerned with the specificity of translation, and the specificity of culture as understood in different disciplines. The concept of translation has indeed been treated as central to discussions on the philosophy of culture (Ogawa 1995), but also for interpreting the various phenomena of national culture by using academic concepts, by translating them into academic language (Calame 2002). On the other hand, there have been publications of cultural introductions to translation studies (Katani 1999), and analyses of the impact of the so-called cultural turn (Bassnett 2007).
A separate domain is comprised of the metaphoric use of the concept of translation, or the discovery of the translational in different cultural phenomena. For example, a museum of ethnography is translational in the sense that each of its exhibits is accompanied by a written explanation, and this sort of a “rewriting of meanings” (Sturge 2006: 432) is comparable to cultural translation (Asad 1986, cf. Carbonell Cortés 2006). In parallel with C. Geertz’s concept of thick translation, it ought to be feasible to use the concept of “thick translation”, signifying translation that maximally opens up the cultural context (Appiah 2003: 427). Contacts between culture and the activity of translation make it possible to treat anthropology as translation (Brocki 2008: 173-211), as well as to examine translation not merely within the framework of translation studies, but cultural anthropology as well (Bachmann-Medick 2006).