Prior to Bassnett, scholars like Eugene Nida focused on dynamic equivalence (meaning). Bassnett and Lefevere declared: Translation studies had become a discipline in crisis because it ignored power structures. The "Cultural Turn" meant analyzing the target culture’s needs, not just the source text’s words.

– The most cited collection is: Bassnett, Susan, and André Lefevere (eds.). (1990). Translation, History and Culture . London: Pinter Publishers. (Sometimes also listed under the series Translation Studies .)

Whether you are downloading an essay PDF for a university thesis or analyzing global literature trends, Bassnett’s core message remains clear: to understand the history of human culture, you must understand the history of translation.

The theoretical debt of this "turn" was to a range of emerging intellectual currents. The late 1970s and 1980s saw the rise of cultural anthropology, post-structuralism, and, significantly, the new interdisciplinary field of cultural studies. Bassnett saw a natural affinity between these fields and translation studies, arguing that translations are "the performative aspect of intercultural communication" and calling for greater collaboration between translation theorists and cultural studies scholars.