The dawn of a new millennium saw the emergence of translation studies carried out by an international network of scholarly communities engaged in scholarly debate across conceptual and disciplinary divisions (Venuti 2000:1). Since South Africa forms an integral part of this network (Beukes 1994, Walker et al. 1995, Kruger 2000), the developments within Translation Studies are also applicable to the South African context.
Linguistic-based theories (see Fawcett 1997) dominated translation studies until the cultural turn at the beginning of the 1980s. In terms of these theories, equivalence was the prevailing concern and yardstick/criterion against which translators were to judge their translations. Unfortunately, owing to linguistic and cultural differences between languages, translations inevitably fell short of the equivalence ideal (Heylen 1993:2). The principal shortcoming of prescriptive/normative translation theories also soon became evident: these theories lacked the necessary sensitivity to thesocio-cultural conditions under which
translations were produced in order to comply with the requirements of acts of communication in the receiving culture (Bassnett-McGuire 1991 [1980]; Bassnett & Lefevere 1990). Thus, the realisation that translations can never be produced in a vacuum, divorced from time and culture, and the desire to explain the time-related and culture-bound criteria at play, resulted in a shift away from a normative and prescriptive methodology (compare Hermans 1985). This trend was conspicuous from the early eighties on and can be related to the linguistic turn from an ahistorical and apolitical approach to language, towards a critical approach (Kress & Hodge 1979, Fairclough 1989). It should furthermore be associated with the influence of semiotics, especially as found in the work of Roland Barthes, Mikhail Bakhtin and Valentin Voloshinov.
The move from translation as text, to translation as culture and politics, has been termed by Mary Snell-Hornby (1990:79-86) as the cultural turn. Bassnett and Lefevere (1990:11) consider this to be a metaphor for the cultural move beyond language in order to focus on the interaction between translation and culture, as well as on the way in which culture impacts on and constrains translation, and subsequently to focus also on the much broader issues of context, history and convention. This approach is inclusive of studies on changing standards in translation over time; the power exercised in and on the publishing industry in pursuit of specific ideologies; feminist writing and translation; translation as appropriation; translation and colonisation; and translation as rewriting, including film rewrites (Munday 2001:127).
The abovementioned developments have led to the quest for the 'opening up' of foreign culture. This may be achieved by means of interlingual translation. In this context translation is regarded as the reproduction of culture, since the act of translating literary texts, in particular, involves transferring aspects of the culture belonging to one group to that of another. Over the centuries, translation has played an important role in terms of cultural enrichment. So much so, that it may be said that the inception of modern national literatures, particularly in the case of minority languages, can often be traced back to translations from originals derived from existing and influential literary systems. As a result, complex and dynamic interaction between translated texts and the receiving culture's own literary production has taken place. In instances where the minority literature is still young, it leaves itself open to foreign influences and translated literature can thus potentially make an active and extensive contribution to the development of the
language and culture (cf. Delisle & Woodsworth 1995:7-24; 45-54; 159-190).
