The Cultural Turn in Translation Studies
In 1990 Susan Bassnett and André Lefevere declared that translation studies had taken a cultural turn. The unit of analysis was no longer the sentence or the text but the culture that received the translation.
Translation as rewriting
Lefevere argued that every translation is also a rewriting, shaped by three pressures: patronage (who pays and what they expect), poetics (the dominant literary norms of the target culture), and ideology (the unspoken rules about what may be said). A translator who ignores these pressures still answers to them; the translation reveals the answers.
What an AI pipeline can and cannot do
An AI pipeline can be told what tone, register, and glossary to use. It cannot independently negotiate patronage or weigh ideology. That work stays with the human who writes the brief. The cultural turn reminds us that the brief is the political act; the model is the executor.
Further reading: foreignization vs domestication, skopos.