On Cultural Studies and Constructing Translation Studies as a Discipline

There has taken place what is called cultural turn in the field of translation studies in China in recent years.There is its own special background for the appearance of cultural studies,a new paradigm in translation studies,which deepens and broadens the dimensions of translation studies by taking politics and social power into research instead of making a linguistic analysis of the text alone.The cultural turn in translation studies has its own historical context,and cultural turn remains not so much as the main direction of translation studies as it serves as a strategy of constructing the discipline because of the anti-discipline nature of cultural studies.Cultural studies is to be one of the many ways of doing translation studies,and translation studies should be warned not to lose its own identity by merging itself in cultural studies.Cultural studies tell us that we need to strengthen our disciplinary consciousness,to keep an open but critical mind,and to guard against becoming a dependency of the westem culture in the process of constructing translation studies as a discipline.