The problem with culture

It is natural that a fairly young discipline such as AVT should embrace the cultural turn in translation studies as a vantage standpoint and look at problems of language and culture as closely intertwined. The cultural turn in audiovisual translation has meant going beyond the study of translation patterns normally found in descriptive research (Chaume 2018). This chapter will offer insights on three loci of culture in translation: cultural references, always a fruitful area of research, but one which contains areas deserving of further investigation; intralinguistic culture clashes, that is those potentially conflicting encounters which involve individuals from different cultures sharing the same language; and finally, allusions in film and TV dialogue to what we often understand as ‘culture’ proper, that is high-end or low-brow products of art, literature, music and so on, which constitute a special problem but also a special opportunity for translators.