Ach, jeśli ty Goethego znasz w oryginale...

The cultural turn in translation studies promised profound changes. The proposals of certain themes (as institutions, gender…) were indeed new. Yet on the Polish ground the contexts of culture, the contribution of translations to the shaping of the receiving literatures, the possibility of reading translations as independent texts, the programmes and images of translators were not. A disturbing peculiarity of the manifestos of the turn is the reduction of the image of translational communication, the abandonment of most research techniques in favour of descriptivism and the ideologisation of the study of translation, seen as a cultural text, controlled by politics or commerce.