The 'cultural turn' in the humanities and in the social sciences has produced in the past two decades a voluminous and polymorphic field of inquiry. Again and again it comes back to new questions to be posed, but also to the consideration of cultural and cultural-political developments themselves, to such pioneering changes in orientation, that cross disciplinary boundaries and lead to parallel focuses and new alignments of inquiry: interpretive turn, performative turn, reflexive turn, postcolonial turn, translational turn, spatial turn, iconic turn. A 'translational turn' in the humanities is certainly emerging. This can be seen in the increasing expansion of the translation category in an interdisciplinary field. If the humanities and social sciences of the last thirty years will be reconstructed systematically from the perspective of their different turns, a new and specific understanding of cultural studies will come to the fore: not as an autonomous discipline but as a multilayered medium for a transdisciplinary encounter and 'translation'.