Cultural translation is the practice of translation while respecting and showing cultural differences. This kind of translation solves some issues linked to culture, such as dialects, food or architecture.

The main issues that cultural translation must solve consist of translating a text as showing the cultural differences of that text while also respecting the source culture as well.

Cultural translation is studied through cultural anthropology, a field of anthropology focused on cultural issues among humans. This discipline questions translation through cultural differences. Indeed, translation studies are not only based on language issues, but also on cultural contexts between people.

An anthropological translator of cultures needs to deal with the issues between the source and the target language, that is to say he must respect at the same time the cultural source of point of view and the target culture. Wilhelm von Humboldt shared this opinion of translation in a letter addressed to A. W. Schlegel, dated July 23, 1796: "All translation seems to me simply an attempt to solve an impossible task. Every translator is doomed to be done in by one of two stumbling blocks: he will either stay too close to the original, at the cost of taste and the language of his nation, or he will adhere too closely to the characteristics peculiar to his nation, at the cost of the original. The medium between the two is not only difficult, but downright impossible".

Some anthropologists raise objections to translation of cultures. According to these researchers, culture seeks a certain coherence that can be found in people's thinking and practices. In this case, a cultural translator must have a much more widespread knowledge than the text actually provides.

Besides, translation of cultures cannot be as equal as it should be, as some cultures and societies remain dominant compared to others, therefore power is a limit to translation of cultures. Indeed, within a translation of cultures, the target language may dominate the source culture in order to make the text comprehensible in a sense of culture for the readers. The meaning of culture is quite difficult to understand, therefore translation of cultures is certainly limited, all the more so borders exist between cultures, which must be thus distinguished. This limit of translation of cultures was also explained in the theory of Edward Sapir, an American linguist and anthropologist: "The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached". "Each linguistic community has its own perception of the world, which differs from that of other linguistic communities, implies the existence of different worlds determined by language".

Some linguists assume that untranslatability does not only come from linguistic limits but also from cultural barriers within translation. According to some linguists, such as C.L. Wren, differences of point of view between peoples relatively impose narrow limits to cultural translatability. The theory of universal translatability is disapproved by some researchers, like André Martinet, who is convinced that human experience cannot be well communicated because it is unique. Catford rationalised this theory in his book Linguistic Theory of Translation: "Cultural untranslatability arises when a situational feature, functionally relevant for the source language text, is completely absent from the culture of which the TL is a part. For instance, the names of some institutions, clothes, foods and abstract concepts, amongst others."

Anton Popovič also assumes that there is a difference between linguistic and cultural untranslatability, an idea that he defends in A Dictionary for the Analysis of Literary Translation: "A situation in which the linguistic elements of the original cannot be replaced adequately in structural, linear, functional or semantic terms in consequence of a lack of denotation or connotation".