Book excerpt: This book introduces Critical Translation Studies (CTS), a cultural-studies approach to the study of translation to Translation Studies (TS) scholars. A term first used by Lydia Liu in her list of research interests, CTS is based perhaps on the model of Critical Discourse Analysis or Critical Legal Studies, with an implicit focus on translation as a social practice shaped by power relations in society. The central claim in CTS is that translators help condition what TS scholars take to be the primal scene of translation: two languages, two language communities, with the translator as mediator. CTS is dedicated to the historicization of the social relations that create that scenario.