Abstract: Adopting a social-cultural perspective,Susan Bassnett and André Lefevere discover that rewritings in translation are produced in the service of powers after they studied a large number of cases.Therefore they think powers (i.e.ideology and poetics) are the decisive factors of rewritings.However,this paper doubts this proposition.By adopting a logical and rational method,the author tries to examine whether the rewritings discussed by Lefevere are translations or non-translations through the discussion about sufficient and necessary factors to translation.Based on the discussion,the paper assumes that the inherit limitations of translatability generated by inadequacy of languages are the decisive factors of rewritings in translation instead of social-cultural powers.

Key words: rewriting, powers, equivalence, paradoxes, limitations of translatability