It is a well-known, taken-for-granted rule that for any translation to work properly, a translator has to go beyond the superficial meanings of the words.
It is not enough to work out how best to render the words of the source text; rather, it is much more important to extract what the words mean in a particular situation according to cultural context. The cultural facet of translation studies urges us to consider the point that the translator is not the only person involved in the translation process; rather, the readers also participate, utilizing what they already have in their cultural reservoir and what they have learned to make sense of what they read, connecting meanings and evaluating them with cultural codes that exist in their minds. Eugene Nida has noted that “language is a part of culture, and in fact, it is the most complex set of habits that any culture exhibits. Language reflects the culture, provides access to the culture, and in many respects constitutes a model of the culture.”
Recently, therefore, the need for treating translation from a wide range of perspectives has been recognized. The significance of sociological settings has been emphasized in recent translation studies, and rather than mere linguistics, insights from a number of scientific disciplines such as psychology, cultural anthropology and communication theory are proposed to help explain the nature of translation.
The cultural turn in translation studies has stimulated many translation studies researchers to elaborate upon adaptation as a form of intersemiotic translation. Adaptation is in fact the least literal or the most free type of translation. It abandons the strict linguistic aspect of translation and rather concerns itself with the cultural one, though it inevitably is concerned with the linguistics also. Adaptation is one of the most appropriate and effective modes of expression when a re-creation is needed to convey the same effect attached to a word to another culture where a same word is missing. Adaptation is usually employed to convey the equivalent in sociocultural terms.
To illustrate the point with an example, we refer to translation of a text related to a wedding, originating from a British context and aimed at Azeri Turkish speakers. During a wedding ceremony in Britain or the United States, the groom is usually accompanied by a man who is called the best man; that is part of their tradition and so a part of their culture. In Turkish culture, however, there is no best man, and the groom is rather accompanied by not one, but two men in the wedding. They are called sağdüş and soldüş and stand on the right and left sides of the groom respectively. So, when rendering a text where there is reference to a best man, anyone translating to Azeri Turkish speakers could possibly substitute it with the more familiar words sağdüş and soldüş.
We should note that though in certain situations the direct translation is not suggested much (when translating a political speech or an advertisement, for example), at the same time not all ideal translations are adaptations. A good translation is faithful to the full context of the source text in terms of meaning as well as style, appearance, register and message. Before choosing to adapt, a translator should understand that it is a must to produce a target text that seems natural and appropriate to the target language and culture while sticking to the essence of the source text; nothing may be altered, deleted or even added from and to the text unnecessarily and without an acceptable reason. A true adaptation is a reinvention that helps readers to better understand the text and its content.  
Although it can happen anywhere, adaptation most often happens in the literary realm. Poetry, for example, as a very personal form of literature, has its roots deep inside the culture, and because metaphors change from culture to culture, as do stylistic preferences, its rendering will likely need more adaptation than other kinds of texts. In general, the greater the differences between cultures, the bigger the obstacles in the path of translation. To overcome these, the translator might resort to adaptation. There is a basic rule to observe: adaptation is used when there is no chance of rendering the concept correctly, precisely and appropriately by performing a usual type of translation