The last few years have seen many attempts to integrate the notion of habitus into a descriptive approach to translation (Simeoni 1998; Sela-Sheffy 2005; Inghilleri 2003, 2005; Meylaerts 2006). For Sela-Sheffy (2005: 2), "[o]bviously, this concept corresponds to and reinforces the notion of norms of translation". Although habitus is a category that goes back to Aristotle (see Simeoni 1998), translation scholars mainly draw on the term as used by Pierre Bourdieu (1972), who designed habitus as the motor of a dialectic between a theory of effects and a theory of strategies. Bourdieu wanted to escape from a philosophy of the subject without sacrificing the actors, and to escape from a philosophy of structure without refusing to take into account the effects structure exerts on and through the actor. Habitus refers to the subjects' internalized system of social structures in the form of dispositions. The inculcation of social structures is a life-long process of interactions between structure and agency through various and variable individual and collective experiences. Dispositions engender practices, perceptions and attitudes that are regular but not necessarily fixed or invariant. Under the influence of social position and individual and collective past, every cultural actor thus develops (and continues to develop) a social identity: a certain representation of the world and of the person's position therein.

Nevertheless, since fine-grained analyses are lacking, especially in the case of intercultural contacts, the notion of habitus seems to confirm all too often what it was supposed to avoid, i.e. the precedence of structure over agency. It has thus frequently been criticized for being deterministic, static and one-directional (Sela-Sheffy 1997, 2005; Geldof 1997; Corcuff 2003), and rightly so. Attempts to apply it within Translation Studies have further laid bare its mono-cultural character, too much linked with structures and actors that refer to national societies only (Simeoni 1998). Intercultural actors develop perceptions and practices partly through cross-cultural habituses. By integrating the translators' intercultural habitus in its framework, Translation Studies can offer a much-needed correction to Bourdieu's theory, which is still more national than intercultural in nature (Meylaerts 2005). This should turn the habitus concept into an intercultural construct valid for less homogenous situations. 

Recent insights insist on habitus as a dynamic, plural concept, as the object of confrontations with various field logics and thus of multiple definitions and discontinuities (Lahire 2001, 2003, 2004; Sela-Sheffy 2005). Every (inter)cultural actor appears as a complex product of multiple processes of socialization disseminated in various institutions (family, schools, friends, work, neighborhood, etc.). Attitudes, perceptions and practices are the result of an unstable interplay of multiple kinds of habituses, questioning the uniqueness and permanence of the individual person. The actors' plural and dynamic (intercultural) habitus therefore forms a key concept for understanding the modalities of intercultural relationships. It can reveal how (intercultural) actors interiorize dynamically and variably (institutional and discursive) normative structures of the source and target fields, and indeed of their mutual contacts and intersections.