Language, in the Bakhtinian sense, is not just a social code system but a particular individual utterance with specific views and emotional-volitional tones. And it is also full of heteroglots, for which a language can be dialogic. It means that language internalizes various cultural, ideological struggles through dialogic inter-relatedness among various language activities in a given society. This view, opposed to the structuralist linguistics which thinks little of cultural, ideological aspects of language, helps to reveal the limits the linguistics-based translation theories have. Translation theories before Eugene Nida, stressing on structural differences between two languages, did not care much of social, cultural functions of translation. Bakhtin`s view on language, and his theory of dialogism in particular, make much of ideological tones of a particular utterance (parole), or the function of language in the cultural struggles of a society, which happens to be one of the main topics in the polysystem theory of Zohar and Toury. Venuti`s post-colonial translation theory, interestingly enough, also shows a similar interest in terms of the subversive function of heteroglossia against the cultural dominance of Anglo-Americanism. It could be said that current translation theories are divided into two groups: the linguistics-based ones and the cultural, ideological ones. But there does not seem to be much understanding or interrelation between them. This is why Bakhtin`s theory of language can be of some help for translation studies. It provides a new perspective which finds the two tendencies converging in today`s translation studies. This paper, outlining some typical problems of translation theories in terms of Bakhtin`s linguistic theory and dialogism, seeks for a possible alternative to the current translation studies.