When he died of acute leukemia,[1] he was Professor of Germanic Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.
Drawing upon the notions of polysystem theorists like Itamar Even-Zohar, he theorized translation as a form of rewriting produced and read with a set of ideological and political constraints within the target language cultural system.
Lefevere, along with Gideon Toury, James S. Holmes and Jose Lambert, can be considered among the foremost scholars who have made translation studies an autonomous discipline.
Together with Susan Bassnett he envisaged that "neither the word, nor the text, but the culture becomes the operational 'unit' of translation".
This has been hailed by Edwin Gentzler, one of the leading synthesizers of translation theory, as the "real breakthrough for the field of translation studies"; it epitomized what is termed "the coming of age" of the discipline; an increasing intercultural or multicultural trend, that might be termed the postcolonial turn.