On turns and fashions in translation studies and beyond

ABSTRACT

There is a great deal of uncertainty in translation studies surrounding the core concepts used to structure its own history. Both paradigm and turn are used to refer to the shifts that have occurred. This article starts by showing why it would be appropriate to give preference to the concept of turn in this context. It presents memes as the partners that, together with travelling concepts such as culture or role, underlie the various turns of translation studies. This, however, still does not tell us why scholars adhere to particular ideas and concepts and ultimately to certain academic directions or turns. The main argument is in favour of introducing the concept of fashion, which has an impressive history of academic analysis, as the driver behind turns. It is demonstrated that fashion is uniquely appropriate to serve as a basis for explaining the unfolding of a turn.

KEYWORDS:

• Turns
• paradigms
• memes
• fashion
• organisation studies

Introduction

The concept of a turn – as in the cultural turn, the sociological turn or the cognitive turn – features prominently in translation studies’ accounts of its historical evolution. A survey of the best-known and most authoritative introductions to the discipline (e.g. Snell-Hornby 2006; Prunč 2012; Munday 2016) suffices to demonstrate this. The concept of a paradigm is used at least as frequently as an alternative or synonym in order to structure and categorise translation studies’ history, its major developments and shifts, and their ensuing results. Less frequent is the use of the concept of a meme (Chesterman 2016; Pöchhacker 2016) in this context. However, all three concepts fulfil a vital organising and structuring function for the discipline.

Following on from my earlier work (Zwischenberger 2019), in this article I will first briefly show that there is a considerable difference between a turn and a paradigm, the two most commonly used concepts. Memes may be viewed as a third partner that seems to underlie both turns and paradigms. A conceptual analysis will show that the turn concept is ultimately more appropriate for labelling the various shifts and their lasting results in translation studies. The turn concept also allows us to narrate translation studies’ history not as a loose succession of shifts but as a history based on interrelated shifts. Translation studies’ turns such as the “cultural turn” (Bassnett and Lefevere 1990), the “sociological turn” (Wolf and Fukari 2007), or the more recent “technological turn” (Cronin 2010) are interrelated and even complementary. The cultural turn in particular, cannot only be seen as a mega-turn encompassing all other turns in cultural studies as purported by the cultural theorist Doris Bachmann-Medick (2016) but this claim can also be extended to translation studies.

There are certain prerequisites to the proclamation of a turn (Bachmann-Medick 2009, 2016). By presenting and analysing the prerequisites for a turn to be proclaimed in a discipline or field of research, this article also seeks to counteract the often premature and inflationary proclamations of turns.

The fulfilment of certain prerequisites certainly reveals when the time is ripe for a turn or an academic shift to be proclaimed but it does not explain what is at the root of a turn or what propels it. Why do scholars follow a particular new direction to the point of critical mass necessary for a turn to unfold? In addressing these questions, I propose to introduce the concept of fashion into the discourse on the history of academia and turns in particular.

Fashion, especially in everyday language, is often presented as something superficial and not to be taken seriously. However, fashion has a long history of academic analysis, especially by sociologists or social theorists, dating back to the early eighteenth century. Connections with and explicit allusions to academia and academic developments have been present since the very beginning of research into the concept of fashion (cf. Aspers and Godart 2013).

One discipline in particular has frequently conducted conceptual investigations into fashion: within the social sciences discipline of organisation studies, the concept of fashion is researched as the driving force behind change in various organisations and institutions (cf. Czarniawska and Sevón 1996; Abrahamson 1996, 2011). Interestingly, organisation studies is also the discipline where the concepts of fashion and translation are directly combined to provide a powerful explanation of organisational change (cf. Czarniawska and Joerges 1996; Czarniawska 2008). Thus it may be assumed that the unfolding of a “translational turn” (Bachmann-Medick 2009) is underway in organisation studies (and certainly across the socials), where the concept of translation has been widely used since the early 1990s – without, however, a single reference being made to either textual translation or translation studies.

The main objective of this article is to introduce the concept of fashion as a changemaker for academia, drawing on the work done in organisation studies. More specifically, I seek to demonstrate how the concept of fashion is a suitable basis for explaining the driving force of turns. The characteristics of the fashion concept which make it uniquely appropriate as a foundation for explaining the unfolding of a turn will also be discussed.

Turns, paradigms, memes and their uses and usability for translation studies

Translation studies is frequently mapped and charted in terms of turns and paradigms. My recent analysis (Zwischenberger 2019) of the most authoritative introductions to and overviews of the discipline (Snell-Hornby 2006; Prunč 2012; Munday 2016; Pöchhacker 2016) revealed rather unreflective use of both turn and paradigm, and virtually no conceptual engagement with them. Turn and paradigm tend to be used either as close synonyms or are simply alternated in these works.

For Mary Snell-Hornby (2006, ix), turns seem to lie on a spectrum between the two extreme poles of “shifting viewpoints” and “paradigms”. Only the latter seem to make a sustainable and substantial contribution to the discipline (such as the cultural turn of the 1980s, which she grants a paradigmatic status). No further conceptual engagement is undertaken. Erich Prunč (2012) in his hefty overview of the historical development of translation studies also employs both concepts. When discussing the shifts of translation studies in general terms, he uses “paradigm (change)” but as soon as he considers the specific shifts in the discipline such as the “cultural turn” (285ff) or the “power turn” (284; 304), he switches to “turns”. No further explanations are forthcoming on this change in terminology. Jeremy Munday (2008) also uses both concepts without making any significant distinction between them. He employs “turn” when describing shifts that are rooted in the so-called “soft sciences”, such as the “cultural and ideological turns” (124ff) that subsume translation as rewriting, gender-related and postcolonial theoretical approaches, along with the ensuing approaches centred on the concepts of power and ideology. The use of “paradigm” is reserved for the shifts in translation studies such as “the software localization paradigm” (190) or the “contrastive analysis paradigm” (193) that seem to be more aligned with the so-called “hard sciences” based on quantitative approaches and rooted in the natural and technical sciences. Franz Pöchhacker (2016) traces the historical developments of interpreting studies using exclusively the concept of paradigm. He makes, however, one very important observation, namely that “the various paradigms coexist and are even partly interrelated, largely complementing rather than competing with one another” (2016, 72). It is, however, exactly this observation that would speak against the use of this concept since Thomas Kuhn ([1962] 2012, 77ff.) describes a paradigm change as the complete substitution of one worldview by another and/or a scientific revolution. It occurs when a paradigm that is a “universally recognized scientific achievement that for a time period provides model problems and solutions to a community of practitioners” (Kuhn [1962] 2012, xlii) ceases to provide satisfactory answers. This leads to its revolutionary replacement. A successful revolution always implies total destruction and a break with the past: “A revolution changes the domain, changes even (according to Kuhn) the very language in which we speak about some aspect of nature” (Hacking 2012, xxxiv). Kuhn ([1962] 2012) points to the shift from the Ptolemaic to the Copernican worldview as a case in point for a paradigm (change). The Copernican Model saw the sun at the centre of the universe against Ptolemy’s geocentric model. All his other examples of candidates for paradigms or paradigm changes also come from natural sciences.

Turning to turns

Such academic revolutions, according to Bachmann-Medick (2016), do not take place in cultural studies and the humanities to which translation studies certainly belongs. Neither there nor in the social sciences does one worldview radically and violently replace another. In fact, there is not even one worldview in the humanities and cultural studies:

[T]he turns in the study of culture cannot be considered “Copernican”. It is in a much more cautious, experimental and gradual manner that they have led to the breakthrough of new perspectives and approaches. It is therefore impossible to speak of a specific “worldview” of the study of culture, which is fragmented into various turns (see Nünning 2005: 177–178). … Such developments have led to a methodological pluralism, a transcendence of boundaries and an eclectic appropriation of methodologies – but not to the formation of a new paradigm that completely replaces a previous one. (Bachmann-Medick 2016, 10f.)

Thus, Bachmann-Medick (2016) argues that a turn is a more appropriate concept to designate shifts in the humanities and cultural studies, and she presents a total of seven turns that have influenced the development of cultural studies.

Precisely the same applies to translation studies, where the unfolding and breakthrough of one great master narrative or worldview certainly does not replace any other(s). Turns in translation studies sometimes happen at roughly the same time, such as the cultural turn and the cognitive turn, both traceable to the 1980s (Prunč 2012, 193ff, 285ff). They existed alongside each other and did not disappear simply because a new turn, such as the sociological turn of the 1990s (320ff), started to unfold. Turns in translation studies may be said to be interrelated and complementary. The sociological turn may even be said to have been born out of the cultural turn since “the ‘cultural turn’ was a pivotal precursor for the sociological analysis of the processes of translation and the role of translators as social beings” (Zwischenberger 2019, 260).

A mega-turn within translation studies

The cultural turn in translation studies owes a great deal to British Cultural Studies (BCS), even though this is rarely acknowledged. Susan Bassnett (1998) seems to be one of the very few translation studies scholars to explicitly write about how rooted the cultural turn is in BCS and point out to certain similarities between the two disciplines. Both consider themselves to be interdisciplines, BCS even viewing itself as a-disciplinary (Bassnett 1998, 125). Whether translation studies is truly interdisciplinary is a valid question since interdisciplinarity would entail an exchange between disciplines: translation studies has absorbed massively from other disciplines in the unfolding of its turns but hardly exported anything (Zwischenberger 2019, 257). Both disciplines have very broad and encompassing notions of the term culture(s). British Cultural Studies and its concepts of “culture as a whole way of life” (Williams 1958, xvi) and “lived experience” (Williams 1958, xviii) developed from the works of Richard Hoggart (1957), Edward Thompson (1963) and Raymond Williams (1958) as a move against an elitist and exclusive notion of high culture then prevalent in English Literary Studies. Thompson (1963) also insisted on the historical specificity of culture and on cultures in the plural. Many disciplines benefitted from this advance and the ensuing conceptualisation of culture, or rather cultures, translation studies included. British Cultural Studies also focused right from the outset on power relations and text production and the social and/or institutional forces and constraints that exert influence over texts and their producers: “The abstraction of texts from the social practices which produced them and the institutional sites where they were elaborated [is] a fetishization” (Hall 1980, 27). This became an integral part of the cultural turn as advocated by Bassnett and Lefevere (1990). Williams (1981, 38ff) also describes in detail various forms of patronage throughout history up to the modern day and its effects on cultural/artistic production and their producers in a “sociology of culture” (56). Patronage (Lefevere 1992) is one of the key concepts of the cultural turn, closely linked to ideology as a vital steering instrument (cf. Lefevere 1992, 14). Ideology was also an essential concept especially in an earlier phase of British Cultural Studies (CCCS 1978, 1980). All of this makes clear that the cultural analyses of BCS were inherently sociological from their outset: “[Cultural Studies] is a kind of sociology which places its emphasis on all signifying systems, it is necessarily and centrally concerned with manifest cultural practices and productions” (Williams 1981, 14). This rootedness of translation studies’ cultural turn in the tenets of British Cultural Studies may be seen as the perfect breeding ground for the sociological turn (Wolf 2007). It may also be seen as a logical consequence of the cultural turn with its clear and pronounced focus on a sociology of agents, the translation process and the cultural product, and the inclusion of sociological theories and concepts from Pierre Bourdieu, Bernard Lahire, Bruno Latour and Niklas Luhmann (Wolf 2007).

The most recent technological turn (Cronin 2010) is not only associated with the technological advances available to professional translators. It is primarily based on the new forms of online collaboration such as translation crowdsourcing, online fan translations such as fansubbing, scanlations etc., all performed primarily by non-professionals on a voluntary basis. Furthermore, the advances made in (neural) machine translation may also be subsumed under this turn. Thus, the technological turn poses threats or at least has serious consequences for professional translators and the field of translation in general. This raises the question of ethics, which is an integral part of the sociological turn (Wolf 2010, 34–38). In particular, the technological turn needs to be investigated from the perspective of a consequentialist translation ethics (Zwischenberger 2016) that focuses on the actual and potential consequences of actions and not the prescriptive nature of deontological ethics. Again, this shows the interrelatedness of turns in translation studies.

Bachmann-Medick (2016) considers all seven turns as having given new orientations to cultural studies to be “cultural turns”, or effectively one cultural mega-turn since they were all given considerable impetus by American anthropology:

The chain of turns was set into motion primarily by cultural anthropology, particularly by its American branch, which differs considerably from the German tradition of philosophical anthropology. Cultural anthropology of the Anglo-American persuasion does not assume anthropological constants or universalizable knowledge systems. Rather, its research interests stem from an engagement with cultural differences. Cultural anthropology was long a foundry of important ideas for the other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. It allowed these disciplines to recognize cultural otherness and plurality and promoted them to study cultural differences in human behaviour. It was cultural anthropology that thus contributed to the rise of a comprehensive “cultural turn” in the human sciences (Bachmann-Medick 2016, 18).

The cultural turn in the study of culture thus exists at a meta-level as an all-encompassing turn. This may also be extended to translation studies, where the cultural turn of the 1980s certainly laid an important foundation for its subsequent turns.

Memes as a third partner

The concept of memes was brought into translation studies by Hans Vermeer (1997) and Andrew Chesterman (2016), both of whom referred to the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins (1989) in their elaborations. Memes are understood as behaving analogously to genes and serving to explain cultural evolution. A meme is defined as an idea, but according to Dawkins (1989, 192) it can also take the form of tunes, catch-phrases, clothing fashions, ways of making pots, of building etc. Chesterman (2016, 3) also defined “supermemes” for translation studies, which are “ideas of such pervasive influence that they come up again and again in the history of the subject, albeit sometimes in slightly different guises”.

Pöchhacker (2016) takes up this idea from Chesterman (2016) and defines various memes and supermemes for interpreting studies through its history. He presents a map of the memes that underlie and inform the various paradigms in interpreting studies (63–64, 68ff). For both Chesterman (2016) and Pöchhacker (2016), memes can be ideas that inform both the scholarly and the lay discourse on translation and interpreting such as the “meme of equivalence” or the view that when translating and/or interpreting “you carry something across [and] you do not expect that this something will change its identity as you carry it” (Chesterman 2016, 4). While this meme and/or focus of translation associated with more or less strictly defined equivalence may have waned in scholarly discourse, it still exists, certainly in popular discourse on translation. Pöchhacker (2016) makes another differentiation between memes and paradigms that equally holds true for turns. He describes paradigms as theoretical and methodological approaches, in contrast to memes, which are just ideas about an object of study. Paradigms also give rise to empirical manifestations (64ff) and steer the research questions posed, the empirical methods used and the underlying theories (Kuhn [1962] 2012). An academic concept such as “paradigm” is thus not just descriptive but programmatic (Bal 2002).

Just as genes propagate in the gene pool, so memes propagate by leaping from brain to brain: “If a scientist hears, or reads about, a good idea, he passes it on to his colleagues and students. He mentions it in his articles and his lectures. If the idea catches on it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain” (Dawkins 1989, 192). But what constitutes a good idea? Dawkins explains that good ideas or memes survive because of “their psychological appeal” (193). This begs a further question of what makes memes so psychologically appealing that people adopt them and, in the case of academia, adopt and follow not just memes but entire turns, of which memes are the building blocks.

A turn and its prerequisites

Memes as ideas, along with what Mieke Bal (2002) calls “travelling concepts” from one discipline or field of research to another, form the basis of the unfolding of a turn. Travelling concepts such as role, norms, ideology, culture or cognition, and their associated ideas or memes, initiated the turns in translation studies. For a turn to occur, a certain number of publications, scientific events etc. all oriented in a certain direction is important but not sufficient. The concepts underlying a turn must leave the purely metaphorical plane:

[O]nly when the conceptual leap has been made and a concept is no longer restricted to a particular object of investigation, but moves right across the disciplines as a new means of knowledge and a methodologically reflected analytical category, can we really speak of a … turn. (Bachmann-Medick 2009, 4)

This is Bachmann-Medick’s (2009) prerequisite for proclaiming a turn generally in cultural studies, as given in her account of the translational turn, of which she is a key propagator. In fact, the translation concept in cultural studies is applied in a highly (superficially) metaphorical way, for example, when people have to “translate” new experiences, behavioural patterns, values etc. for themselves but there is no explanation of this translation process, for example, in terms of what concretely changes and/or who is affected by this change. This is acknowledged by Bachmann-Medick (2009, 4) herself: “Will the translation category as it moves beyond the textual and linguistic level, stubbornly stick to the path of purely metaphorical uses of the translation concept?”

In order for the concepts behind a turn to become analytical categories and go beyond loose metaphors, considerable conceptual work is necessary. This means that all the concepts aligned to a core concept need to be laid bare, leading to the development of a much richer language for describing an object and its related subjects of study. Serious conceptual work exposes a whole cluster of aligned concepts that, if well thought-through and properly defined, represent whole theories and/or theoretical approaches. This is also what distinguishes an academic concept in the true sense from an everyday concept, or rather a word. A concept has the capacity to theorise an object (Bal 2002, 22ff). The academic concept of role, for example, has a whole cluster of aligned concepts such as the social position from which an interpreter plays their roles to meet the expectations of single-role others (e.g. speaker or booth mate) or reference groups (e.g. listeners), to name but a few of the core concepts that together represent a whole role theory. In everyday language, role usually appears in the singular and is equated with performing a specific task (Zwischenberger 2015).

For this conceptual work to be properly undertaken it seems logical that one would turn to the discipline(s) or field(s) of research where a certain travelling concept is actually used as a master concept. Interestingly, however, this is hardly ever done. Many core concepts in translation studies – such as the aforementioned role, with its epistemological basis in sociology, psychology and anthropology, or the more recent concept of collaboration based in organisation studies (Zwischenberger 2020) as in “(online) collaborative translation” – have been absorbed with hardly any reference to the disciplines or fields of research that have the most expertise with these concepts. They are currently often used more as buzzwords or everyday concepts than academic concepts.

The same holds true for translation studies’ master concept, which underlies the various “translational turns” outside translation studies such as in the example from organisation studies, where translation is used in conjunction with fashion, as explored below (“fashion + translation = change”). Translation in this example and outside translation studies is usually used in a rather loose way and without reference to translation studies.

This lack of conceptual work raises the question of whether certain turns might be proclaimed too easily and hastily, both within translation studies and beyond, for the sake of (apparent) innovation. These hasty and unreflective proclamations indeed often give the impression of charting certain territories for the personal gain and fame of individuals or groups of researchers rather than a wider academic purpose.

While travelling concepts as analytical categories and memes certainly form the basis of a turn, we must also ask what makes people take on certain travelling concepts and memes and adhere to the unfolding of a turn.

Fashion may be the answer as it certainly has a socially cohesive value, following as it does the principle of imitation. The unifying and grouping of people around a new academic path is key when it comes to the unfolding of a turn.

Fashion as an academic concept: its history and suitability as a foundation for turns

Even if fashion in both everyday and academic discourse is usually viewed as superficial or even frivolous, fashion as an academic concept has an impressive history which can be traced back to the social theorist Bernard Mandeville ([1714] 1924) who saw the aspirations to fashion and luxury as key drivers for prosperity. The French sociologist Gabriel Tarde in his consideration of fashion examined the process of imitation and the diffusion of fashion via imitation which he described as a basic mechanism for social connection and cohesion (Tarde [1890] 1903). The father of German-language sociology Georg Simmel ([1904] 1957), building on Tarde’s work, described the so-called “trickle-down effect” in relation to fashion and imitation of famous, prestigious and influential figures. Edward Sapir (1931) analysed the sociology of the concept of fashion and emphasised its importance for the constitution of groups and social cohesion. Sapir, however, explicitly went far beyond the realm of clothing and the corporeal in his elaborations:

Many speak of fashion in thought, art, habits of living and morals. It is superficial to dismiss such locutions as metaphorical and unimportant. The usage shows a true intuition of the meaning of fashion, which while it is primarily applied to dress and the exhibition of the human body it is not essentially concerned with the fact of dress or ornament but with symbolism. There is nothing to prevent a thought, a type of morality or an art from being the psychological equivalent of a costuming of the ego. (Sapir 1931, 144)

Thus, there is already a hint at a possible connection between fashion and academia, with intellectual innovation being in constant demand and a costuming of the ego certainly playing a role.

The sociologist Herbert Blumer (1968, 1969) takes Simmel’s work ([1904] 1957) as a starting point for his engagement with the concept of fashion. He points out, however, that when following and/or imitating a fashion, it is much more important for people to be in fashion and be part of a group than to follow famous and influential people per se. Furthermore, fashion represents an order-establishing mechanism providing a range of available possibilities to choose from. Blumer (1969, 275) also presents “an invitation to sociologists to take seriously the topic of fashion”.

The concept of fashion was largely developed in sociology and social sciences in general. There were certainly also other disciplines and projects that engaged with the concept of fashion such as, for example, British Cultural Studies, most notably the work of Dick Hebdige (1979) on punk subculture and punks’ way of articulating and expressing themselves via their fashion. Philosophy, in general, has a rather ambivalent or even negative relationship with fashion, which can be traced back to Immanuel Kant (1798) who believed that a closer engagement with fashion was not worthwhile as there was no utility to be gained from it for society. Hans-Georg Gadamer (1993), however, acknowledged that there is an element of fashion in academic practice and work but provided no further discussion of the concept (Aspers and Godart 2013, 176).

At present, fashion is of key interest in organisation studies, where the concept has been used in order to explain organisational change since the 1990s (Czarniawska 2005, 129). Furthermore, some organisation and management studies scholars have linked fashion directly to academia (e.g. Starbuck 2008; Czarniawska 2011; Bort and Kieser 2011). The following account draws heavily on this literature.

The rocky relationship between fashion and academia

Even if the concept of fashion has a rich and centuries-long history of conceptual–theoretical engagement, academia still seems to be sceptical and unaware of the usefulness of the concept for its own purposes. I am not aware of a single attempt to integrate or discuss the concept of fashion in translation studies. Academia, however, is a case in point for fashion playing an obvious role, as suggested by Bort and Kieser (2011), two organisation studies scholars:

[A]ll areas of human culture are subjected to the whims of fashion – politics, clothes, sports, given names or the visual and performing arts – why should science be an exception? Isn’t academia one of the fields in which individuals attempt to impress each other? And aren’t approaches that achieve results in that direction bound to be imitated? Imitation is at the heart of fashion. (Bort and Kieser 2011, 656)

The reason for the rocky relationship may certainly be found in fashion’s primary and obvious areas of application such as in design, architecture and above all clothing, as is also confirmed by the following observation:

[T]he scope restriction in the study of fashion confined it to a narrow set of aesthetic artifacts – interior décor, art, or literature. Fashion studies had scope conditions that restricted them to the study of largely inconsequential phenomena, because of their lasting association with [stereotyped conceptions] of femininity in an ever patriarchal society. (Abrahamson 2011, 624)

Academia and the university have also long been dominated and controlled by patriarchal structures that are only now gradually beginning to be dismantled.

In relation to the turn concept there are some explicit and anecdotal references that already suggest a possible, albeit sometimes negatively or at least sceptically perceived, union of turns and fashion. Tom Mitchell, the labeller of the “pictorial turn”, clearly points out the union of his turn and fashion: “as an investigator of mass culture and technical media with a certain respect, I have observed the ‘fashion’ of the ‘pictorial turn’ as an object of historical analysis and not just as short-lived marketing jargon (in academia)” (2007, 40; my translation). This hints at a perception of fashion that has a lasting effect, and which is therefore invested with seriousness in contrast to pure jargon.

In a critique of Bachmann-Medick (2016), the cultural theorist Hartmut Böhme (2008) uses the term “fashion” in order to dismiss the turns in cultural studies:

If this were otherwise, the author [Bachmann-Medick] would not in her two-page outlook present a further 15 (fifteen!) potential turns, which would mean stacking the turns to dizzying heights. The author’s reflections show that no “systematic differentiation” has been undertaken. 20 or even just 15 turns within 30 years: that would not be academia but at best marketing and fashion, if not nonsense. (Böhme 2008, 2; my translation)

In presenting her various turns for cultural studies, Bachmann-Medick (2016) herself questions whether turns follow the mechanisms of fashion:

In other words, is it not the case that the dictates of fashion and the laws of “distinction” also apply to the various turns in the study of culture, particularly in the sense of Bourdieu’s remark that “when the miniskirt reaches the mining village of northern France, it’s time to start all over again” (Bourdieu 1993, 135)? This question touches upon the turns’ tendency to build consensus and create mainstream movements. (Bachmann-Medick 2016, 9)

Its ability to create consensus and a mainstream following is exactly what is needed, and what gives fashion such a sound basis to explain the unfolding of a turn. It needs to be pointed out, however, that Bachmann-Medick in her entire work does not pursue this idea any further.

Fashion as the motor behind turns

Imitation is key to the diffusion of fashion. Ideally, a new research direction initially attracts positive attention and is imitated. Only through imitation and/or creative appropriation – and thus, inevitably, also through change – to form a critical mass can a newly selected direction develop into a turn. Skopos theory (Reiss and Vermeer 1984), for example, without any imitation, appropriation and further development could not have developed into a functional turn, subsuming all functional translation theories and approaches.

Fashion and its core mechanism of imitation are strongly relational. Imitation, on the one hand, enables an individual to feel a part of a group while enabling them to distinguish themselves. This involves an observable paradox: “We imitate those who imitate nobody, and those who are unique and original: The paradox is evident, and in this case takes the form conformity with deviance … . We imitate the refusal of imitation, and in doing so we are conforming and deviant at the same time” (Esposito 2011, 609; original emphasis). This also happens when scholars adhere to a turn and/or its proponent(s).

Fashions, contrary to fads, which are “incipient fashions that fail – fleeting enthusiasms that fade away, leaving no trace”, are “changing modes of appearance or ways of doing that are popular during certain periods” (Czarniawska 2011, 6) and always leave a trace, thus never really vanishing. Certainly, a fashion’s popularity does not remain at a consistently high level but instead has a peak and thereafter a certain decline.

The dwindling of a turn’s power of attraction sets in after the degree of imitation has peaked. One of the main reasons for this decline is that “high-brow fashion followers can no longer distinguish themselves from others and start to look for alternatives” (Benders and van Veen 2001, 43). Competition puts pressure on academics to either generate or at least follow a fashion that promises innovation and thus attention. Consequently, there is a decline in references to events dedicated to and quotations from the promoters of a certain turn. Fashion is based on the paradox of the “stability of the transitional” (Esposito 2011, 607). This transition from one fashion to the next is in no way revolutionary, as a paradigm shift is. There is no breaking with the past but rather a much softer transition.

Herbert Blumer (1969, 286ff) formulated a series of prerequisites for a fashion to emerge. New fashions sprout in areas that are not yet firmly established and that do not yet have a focus on conservation: “If the area is securely established, as in the domain of the sacred, there will be no fashion. Fashion presupposes that the area is in passage responding to changes” (286). This also explains the series of turns within the still rather young discipline of translation studies. A further prerequisite for a fashion to emerge according to Blumer (1969, 286) is a potential number of models to choose from. Ultimately the fashion/model which best represents the zeitgeist and that appears to be most forward-looking will be chosen. A new turn, thus, needs to be perceived as the best suited to respond to the challenges of the present and the future.

As far as this choice and the subsequent establishment of a fashion is concerned, so-called “fashion setters” (Benders and van Veen 2001, 35ff.) play an important role. These are generally influential and prestigious figures, and in our case scholars that act as champions of an academic shift. These influential figures do not need to be or belong to the initiators of a new fashion, but need to give it a favourable judgement so that it can establish itself: “The prestige of such persons must be such that they are acknowledged to pass judgement on the value or suitability of the rival models” (Blumer 1969, 287). Thus, it is extremely hard, if not impossible, for a new turn to establish itself without having secured the acknowledgement of influential names. This holds even truer for turns initiated by lesser-known scholars. It is the big names of a discipline who have the necessary means of reproduction (the power to make or break careers) (Bourdieu 1998, 31). This was also empirically confirmed by a large study from organisation studies by Bort and Kieser (2011) which showed that established scholars and/or figures of prestige can have a statistically significant positive influence on the attraction of a new academic fashion if they act as its initiators or promoters. The same, however, does not hold true for prestigious publication channels when it comes to the successful introduction and establishment of a new fashion in academia. Interestingly, there was no statistically significant correlation between the successful implementation of a new scientific fashion and its diffusion in prestigious and highly ranked academic journals (Bort and Kieser 2011, 667).

Successful fashions become institutionalised, only thereby truly unfolding as a turn manifested in specific individuals who associate themselves with a turn and represent it. Furthermore, there must be publications and scientific events dedicated to a turn and there could even be specific university/departmental research foci and/or areas supporting a turn, etc.

In a discipline or academic field there is certainly not just one but multiple fashions that exist alongside one another. Fashion is geared towards the future but there is also always a connection to the present and the past which makes it particularly suitable as a foundation for explaining turns. “Scientific novelties that connect themselves more easily to the major present discourses have a higher chance of getting accepted than innovations that are not connected in this way” (Bort and Kieser 2011, 659f.). The organisation studies scholar Barbara Czarniawska (2004, 123) writes in this context about “the power of associations” and the rootedness of new ideas or fashions in old ones. New fashions are usually born out of old fashions, taking over their elements, or else old fashions recur after a certain period of time, as in the case of retro fashions: “Fashion … does not stand merely for what is new or for the future. Fashion runs in cycles, although the regularity of those cycles may be in the eye of the beholder – especially a beholder who is keen on periodization” (Czarniawska 2011, 9). This again demonstrates that fashion provides a solid foundation for explaining turns.

Fashion + translation = change

Organisation studies are not only a discipline where there is a great deal of engagement with the concept of fashion; within it, fashion has also been combined with the concept of translation. Just like the fashion concept, the translation concept has been explored in organisation studies since the early 1990s (Czarniawska and Sevón 2005). Translation studies, however, plays no role in this use of the translation concept.

The use of the translation concept in organisation studies as well as across the social sciences can be traced back to the French philosopher Michel Serres (1992), who employed it in two ways: firstly, translation stands for the conversion of one form of energy into another, and secondly it represents the conveyance of knowledge from one genre into another. Serres (1992) applies the former to describe all economic and industrial production machines as translation machines.

The concept of translation in organisation studies and the social sciences in general was preceded by the concept of diffusion (Rogers 1962) used in anthropology. Latour (1986) gave impetus to this conceptual change for the social sciences. While in diffusion the impetus or impulse is emitted from a centre and then transmitted from one passive actor to the next, translation involves active actors translating in accordance with certain interests and goals (264).

The translation model developed in organisation studies by Czarniawska and Joerges (1996) and Czarniawska and Sevón (2005) departs from the question of how new ideas can travel in an organisation or institution. Firstly, ideas need to be materialised in order to travel – they need to be turned into objects such as pictures or sounds. They must be written down, spoken out loud or recorded before they can travel. Similarly, Czarniawska and Joerges (1996, 32) note that “the simplest way of objectifying ideas is turning them into linguistic artifacts.” Even if a reference to lingual translation seems to impose itself here, there is no mention of lingual translation, let alone of translation studies. The translation process is completed when the idea ultimately arrives at a new place and is translated into action (40). Ideas are kept in motion by the energy produced by each translation.

Fashion is behind and steers the entire translation process by acting as a mechanism for selecting the ideas to be translated from the available range. These ideas are then materialised first into objects and ultimately into actions: “[F]ashion selects between those things that exist and through this choice creates something that has never existed before” (Czarniawska 2008, 101). Thus, translation depends on fashion as it provides an orientation that guides the translation process: “Fashion is oriented towards finding tastes, things, ideas typical of a given time” (Czarniawska 2005, 139). The dependency is mutual though: “The notion of translation helps to understand yet another paradox: fashion is created even as it is followed. It is the subsequent translations that simultaneously produce and reproduce variations in fashion: repletion creates and re-creates difference” (136). This whole process leads to change in organisations and institutions. Just as fashion is used to explain the changes in organisations, so too in this article it has been employed to explain academic changes in the form of turns in translation studies and academia in general.

Conclusions

As demonstrated, the unfolding of a turn would require thorough conceptual work, which is, however, rarely undertaken with the necessary care. Therefore, the proclamation of certain turns may often be premature or insufficiently justified. This applies to the use of concepts driving the various turns in translation studies but also the translational turns taking place elsewhere that employ the concept of translation without much conceptual analysis. The same conceptual care would need to be extended to the use of the concepts that define the various shifts in translation studies. Examining the various introductions into translation studies shows that the terms “turns” and “paradigms” have so far been employed without much conceptual consideration. A discipline or field of research and its scholars, however, need to be fully aware of the concepts they use, especially if these are the core concepts underlying a discipline’s academic shifts and/or denominating the shifts themselves and thus representing (the history of) a discipline.

When a discipline or field of research traces and analyses its own evolution it must not get bogged down in conceptual work alone – as vital and elementary as this process may be – but an effort must also be made to understand where academic shifts or turns come from and what fuels them.

This, however, still leaves the question of what drives a turn unanswered. Despite the fact that fashion has a long and rich history as an academic concept, having earlier attracted the attention of sociologists, and currently being a focus of organisation studies, where it is combined with the concept of translation to explain organisational change, it is still treated with scepticism. This may be traced back to the ties between fashion and clothing and thus stereotyped conceptions of femininity. Organisation studies scholars have explicitly connected fashion with academia. Some of the propagators and critics of the turn concept have explicitly hinted at a union between fashion and turns but have done this in a negative way or not followed it any further (e. g. Bachmann-Medick 2016; Böhme 2008). This article integrates for the first time the concept of fashion as a changemaker into translation studies’ scholarly history and presents it as the driving force behind turns in academia in general. Its characteristics uniquely qualify fashion to act as a foundation from which to explain turns. Fashion gives its followers a sense of uniqueness but also membership of of a(n) (academic) group or strand. Fashion is a selection mechanism which gives direction and helps to select from the available range of options what best represents the zeitgeist and which options also represent the best potential solutions to present and future challenges. Fashions are highly relational phenomena as they are always tied to the past and present. Thus, the transition from one fashion to the next is not abrupt; instead, fashions, just like turns, can be born out of one another or certain elements of an old fashion can be maintained in the new one. Fashions, unlike fads, have a certain stability. It is, however, only the fashions that become institutionalised, manifesting themselves in related institutional academic foci, personnel, publications etc., that really turn into academic turns.

As a now mature and established discipline, we need to stop taking things for granted and instead attempt to really dig into the core of what makes us a discipline. Digging into where we come from is key to a better understanding of where we are heading. This article extends Blumer’s (1969) invitation to sociology to start taking the concept of fashion seriously in translation studies.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Cornelia Zwischenberger

Cornelia Zwischenberger works as a Professor in Transcultural Communication at the Centre for Translation Studies at the University of Vienna in Austria. Her current research focuses on translation as a travelling concept in other disciplines as well as on new online collaborative forms of translation such as in crowdsourcing, online fan translation etc. She has published numerous books and articles and is co-editor of the scholarly series “Transkulturalität – Translation – Transfer” (Frank & Timme).