Translation in motion: a concept’s journey towards norm diffusion studies

Abstract

Scholars of International Relations (IR) increasingly study global norm diffusion as translation, in order to capture norm transformation beyond mere transfer. However, in contrast to ‘original’ understandings of translation, the IR version gives ontological priority to the actor, downplaying the productive power of cultural difference. Thus, IR brings translation in line with the discipline’s universal assumption of a Western-centric rationale of action. To expose this conceptual shift, which follows a policy-oriented research interest, this article retraces the concept’s ‘origins’ in translation studies, postcolonial studies and actor-network theory. The genealogical perspective shows the translation concept in motion, currently unfolding its dynamics within IR. Finally, we see a new research field of global norm translation emerging that promises a pluralist perspective on the global. However, because scholars hesitate to attack the core problem of IR’s positivist ontology, the ‘provincialisation’ of the discipline’s mainstream perception of the global South remains a work in progress.

Keywords:

• Translation
• global norms
• global South
• local agency
• norm diffusion

Introduction

Norm diffusion is not a top-down process. When norms spread from global to local arenas, they may be ‘sent’ by international and transnational actors, but never into a passive target context. Rather, norms such as human rights or standards of transitional justice are always also actively ‘received’. In fact, in the process of global norm diffusion, norms migrate through different contexts where people interpret, modify, and reshape them in discourse as well as in practice. Thus, local transformations of a norm emerge which then essentially co-determine the legitimacy and effectiveness of a global norm at the local level. Also, local transformations can influence diffusion processes elsewhere; and beyond that, they may even change the very design and content of the global norm itself. In the discipline of International Relations (IR), recent scholarship on global norm diffusion has increasingly been paying attention to these multidimensional bottom-up processes of global norm change, thus straying from the linear paths of diffusion research. As is argued within this collection, today’s IR is changing its focus from dominant norm entrepreneurs to ‘the agency of the governed’.¹ To strengthen this agenda, scholars have introduced the concept of translation. While the notion of diffusion suggests that global norms spread from the global to the local, thus bringing about a worldwide institutional isomorphism, translation instead points to the imperative of a norm’s active reception, its contextual re-interpretation and resulting dynamics of global norm change.

Over time and across disciplines, translation has always highlighted cultural interstices or intermediary spaces. However, what once was a narrow concept to render a text’s meaning in another language is today a broad and chameleonic term, constantly changing its own meaning – a concept in motion. This becomes particularly clear when scholars of IR adopt the concept as the key of the cultural turn in the mid-2000s. In fact, translation in IR significantly deviates from understandings of the concept in translation studies, postcolonial studies and actor-network theory, which IR scholars explicitly draw on. These disciplines have espoused the idea that any transfer of things and thoughts from one context to another always contains the dilemma of cultural difference, which renders equivalence between an original and its translation unachievable. Accordingly, cultural innovation is inherent in the translation process. In other words, a translation always changes the travelling object, simply by making sense of it in a new local context. When IR scholars adopt the concept from the above-mentioned cultural sciences, this productive power of the translation disappears. Instead, the focus shifts to translators – intermediary actors between ‘senders’ and ‘recipients’ who strategically modify a global norm according to their interests and objectives. Theoretically, the IR version of translation thus gives ontological priority to the actor, thereby downplaying the productive power of cultural difference, which is highlighted in the ‘original’ versions of the concept.

To expose the conceptual shift that follows a policy-oriented research interest, this article retraces the origins of IR’s translation concept and then reconstructs its adoption process and momentum within the discipline. This genealogical perspective will reveal that IR’s adoption of the concept is indeed itself a translation. By travelling from one discursive context into another, translation ultimately changes in its meaning. For instance, the postcolonial version of translation focuses on incidental dynamics of culture, which, from time to time, allow for cultural innovations that push the boundaries of the discourse. By contrast, IR’s ‘translation’ of the concept highlights the (structural) power of translators, their interests and objectives, and the resulting translation outcomes. Thus, basic assumptions about structure and agency have changed fundamentally in the translation of ‘translation’.

This article divides the journey of translation towards norm diffusion studies into five stages. The first three sections after this introduction shed light on three understandings of translation – from translation studies, postcolonial studies, and actor-network theory – which each are conceptual reference points (‘the three originals’) in the IR debate on translation. The main section of the article then reconstructs the adoption process within IR’s debate on the proliferation of global norms, which is itself a conceptual translation. In fact, the concept of translation is welcomed in diffusion studies as a way to make sense of diffusion outcomes that are situated between adoption and rejection, as well as of the underlying processes of norm transformation that are supposed to be a function of the translator’s objectives and opportunities. From the genealogical perspective of this article, it emerges that IR scholars re-interpret the concept of cultural translation in accord with their policy-oriented research interests. The next section follows the dynamics of the translation concept within the IR debate, where it brings new topics (controversial translations, local-to-local translation, and re-translations) onto the research agenda. Ultimately, a new research field emerges, which I refer to as global norm translation. This field understands translation as a multi-directional and multi-level process of norm transformation between the global and the local, and promises a pluralist perspective on the global. The conclusions finally assess IR’s translation of ‘translation’. It is argued that cultural sciences’ approaches could have helped to ‘provincialise’ IR’s mainstream perception of the global South. However, because norm scholars hesitate to attack the core problem of IR’s positivist ontology, the pluralisation of perspectives is still outstanding.

Translation of text and the discovery of momentum and difference

Much like the practice of translation is as old as language itself, so has theoretical reflection on it existed since the very beginning of scientific enquiry. For centuries, most scholars agreed that a translation should transfer a meaning as precisely as possible from one language context into another. Interestingly, the fundamental dilemma of this exercise was already recognised in ancient Rome: Languages are incongruent; and therefore, translation could only ever be true either to the original or to the target language. Subsequent debates have accordingly swung between literal (word-for-word) translations on the one hand, and faithful (‘sense-for-sense’) translations on the other.²

It is not until the twentieth century, as translation studies emerge as an autonomous discipline, that scholars begin to dedicate themselves increasingly to the dual challenge of creating equivalence, and exposing the cultural contexts of translation. While practice-oriented philologists reflect on the different strategies and rules of translation in their questioning of conventional approaches, philosophers delve more deeply into the examination of difference. Ranging from Friedrich Schleiermacher to Walter Benjamin to the leading figures of translation and postcolonial studies in the 1990s, this philosophical line of argumentation is of particular importance for the subsequent journey of translation through the disciplines.³ First, the basic differentiation between ‘foreignisation’ and ‘domestication’ is introduced; second, the ‘originality’ and momentum of a translation is discovered; third, the social conditions and consequences of translation practice are critically examined and normatively assessed.⁴ Together, these impulses open up a space for relativisation and context sensitivity. This sets in motion the deconstruction of the translation ideal of equivalence, and enables a diversification of perspectives as well as profound normative critique.

Recent handbook articles and reviews of translation studies agree that the basic differentiation between domestication and foreignisation goes back to Friedrich Schleiermacher⁵ whose ideal of translation is ‘to take the reader to the author’⁶ , and thus to confront her or him with a different perception of the world.⁷ This ideal is in line with a general belief in the potential for understanding the foreign. It remains predominant even when, at the beginning of the twentieth century, Walter Benjamin publishes his famous essay on ‘The task of the Translator’⁸ . In this essay – which does not become a key text until much later – Benjamin reflects on the cultural dynamics of language, and thus fundamentally challenges Schleiermacher’s either/or of domestication and foreignisation. Indeed, he starts from the assumption that languages are subject to constant change. In other words, he assumes instability of meaning to be normal. Thus, the aspired equivalence between original and translation becomes an illusion. Instead, both texts are related not through a (stable) shared meaning, but through a momentary encounter in which two languages touch and an ‘original’ meaning crosses language boundaries. What follows is the translation’s own history of meaning production, its reception, interpretation, and transformative effect. In fact, in Benjamin’s view, the translation no longer even adheres to the logic of the original. Rather, it is an autonomous ‘afterlife’ of a source text, which follows the rules of the target language and culture. The original, in contrast, is no more than a catalyst that might unleash a dynamics of transformation and change within the target context. The implications of Benjamin’s essay for translation theory are obvious. Translators are encouraged to radically change perspective from the original and its original meaning to the creativity and productivity of the translation process itself.⁹

This idea reappears in the last quarter of the 20th century. Against the backdrop of the cultural turn,¹⁰ an awareness of momentum and difference in translation reaches the mainstream of translation scholars, thus setting the scene for a new academic discipline.¹¹ Newly aware of a translation’s inevitable contingency, translation scholars explore the role of the translator, as well as the social conditions and consequences of dominant translation practices; and they uncover powerful cultural frames that define the actual scope of creativity.¹² Once this relationship between language and culture has been revealed, the concept of translation takes on a life of its own. Indeed, by inquiring into linguistic equivalence from a cultural perspective, scholars become sensitised towards cultural difference. Cultural contexts come to the fore,¹³ along with the political dimension of translation.¹⁴

Cultural translation and the overcoming of postcolonial difference

Postcolonial scholars, in particular, shape the described development of translation studies by raising awareness of, and thereby criticising, the exclusionary effects of dominant ‘domesticating’ patterns of interpretation.¹⁵ As members of externally determined societies, these scholars themselves often feel the distortive effects of a dominant ‘Western’ interpretation of their worlds and writings. They perceive of their own identities, ideas, and institutions as cultural translations, which inevitably follow the ideal of a ‘Western’ original. In this process of translation some things are always left untold: the difference – different ways of translating, different ways of seeing the world. Ultimately, what it is that is lost in translation becomes an issue of productive power.¹⁶ As part of a dominant cultural discourse, it is argued that translations always reproduce an asymmetric relationship between ‘the West and the Rest’¹⁷ .

Postcolonial studies, largely due to the personal concerns of its protagonists, is a normative project aimed at political emancipation, in which scholars analyse and fight their other-directedness. This larger project entails a conceptualisation of translation as a ‘field of power’¹⁸ , in which not only the meaning of literary texts, but entire ontologies – the very being of things – are defined. Three ways of dealing with translation can be distinguished: First, concerned mostly with literary production about and from the (post)colonies, scholars expose translation as a strategy of domination, which produces a humiliating stereotype of the postcolonial self and world. Second, postcolonial scholars are confronted with the dilemma of being labelled either a copy or a negation of a ‘Western’ original in creating their alternative translations. As translators, they thus search for a way out of the imposed postcolonial difference, in pursuit of their own, and original, identity.¹⁹ Third, scholars discover that postcolonial subjects creatively ‘play’ with imposed identities, ideas, and, institutions, sometimes thereby creating something new in the process.²⁰

Homi Bhabha, in particular, guides the discussion in the direction of creativity and change. According to him, translation is a productive social practice through which ‘newness enters the world’²¹ . More precisely, translation is where definitions and meanings from different contexts merge and transform through the performative, subversive or mimicking actions (and writings) of border crossers. Far from an alienating replication of a dominant ‘Western’ social structure and habitus (mimicry, in Bhabha’s terminology), translation is an act of meaning production that transforms and empowers. It takes place in an erratic ‘third space’²² between ‘the West’ and ‘the other’ where the motion of power is intermitted and the contingence of meaning shines through. Under this condition, stereotypes cannot just be deconstructed but they can also be reconstructed anew. Explicitly, Bhabha refers to Walter Benjamin when developing his notions of a cultural translation, which is performative insofar as it exposes and thereby changes cultural difference.²³ Obviously, Bhabha’s vision of translation is comparatively narrow and idealistic.²⁴ In contrast to what is generally expected by postcolonial thinkers, translation occurs where power is intermitted. As such, translation interacts with Bhabha’s concepts of hybridity and mimicry, which reflect on the normal practices of interculturality between dominant and inferior, ‘Western’ and ‘non-Western’ frames. Thus, it could be argued that the concepts of mimicry and hybridity present the more mainstream postcolonial notion of translation, since they imply the coerced replication of a dominant ‘Western’ representation of the postcolonial self and its world.

Overall, postcolonial scholars are particularly concerned with how different ways of seeing the world and acting in it are made possible, despite the oppressive power of ‘Western’ patterns of interpretation. Is difference translatable? Can ‘the subaltern’ represent herself, her worldview and history in an authentic way – and if so, how?²⁵ Thus, postcolonial scholars use translation both as a destabilising critique and as a creative method of cultural innovation that is ultimately empowering (in the Foucauldian sense of productive power).

Cultural translation and the production of common realities

A second translation model emerges in the 1980s in science and technology studies, and later actor-network theory (ANT). This model differs significantly from the postcolonial one, since it conceives of translation as a basic operation of society. While both approaches assume the ontological relativism of the cultural turn, postulating actor-contingent perspectives on the world, postcolonial theory uses translation to deal with cultural difference especially between two entities, a ‘Western’ and a ‘Non-Western’ one. In contrast, according to ANT, translation fundamentally enables communication by continuously transforming things and thoughts as they cross cultural lines and individual perspectives. In a nutshell, the concept here becomes more complex. Beyond a binary constellation of translation, ANT conceives of a chain of translations between different actors, enabling collective action through the production of a common ontology.

The ANT model of translation develops in French sociology, independent from the discourse unfolding in philology and translation studies. Notably, it is shaped by two lateral entrants, an engineer and a philosopher, who both offer exceptionally creative ways of dealing with science, technology and innovation. In reference to Michel Serre’s philosophy of science and to American pragmatism, Michel Callon and Bruno Latour develop their idea of a modern society of networks, with translation as the stabilising process within these networks. This idea is based on the assumption that social differentiation (and, more precisely, the ‘purification’²⁶ of different ontologies) results in specifically modern problems of mutual understanding and communication, since social actors act according to self-contained logics. Indeed, different ‘micro’ and ‘macro-actors’ (individuals and collectives) reproduce different representations of the world – of other actors, things, time and space, etc. (Callon/Latour 1981). Thus, mutual understanding is difficult and collective action is unlikely. How then can actors come together and act as one, if communication really is that unstable? According to Callon and Latour, translation solves this problem of societal integration, thus turning the leading question of sociology upside down: integration is no longer the cause but the effect of performative social practices of translation.²⁷

This idea becomes particularly clear in Michel Callon’s often-quoted essay on the ‘Domestication of the Scallops and the Fisherman of St-Brieux Bay’²⁸ . Here, the author reconstructs a joint (and ultimately failing) attempt of a group of scientists to colonise a foreign species of scallops in Brittany. The actors involved in the project – scientists, fishermen, and scallops – act according to their particular definition of the situation (relevant actors, their roles, etc.). Callon reconstructs these ontologies and then shows how actor-networks produce and reproduce a shared vision from distinct actor-specific perspectives. In short, for Callon network building is about a leading actor who effectively ‘translates’ his or her ‘definition’ of a situation – the problem, a solution approach, particular identities and interests (as the leading actor sees them) etc. – to other actors.²⁹ In later texts, Callon and especially Latour shift their focus from ontologies to the communication process, thereby formulating their theory of translation. In order to stabilise networks of interaction, actors use ‘intermediaries’ that transport ‘definitions’ (i.e. an actor’s standpoint, meanings) from one actor to another. Such ‘inter-media’ are often non-human: ‘roundtable discussions, public declarations, texts, technical objects, embodied skills, currencies’³⁰ . Resembling ‘social facts’ in classical social theory, these material media stabilise meaning by offering ‘ways of linking people that may last longer than any given interaction’³¹ . Yet, while Callon underlines the special role of leading and intermediary actors, Latour stresses the participation of all actors, more and less visible, in the translation chain.

Each of the people in the chain (…) are doing something essential for the existence and maintenance of the token [that which is translated]. (…)[T]he chain is made of actors – not of patients – and since the token is in everyone’s hands in turn, everyone shapes it according to their different projects. (…) The token changes as it moves from hand to hand and the faithful transmission of a statement becomes a single and unusual case among many, more, likely, others.³²

Thus, translation is more than a mere transfer or change of location. It is understood as transformation – a change in actors’ ontologies and relations, resulting from a ‘pluriphony’³³ of diverging translation attempts that, now and then, converge as provisional agreement on the reality. Again, this common ground of mutual understanding is fundamentally unstable. The more it is materially anchored (such as a ‘metacode’³⁴ of numbers and statistics), the more it shapes later modes of translation and thus stabilises the actor-network in question.

At this point, the ANT model of translation resembles an actor-centric variant of a theory of productive power. Instead of a resource that some actors possess, power ‘results from the actions of a chain of agents each of whom ‘translates’ it [a given command] in accordance with his/her own projects’³⁵ . Thus, power becomes an effect of the translation dynamic. It depends on actors’ strategies of translation but cannot be reduced to one actor’s strategy alone. Rather, Latour (more so than Callon) factors non-intended consequences into the theory, thereby discovering the situational entry points for innovation and social change as well as the (re-)stabilising intermediaries that ensure a certain continuity. Like society, power is thought an unstable explanandum, which can only emerge and re-emerge in translation practice.

In this reading, the ANT model and the postcolonial model of translation show some interesting similarities, especially against the backdrop of Benjamin’s ‘Task of the Translator’. Both concepts shed light on the cultural dimension of crossing borders. Echoing Benjamin’s vision of translation, they focus not only on transfer aspects, but also on the transformations taking place when things and thoughts travel between actors with different conceptions of ‘reality’, thereby revealing difference, transformation and change. While Benjamin’s notion of translation envisions the creation of a new original, the postcolonial and ANT model focus more on the corresponding power effects. In both models a productive tension emerges between an agenda of mutual understanding on the one hand, and the overwhelming evidence of cultural difference on the other – a tension, which produces social power relations. However, while the protagonists of ANT view these relations between actors as rather unstable, postcolonial scholars emphasise their stability. This difference reflects differing subject matters. Concerned with the extremely asymmetric North-South relationship, postcolonial scholars start from the assumption of discursive reproduction and stability, and try to identify exceptional moments of change. In contrast, AN-theorists operate in the research field of science and technology development where innovation and change are taken for granted. Thus, they search for exceptional stabilisation factors. This difference notwithstanding, both translation approaches follow the constructivist paradigm, assuming a relativist ontology of multiple realities. Their basic message is (a) that things have different meanings in different cultural contexts or for different actors respectively, and (b) that translations effectively (re-)produce these ontologies and the resulting societal relations (productive power).

Translation in international relations

In the 2000s, the concept of translation finds its way into the mainstream of the humanities and social sciences. The concept manages to bridge gaps in various fields: between theory and practice, between disciplines, between social groups and systems, or between spaces, levels, and scales. With regard to global interaction, translation proves particularly helpful in empirically addressing the fundamental problems of eurocentrism and methodological nationalism³⁶ in social-science research, by offering innovative perspectives on agency and social practices at the world’s peripheries. Thus, wherever scholars deal with transnational processes of border crossing, they welcome this new approach. Yet, most scholars across disciplines downplay the radically relativist ontologies, which underlie the translation concepts of Benjamin, Bhabha and Latour. Instead, they use translation to explore new topics at the interstices of well-established research fields.

In the discourse on global norm diffusion, ‘translation’ becomes an attractive concept as the institutionalist and constructivist approaches of the 1990s come under criticism. In the early 1990s, the Stanford School of sociological institutionalism pushed the concept of diffusion to describe the proliferation of a global normative script that underlies the contemporary state system or world order. The scholarly community around John Meyer investigated if and how institutional forms such as constitutions or education standards spread from a global centre to the periphery. They found an institutional isomorphism, which they explained as a function of external demands: Thus, states in the world’s peripheries adopt global scripts because they believe either in their superiority or legitimacy; because they follow global standardisation; or because they are coerced. The Stanford School further argued that diffusion often results in a functional mismatch or ‘decoupling’ of formal (global) institutions from local practices in the target state.³⁷ Here, local contexts appeared in the theory – but only in a very shallow form. Beyond that, the Stanford School did not theorise local institutional structures and their role in the diffusion process.³⁸

In the late 1990s, IR constructivists continued this story of global norm diffusion by paying attention to socialisation and learning processes; and they brought in the actors of transnational activism. The optimistic spirit of the 1990s was reflected in the various models of diffusion during that time.³⁹ When analysing how a global norm ‘spirals’ into a local context, scholars concentrated on actors visible at the global scale. Besides resistant autocratic governments, local people’s agency was only imagined as part of a transnational civil society, which was globally uniform, positively connoted, and, of course, essentially ‘Western’ (just like the global norms). The dichotomisation of good and bad actors led to the exclusive focus on formal institutions. If only these were ratified against the rejection of an autocratic elite, learning and socialisation mechanisms would be able to overcome decoupling and ultimately result in the adaptation of previous practices according to the superior normative script. In this reading, there exists neither independent local context nor agency as a motor for change of the global norm itself, other than adoption (on the part of civil society actors) or rejection (on the part of autocratic elites). This criticism remained relevant even though scholars began to overcome the initial normative bias of diffusion studies and broaden perspective in the early 2000s, by scrutinising norm compliance as well as impact, the human rights practices of Western states and ‘private’ non-state actors.⁴⁰

For some scholars, however, these amendments did not go far enough. As a pioneer of a more radical change in perspective, Amitav Acharya suggested in an International Organisation article from 2004 what has later become widely accepted: that ‘the agency-role of norm takers’ matters.⁴¹ Others soon agreed that diffusion research should leave behind a simplistic transfer model, which presumes active ‘senders’ and passive ‘recipients’. Instead, it should open up the black box of ‘the local’ and explore global norm dynamics from the bottom up. This way, scholars hoped to better explain the actual outcome of global norm diffusion, which is often neither adoption nor rejection, but norm transformation. At this point, the discourse on local adaptation dynamics began to experiment with new concepts, such as localisation, appropriation and translation to focus reinterpretation, modification, and reshaping.⁴² Of these approaches, translation has, in recent years, proven to be the most complex and multifaceted one.

The introduction of translation into diffusion research can be attributed to the ‘translation work’ of Sally E. Merry.⁴³ An anthropologist of human rights, she effectively makes the model fit for norm research by combining the ‘West-versus-rest’ divide of postcolonial discourse with an actor-centric perspective on translators, and applying the resulting perspective to transnational activism, the primary area of IR’s debate on global norm diffusion. Empirically, Merry engages with international human rights law, with an emphasis on the protection of women from violence. In a widely noticed interdisciplinary research project, she analyses the ‘vernacularisation’ strategies of transnational NGOs in China, India, Peru, and the United States. The analysis focuses on translators: organisations such as transnational movements or (I)NGOs represented by their activists and local staff. These intermediary actors are central to the diffusion process since they connect an abstract global norm to local realities. According to Merry, intermediaries can either reproduce, appropriate, or translate a norm. Reproduction is understood to produce tensions with local norms, hindering a broad realisation of the global norms. Meanwhile, appropriation in the sense of a perfect embedding into a local culture adds to the status quo. Only translation results in actual change. Here, according to a fairly narrow notion of ‘faithful’ translation, transferred norms are only cautiously modified. Fundamentally, the core meaning of a norm should persist during a translation process.

[T]ranslation does not mean transformation. Despite changes in the cultural phrasing of human rights ideas and the structural conditions of interventions, the underlying assumptions of person and action remain the same.⁴⁴

Here, translation remains tied to a norm’s ‘original’ meaning.⁴⁵ Merry thus follows a classical notion of translation, ignoring recent insights into the inner dynamics of a translation, which have been highlighted by translation studies, postcolonial studies, and ANT. Moreover, Merry’s heuristic is rather simple. It consists of senders, recipients, and translators in between, thus visualising the potentiality of cultural equivalence. Considering the meta-perspective of this article, it becomes obvious that this re-shaping of the translation concept is itself a cultural translation. The general observation of postcolonial translation scholars applies: Something has been lost in the translation process. Indeed, by thinking of translation from an actor-centric perspective, the productive power of the translation itself becomes secondary, and cultural difference is no longer unbridgeable.

Maybe it is just this re-shaping of translation, which makes the concept attractive for a policy-oriented scholarship. In fact, Merry’s actor-centric heuristic turns out to be an excellent tool to correct the diffusion approach: It sheds light on transnational interactions (instead of unidirectional influence) as well as on uncertain outcomes (instead of the either/or of adoption and rejection), by bringing in ‘the decisions of the (…) translator’⁴⁶ in the face of a receiving context. In a positivist understanding, the actor-centric conception of translation remains compatible with the conventional trickle-down approach of diffusion studies, which enables scholars to make progress on issues of impact. A good example for such a streamlined IR conception of translation is Lisbeth Zimmermann’s reconceptualisation of translation as a particular diffusion outcome – a middle category between adoption and rejection – which may apply to each of the three phases of global norm diffusion: domestic discourse, law, and implementation.⁴⁷ Such a neat categorisation of different diffusion outcomes provides an adequate basis for general statements. The model also helps revise essentialist ideas of institutional “fit” or cultural “match” of the early 2000s⁴⁸ and develop more dynamic perspectives on strategic embedding and adaptation instead. From the genealogical perspective of this article, it is evident that translation in this sense bears hardly any similarity with its culturalist predecessors. Only from a Western-centric IR perspective, it offers new explanations for the success or failure of external interventions.

Other IR scholars, however, feel more inspired by Merry’s empirical research agenda and move closer towards social anthropology. They increasingly enter the local arena to study the translation of policy agendas, concrete legal norms, or ‘global value packages’⁴⁹ such as human rights and democracy. While Merry’s publications remain widely quoted and distinctly visible, recent scholarship has added considerable complexity by entering, again, into interdisciplinary dialogue. The anthropology of aid has played an important role in this respect, since it connects the ANT notion of translation to the study of global-local interactions. Two works have been of particular importance to diffusion studies: First, the introduction to an edited volume on ‘Development Brokers and Translators’, by David Lewis and David Mosse, which conceptualises an ANT approach to studying international development cooperation. In a nutshell, this text suggests that one should follow ‘chains of translation’ in order to scrutinise how established policies reproduce through translations ‘(…) into the different logic of the intentions, goals, and ambitions of the many people and institutions they bring together and who lend them solidity and the appearance of consensus’.⁵⁰ Second, Richard Rottenburg’s pioneer study ‘Far-Fetched Facts’, which puts the ambition into practice, by analysing a typical development project as a fragile chain of translation.⁵¹

Both works are frequently cited in diffusion studies as, for instance, by Tobias Berger. Following Lewis and Mosse, and similar to Rottenburg, Berger pragmatically uses parts of both the ANT concept of translation and of postcolonial theory to explore development projects as sites of norm diffusion.⁵² His study on the rule of law through local non-state justice institutions focuses on four EU financed projects in Bangladesh, realised by the UNDP and four local NGOs. Echoing Merry’s approach, Berger conceptualises these inter/transnational organisations as translators. However, instead of exclusively zooming in on local arenas, the author follows a ‘chain of translation’ to reconstruct typical alterations to the rule of law over the course of the project’s realisation. In this vein, first, he finds that each of the project’s agents develops her/his own ‘translation’ of a local non-state justice institution, namely as a state-backed judiciary (EU), as local democracy governance (UNDP), or as an institution for community justice (local NGOs). Second, Berger shows that only local actors are able to effectively ‘translate’ the rule of law in the concrete sense of access to justice. Ironically, they achieve success by rejecting the organisational blueprints of their international donors and designing a unique hybrid instead, comprising the global norm, Islamic law, community justice institutions and local legal practices. Thus, on the conceptual level, Berger pragmatically integrates ideas from different discourses into a complex heuristic. While still reproducing the top-down perspective of the diffusion paradigm, together with Merry’s binary differentiation of global versus local frames and actors, Berger adds significant complexity to the analysis by following the Lewis-and-Mosse reading of the ANT approach. However, in contrast to Bruno Latour’s ‘original’ idea, and thus compatible with a positivist ontology predominant in diffusion studies, the challenge of a translation becomes more about bridging diverging interests and objectives than about creating a shared reality. Equivalence of meaning or content remains possible, in Berger’s view, as far as translators are able to cleverly transform the shape of a norm. Yet, in his final reflections on the impact of ‘different’ cultural backgrounds, and on translation’s bottom-up feedback, another shift of the concept of translation in motion starts looming.

Global norm translation

In recent years, the IR concept of translation has developed its own dynamics within the discipline. While Berger, like Merry, still juxtaposes a transnational context with a local one, some pioneering scholars emphasise the diversity of (local) actors and ontologies. Instead of reconstructing the singular interpretation of a global norm in a given setting, these scholars raise awareness of the normality of a norm being contested, particularly in practice. At all levels, this perspective uncovers a variety of diverging translations, which can, in turn, have an effect on the global norm and context itself. Theoretically, when conceptualising translation as a multi-directional process of norm change, scholars leave the linear paths of diffusion research behind.

In order to gain access to the empirical variety of translations, Aaron Boesenacker and Leslie Vinjamuri, for example, avoid the differentiation between transnational and local actors.⁵³ Instead, they inquire into how civil society actors shape local versions of a transitional justice policy. Boesenacker and Vinjamuri show a special interest in generalisation, by differentiating civil society actors in terms of ideology and functional role. Ideologically, they find a religious and a liberal-legal culture that produce different notions of justice. One stresses forgiveness and reconciliation, the other criminal accountability and punishment. Functionally, whether the translation of a global norm package is either pragmatic, or affirmative, or contesting, depends on an organisation’s financial and cultural autonomy from the local and international contexts. By offering this alternative conceptualisation, the authors implicitly criticise level-to-level translation. While a top-down approach premised on a single ‘true’ translation into a specific context, saw only the adaptation of a liberal-legal global script, Boesenacker and Vinjamuri point to a powerful alternative framework, as well as to different pragmatic strategies of translation between the two.

Marit Østebø even goes one step further, by calling on diffusion scholars to acknowledge ‘the grassroots’ as translators so as to eventually recognise ‘subaltern voices’ in their studies.⁵⁴ Until then, the debate on global norm translation had never reflected on the interpretations and agency of the effective ‘recipients’ or ‘targets’ of a norm. Rather, it remained focused on translators between ‘senders’ and ‘recipients’ that mediated a norm’s meaning as well as standard practices of implementation for them. Using a case from rural Ethiopia, Østebø argues that rural populations develop their own understanding of the global gender equality norm, as negotiated ‘complementarity’. This context-specific translation explains why a top-down promotion of gender equality as ‘sameness’ is largely rejected by Ethiopia’s rural populations. Interestingly, Østebø uses this finding not only to highlight another important transformation point in global norm diffusion. By referring to Benjamin’s idea of autonomous translations in motion (see above), she also points to a norm’s dynamic character, its fundamental indeterminacy, which, in turn, opens up space for permanent interpretation, contestation, and change. Thus, a norm’s meaning ultimately depends on active reception and thus, ‘the primacy, to some extent, belongs to the listener’s response’.⁵⁵

Echoing the above arguments, Susanne Zwingel manages to add a power dimension to all this, thus bringing productive power back in.⁵⁶ While she agrees that actors and translations are diverse at the local level, she argues that reflections on local specifics also shed light on the ‘hegemonic character of the global norm creation’⁵⁷ and of transnational activism. For instance, global norm packages such as the Convention of the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) impose a certain understanding of a woman and her needs, thus ignoring the specificity of local gender identities and inequalities. This is why global norm diffusion appears as a top-down process. Women in the global South can hardly escape the power of global normative inputs. And yet, according to Zwingel, there are some feedback mechanisms hidden in ‘ongoing and collective interpretations and practices’⁵⁸ at the local level. In detail, she argues that the content and scope of the CEDAW convention is continuously negotiated in its diverse local application contexts. While other scholars discern different translations and their mutual contestation (see above), Zwingel stresses the local constellation of various state and non-state actors who negotiate an ‘impact translation’⁵⁹ in a specific arena. Within this actor constellation, resources of power are relevant. Yet, even weak local actors regularly influence the translation process by rejecting or embracing norms according to their own concrete vision of change. via transnational activism, the local experience of ‘impact translation[s]’ then re-translates into the global realm where global norms emerge and change.⁶⁰ Thus, the creation of a norm is an interactive process, which takes place at the global level (in line with the life cycle model) as well as at the local level (although indirectly, via the local experience of transnational activism).⁶¹ Interestingly, the idea of marginal actors coproducing the dominant idea is very similar to the ANT notion of a social coproduction of reality.

The here outlined approach of global norm translation draws its inspiration from social anthropology. Indeed, a fascination with local dynamics of transformation is noticeable in the debate, and some scholars clearly sympathise with an interpretive approach. As a result, generalisability, which has been the central aspiration of diffusion studies, falls to the wayside. Diffusion scholars may indeed criticise that, while translation research has expanded the ‘normal’ outcome of diffusion beyond rejection and adoption, it has so far failed to differentiate systematically between the various patterns of translation outcomes that range from enhancing the empirical legitimacy and effectiveness of a norm to supporting local inequalities. Yet, this critique does not acknowledge the agenda of the outlined literature, which is to overcome IR’s positivist ontology. Scholars of global norm translation are aware of the coproduction of various powerful translations by a multitude of state and non-state actors on different levels, and in diverse directions. They realise the incompleteness of a global norm, whose meaning is just another translation among many; and they understand that this incompleteness is necessary to comprise different ontological perspectives on global norms, which they try to access by their interpretative methods. In short, what differentiates scholars of global norm translation from the IR mainstream is their endeavour to pluralise the dominant perception of the global South, by acknowledging different standpoints. Thus, the emerging research field on global norm translation sheds light on broader global norm dynamics, of which diffusion is just one aspect.

Conclusion

Translation is a concept in motion. Indeed, when scholars of IR adopted it from translation studies, postcolonial studies, and actor-network theory, the concept changed its meaning from a powerful dynamic of cultural innovation to strategic intermediation between the global and the local. Theoretically, the ontological priority shifted from structure to agency, thus following IR’s positivist agenda. To expose this conceptual shift, this article retraced the origins of IR’s translation concept and then reconstructed its adoption process and momentum within the discipline. To begin with, the study reconstructed the most frequently cited ‘originals’ of IR’s translation debate, with Walter Benjamin, Homi Bhabha, and Bruno Latour being central reference points. The synopsis unfolded that these ‘originals’ share a special interest in the momentum of a translation and its productive power to change people’s ways of seeing the world and acting in it. After the reconstruction, the article follows the concept’s journey to IR whereas crisis in diffusion studies favoured a change in perspective towards norm transformation and local agency. While the crisis turned out to be a pull-factor for translation, innovative translations of the concept itself at the interstices of IR and development anthropology – special shifts in meaning from structure to agency – pushed it into the centre of IR’s norm research. The subsequent debate on global norm translation developed a momentum and ultimately strayed from the linear paths of diffusion research. Conceptual considerations in the new research field come closer again to the three ‘original’ concepts of cultural translation, understanding translation as a multi-directional and multi-level process of norm transformation between the global and the local.

Without doubt, the IR version of translation increases the discipline’s awareness of the co-presence of different normative meanings, of the imperative of context-related re-interpretation, and the normality of norm change. However, something gets lost on the concept’s journey – the curiosity for innovation, creativity, and newness shared by translation scholars in cultural sciences. Instead of exploring a translation’s substance as such, IR scholars are rather interested in its deviation from ‘the norm’⁶² , which they wish to minimise. In fact, the motion of translation as described in the genealogy above resembles the transformation of constructivism in the 1990s that postcolonial scholars have criticised heavily in three respects⁶³ : Critics accuse IR, first, of making implicit value judgements that dominate others and, second, of reproducing a negative description of the global South that discriminates others. Third, both flaws are based in a positivist ontology that does not tolerate any ‘truth’ but the Western one.

In fact, the debate on global norm translation exhibits once again how the mainstream of IR subordinates the awareness of contingency inherent to the translation ‘originals’ to the normative political project of liberalism to which IR has always been bound historically. Based on the traditionally positivist ontology of IR, scholars hold on to a normative core of human rights standards which they (unconsciously) assume to be normatively superior and thus persuasive. That is why they see the rationale behind any other interpretation or contestation of these norms in the strategic interests of translators rather than in diverging local ontologies. The postcolonial critique condemns this assumption as form of ‘epistemic violence’ that effectively deprives the postcolonial subject of its standpoint, including its own normative position.

The ‘originals’ of translation discussed in the first sections of this article start from the complete opposite position: they posit the cultural context as absolute. Perception and knowledge are always relative to the standpoint of the observer. Walter Benjamin is most explicit on this point: The meaning of a translation only applies in its context; as soon as it crosses boundaries, its content changes fundamentally. There are no ‘true’ translations in the sense of a positivist ontology. Now, if IR fully adopted this position, it would need to radically change its research agenda. Theory itself would always be incomplete since theoretical claims would have to give up their universal pretence. This would, however, challenge the political relevance of a discipline impossible to distinguish from social anthropology, and thus IR’s right to exist.

Not every IR scholar ought to fully appropriate the relativist ontology of her critics. There are other ways of dealing with the culturalist critique. I believe that translation studies are particularly appropriate for ‘provincialising’ dominant IR positions, because the concept of translation directs our attention to the practical encounters of the Western-liberal frame embodied in a global norm and alternative patterns of thought and action, especially in the global South. First and foremost, the translation process renders the contingency of ontological premises visible; it shows the non-necessity of a particular world view (ontology) that produces certain interpretations of a norm. This is the basic condition for self-reflection. Second, in a quite pragmatic and concrete sense the content of a translation points the observer to alternative webs of meaning. If scholars of global norm translation create space for the analysis of a specific outcome of translation – without immediately referring back to the global norm – they would be able to collect evidence for a specifically local construction of reality. Such items of evidence can eventually contribute to the step-by-step deconstruction of IR’s mainstream view of the global South as a deficient ‘alter ego’ of the West, and to its pluralistic reconstruction. Third, the focus on translations reveals value judgements implicit in the research approach. Scholarly reflections on these implicit normative assumptions do not necessarily have to end in the abandonment of one’s own position. Instead, reflections open up fascinating questions for IR norm research: How can we adhere to a normative core in which we believe and for which we stand up from a powerful, dominant position – without using ‘epistemic violence’ against the inferior ‘other’? And, how can we acknowledge alternative ontologies – without abandoning our own position? Translation could help here as a meta-perspective in opening up the discipline for an overdue dialogue of cultures that may contribute to the pluralisation of IR.

Notes on contributor

Anke Draude is a postdoctoral research associate at the Otto Suhr Institute of Political Science, Freie Universität Berlin. Her research focuses on discursive shifts and conceptual innovations in the study of governance, aid, and development in areas of limited statehood.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Funding

This work was supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG).

Acknowledgements

For critical comments on the draft manuscript, I would like to thank the participants of the two workshops on ‘The Agency of the Governed’, organised by the Collaborative Research Center ‘Governance in Areas of Limited Statehood’ at Freie Universität Berlin. Special thanks go to Marianne Braig, Catherine Craven, Vera van Huellen, and the two anonymous reviewers from Third World Thematics for excellent comments on previous versions of this text.

Notes

1. See the programmatic agenda of this collection in Draude, “The Agency of the Governed in Transfer and Diffusion Studies.”

2. Windle and Pym, “European Thinking on Secular Translation,” 8.

3. Cheung, “A History of Twentieth Century Translation Theory.”

4. Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility, 19–20.

5. Schleiermacher, “Über die verschiedenen Methoden des Übersetzens.”

6. Vermeer, “Translation Today,” 5.

7. Windle and Pym, “European Thinking on Secular Translation,” 11–12.

8. Benjamin, “Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers.”

9. Cf. Foljanty, “Rechtstransfer als kulturelle Übersetzung,” 97–99.

10. Asad, “The Concept of Cultural Translation in British Anthropology.”

11. Bachmann-Medick, Cultural Turns; Buden et al., “Cultural Translation”; Venuti, The Translation Studies Reader.

12. Bassnett, “Translating Terror.”

13. Bassnett and Lefevere, Constructing Cultures.

14. Apter, The Translation Zone.

15. Bassnett and Trivedi, Post-Colonial Translation; Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility.

16. Barnett and Duvall, “Power in International Politics.”

17. Ferguson, Civilization.

18. Spivak, “More Thoughts on Cultural Translation.”

19. Gentzler, Contemporary Translation Theories, 176; Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine, 179–200.

20. Dingwaney and Maier, Between Languages and Cultures.

21. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 303.

22. Ibid., 312.

23. Ibid., 325.

24. De la Rosa, Aneignung und interkulturelle Repräsentation.

25. Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”; Maggio, “Can the Subaltern Be Heard?”

26. Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 11.

27. Latour, “The Powers of Association,” 273–77; see also Cochoy, “A Theory of ‘Agencing’,” 112.

28. Callon, “Some Elements for a Sociology of Translation”; note that Callon's methodology goes back to Latour and Woolgar, Laboratory Life.

29. Cf. Latour, Pandora's Hope, 24–79.

30. Callon, “Techno-Economic Networks and Irreversibility,” 143.

31. Latour, “The Powers of Association,” 264.

32. Ibid., 268.

33. Czarniawska, “Bruno Latour,” 92.

34. Rottenburg, Far-Fetched Facts, 173.

35. See note 31.

36. Richter, “More than a Two-Way Traffic,” 225.

37. Meyer et al., “World Society and the Nation‐State,” 154–56; Meyer, “Globalization,” 244.

38. Cf. Berger, Global Norms and Local Courts.

39. Finnemore and Sikkink, “International Norm Dynamics and Political Change”; Risse, Ropp and Sikkink, The Power of Human Rights.

40. For an overview of these developments in diffusion studies, see Risse, Ropp and Sikkink, The Persistent Power of Human Rights, and, more critically, Zwingel, “How Do Norms Travel?”

41. Acharya, “How Ideas Spread,” 240.

42. Zimmermann, “Same Same or Different?” 110–11.

43. Levitt and Merry, “Vernacularization on the Ground”; Merry, Human Rights and Gender Violence; Merry, “Transnational Human Rights and Local Activism.”

44. Merry, Human Rights and Gender Violence, 220.

45. Ibid., 135–36; Levitt and Merry, “Vernacularization on the Ground,” 441.

46. Brake and Katzenstein, “Lost in Translation?” 730.

47. Zimmermann, “Same Same or Different?”

48. Checkel, “Norms, Institutions, and National Identity.”

49. Levitt and Merry, “Vernacularization on the Ground,” 443.

50. Mosse and Lewis, “Brokerage and Translation in Development,” 16.

51. Rottenburg, Far-Fetched Facts.

52. Berger, Global Norms and Local Courts.

53. Boesenecker and Vinjamuri, “Lost in Translation?”

54. Østebø, “Translations of Gender Equality in Ethiopia,” 444.

55. Ibid., 446; see also Krook and True, “Life Cycles of International Norms”; Wiener and Puetter, “The Quality of Norms.”

56. Zwingel, “Intergovernmental Negotiations to (Sub)National Change”; Zwingel, “How Do Norms Travel?”

57. Zwingel, “Intergovernmental Negotiations to (Sub)National Change,” 414.

58. Zwingel, “How Do Norms Travel?” 126.

59. Ibid., 125.

60. Cf. Bettiza and Dionigi, “How Do Religious Norms Diffuse?”

61. Cf. Rajaram and Zararia, “Translating Women's Human Rights”; Vaughan and Rafanell, “Development Policy ‘Transfer’ and Practice.”

62. Cf. Epstein, “The Postcolonial Perspective.”

63. E.g. Darby, “A Disabling Discipline?”; Epstein, “Constructivism or Universals in International Relations”; Epstein, “The Postcolonial Perspective.”