The social/sociological turn Turns — or “shifting viewpoints” (Snell-Hornby 2006) — are a constitutive feature of any discipline. In its short history, the discipline of translation has witnessed a variety of such turns, from the “pragmatic turn” in linguistics in the 1960s — when many still viewed translation studies as an offshoot of contrastive linguistics — and the “cultural turn” in the 1990s, to the “sociological turn” and the “power turn” in the 2000s, just to name a few. Finally, in 2009, a plea was formulated in favor of establishing what was labeled “Translator Studies.” A thematic issue of Hermes — “Translation Studies: Focus on the Translator” — included a contribution by Andrew Chesterman who claims that the growing number of recent research ten dencies which in one way or another focus on the figure of the translator rather than on translations as texts would justify the establishment of “Translator Studies” (Chesterman 2009: 13, emphasis in the original). Chesterman takes James Holmes’ “map of translation studies” (1988, further discussed and “canonized” by Toury in 1995) as a foundation of his remarks and proposes to re-map it by including the various agents involved in the translation process with their own history, inter ests, and perspectives on their professions. According to Chesterman, the relevant branches of this subfield of translation studies are cultural (dealing with values, ideologies, traditions, etc.), cognitive (tackling mental processes, decision-mak ing, attitudes toward norms, etc.), and sociological (covering the agents’ observ able behavior, their social networks, status and working processes, etc.) (ibid.:19). While Chesterman’s proposal merits a thorough discussion on the enduring lack of coherent research on the involvement of agents in the translation process, this article will not go into detail regarding Chesterman’s claims and will therefore not discuss the conceptualization of a subfield of Translator Studies. Such a discus sion would both need to examine the potentially excessive subjectivization of the translation process and foreground its potential for the elaboration of viewpoints on translation which go quite beyond those dealt with in the last decades. The “sociological turn” marks paradigmatic changes in reflection on the rea sons conditioning a translation process. In order to shed light on the intricate mechanisms underlying the translation activity in its societal context, it seems first necessary to reveal the reasons and conditions responsible for the appear ance and forging of a “turn.” How does a “paradigmatic” turn come about, and what are the factors that keep a turn going? Placing the discussion of a scientific discipline’s shifts of paradigm on a research agenda might be seen both as a sign of its establishment within the scientific community and a stage in the scientific branch’s “evolution” which allows for the questioning of its results and conquests also from outside. In recent years we have witnessed an ongoing debate on these questions, beginning with Mary Snell-Hornby’s The Turns of Translation Studies. New Paradigms or Shifting Viewpoints? (2006), and continuing with the special issue of Translation Studies in 2009 on “The Translational Turn.” A paradigm or “turn” without a doubt reveals a break with traditional views on a certain subject — in the case in question on translation concepts in their widest sense — and the introduction of new perspectives. Such perspectives do not necessarily discard longstanding perceptions but take established approaches as a starting point for sketching new horizons and for further developments in a specific area. One of the books which recently have discussed paradigmatic shifts is Doris Bachmann-Medick’s Cultural Turns: Neuorientierungen in den Kulturwissenschaften (2006). Bachmann-Medick asks how “turns” generally come about in the humanities. Her initial point is that disciplines which in one way or another have to do with culture or which can be considered part of the cluster of domains within Cultural Studies are not involved in the “impassioned discus sion of scientific ‘revolutions’ ” (ibid.:18, my translation). She thus rejects the ap plication of Thomas S. Kuhn’s claims in his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1970) to the domain of Cultural Studies and insists on distinguishing between “paradigms” and “turns.”1 In doing so, she draws on George Marcus and Michael Fischer, according to whom turns are “relatively ephemeral and transitional be tween periods of more settled, paradigm-dominated styles of research” (1986, qtd. in ibid.:18). In more detail, Bachmann-Medick argues that [i]n disciplines concerned with culture, theory does not advance via the massive ruptures of “paradigms”. Theoretical attention shifts less comprehensively, in a delicate feedback loop with the problems and processes of theoretical constella tion. (Bachmann-Medick 2009: 4)
