My understanding is that the phrase “barbarian invasions” is out of use but I’ll let a specialist on that explain the specifics of why. This is a more more general point about the language than the specifics of late antique history. Völkerwanderung would more directly translate to “folk migration” or “folk movement,” which does show up in contemporary archaeology it seems (e.g. see: Cunliffe, Anthony). (A more literal way to say “barbarian invasions” in German would be something like “Barbarenseinmarsch,” which was never used). As a historian of modern Germany, I’ve realized a couple things about how English appropriated German concepts in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. There is/was a tendency to make things more ‘science’-sounding or to make them more heroic/romantic sounding. (I suspect personal and popular perceptions of Germans at a given time by English-speakers influenced the choice). I run into the first with my research on coal mining. For example, “half-fatty” coal (Halbfette) becomes “semibituminous;” the former is actually descriptive of the coal’s qualities while the latter requires you to have knowledge of erroneous ancient geology to even begin to guess it’s industrial application (good for coking because of its high volatility). The application of the (preexisting) English term obscures the real substance behind (what I think amounts to) pseudo-technical language. “Völkerwanderung” to “barbarian invasions” seems to do the opposite and be a case of the second, however, probably to fit the tradition of a (West) Roman “Fall” in English historiography going back to Edward Gibbon. When it came to a description based (I’m guessing here) on German secondary literature, whoever translated the terminology probably said: “Well, what they mean by Völkerwanderung is ‘barbarian invasions,’” despite neither of those words being present in the German original. So, without tracing out the specific etymology here, I think this is actually as much about the outdated (i.e., 19th c.) translations still lurking in the discourse, whereas the concept of “folk movement,” with a lot of qualifications and revisions, seems very much in use.

Barry Cunliffe, The Ancient Celts.

Anthony Wilson, The Horse, the Wheel, and Language.

Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

Both contemporary authors (especially Anthony) give a discussion of Eurasian archaeology and it’s development over the last 200 years as part of positioning their own arguments. This means covering the subject of folk movement in some detail. Neither deal with the Völkerwanderung of the late antiquity, but they do address the concept in relation to their subjects (the Celtic peoples and ancient Indo-Europeans respectively).