Project duration: 2014-2019
Project team members: Michael Schreiber (project lead), Caroline Ingelbeen (research associate)
The project deals with official translations of legal, administrative and political texts from French into Dutch (Flemish) during the French occupation or annexation of Belgium. While historians and linguists have often claimed that Flanders was completely Frenchified in administrative and linguistic terms during this period, the number of official and mostly bilingually printed translations issued by public authorities turned out to be unexpectedly high.
In several archives and libraries more than 1 100 documents were collected, of which as many as 500 were found in the municipal archive of Bruges. The documents were photographed and digitalised manually in case of texts with many graphical variants. They were then uploaded to a publicly accessible database where the full texts, annotated with different bibliographical information, can be searched.
According to the analysis, most of the translations are quite literal. The phrase unique structure, for example, which is typical for French legal and administrative texts, has been maintained in the Flemish translations. There is thus reason to presume that the French texts and their translations have had a lasting influence on the propagation of the phrase unique structure in different text types in the French and Dutch legal language of Belgium.
In the field of political rhetoric, too, the linguistic features present in the French texts have been rendered literally in the translations. However, it seems rather unlikely that the future legal language has been influenced at the lexical and phraseological level as the translations are very heterogenous regarding these aspects. Presumably, there are two reasons for this great variation. Firstly, the legal Dutch of Belgium was not yet standardised at that time and secondly, there were differences in the level of professionalism between the translations organised on the regional and local level and those organised by the national translation agencies in Paris. The project goals could be successfully achieved thanks to different cooperation partners such as Lieven D’hulst (KU Leuven) and Peter Gilles (University of Luxemburg).