Project duration: 2017-2020
Project team members: Michael Schreiber (project lead), Sarah Del Grosso, Jelena Nikolic (research associates)
The project deals with translations of legal, administrative and political texts from French into Italian during the Napoleonic era. These translations, which were analysed from the perspective of translation studies and linguistics, are the consequence of a translation policy which was already introduced during the French Revolution and which clearly contradicts the generally strictly monolingual language policy of that period.
The so-called triennio rivoluzionario (1796-1799) saw the foundation of Italian sister republics under French influence, which is why more and more texts were translated from French into English. These translations have not yet been studied thoroughly from the perspective of translation studies and linguistics. Preliminary studies exist particularly in the field of legal history, but there was a total lack of studies focussing on the interdependencies of language, translation and law from a historical angle.
The project intends to fill a part of this research gap by concentrating on translations of texts potentially directed to a broad public, e.g. laws (incl. collections of laws and codes of law), decrees, announcements and political speeches.
Geographically speaking, the project was limited to Milan and Genoa. Milan occupied a key role in Napoleonic Italy. First, it became the capital of the Cisalpine, then of the Italian Republic and later of the Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy. In Milan the Code civil and other French codes of law were translated into Italian. Genoa was included since the Ligurian Republic was one of the relatively long-living sister republics whose history has scarcely been studied up to now.
In the State Archives of Milan and in different archives in Genoa about 400 printed and many handwritten documents associated with the translations of the codes of law could be collected. The documents were photographed, digitalised manually as well as with the help of OCR software and then uploaded to a publicly accessible database where the full texts can be searched.
The project pursued the following goals:
- Creation of a database of the translations in question (especially of archival texts that had not yet been listed bibliographically)
- Description of linguistic translation problems and their solutions (on the following levels: lexicon/terminology, syntax, text structure, rhetoric)
- Description of the role that the translations played in the development of the Italian legal and administrative language
- Documentation of the translation policy (analysis of documents dealing with the organisation of official translations)