Project duration: 2021-2025
Project team members: Michael Schreiber (project lead), Sarah Del Grosso (research associate)
The project deals with translations of legal and administrative texts from French into German during the ‘Republic of Mainz’ (1792-1793) and the French rule (1798-1814) in Rhine-Hesse and the Palatinate region. These translations, which are analysed from the perspective of linguistics and translation studies, 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. With regard to the language pair French-German such translations have not yet been studied closely. Preliminary studies exist particularly in the field of (legal) history and German philology, but there is a total lack of studies focussing on the interdependencies of language, translation and law from a historical angle for this language pair.
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 and announcements.
For practical reasons, the project is geographically limited to the territory of the ‘Republic of Mainz’ (1792-1793) and the Department Mont-Tonnerre/Donnersberg (1798-1814). A comparative look will be taken at the town of Landau in the Palatinate region which had already been under French administration since 1680 and belonged to the Department Bas-Rhin (Northern Alsace) during the analysed period.
In different archives in the studied area more than 1 000 printed documents could be collected. They 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 pursues the following goals:
- Creation of a database of the translations in question
- 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 German legal and administrative language
- Documentation of the translation policy (analysis of documents dealing with the organisation of official translations)