The translation of legal and administrative texts in Rhinehessen and the Palatinate Region during the Republic of Mainz and the French period

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Michael Schreiber
• Subject Area: Individual Linguistics, Historical Linguistics
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 461348132

This project deals with translations of legal and administrative texts from French into German during the ‘Republic of Mainz’ (1791-1793) and the French period (1798-1814) in Rhinehessen and the Palatinate region. These translations, which shall be analyzed from the perspective of linguistics and translation studies, are the consequence of a translation policy which began during the French Revolution and which contradicts clearly the general tendency of the French linguistic policy of this period, which consisted in the oppression of all forms multilingualism. The translations which result from this translation policy have not yet been studied in detail from the perspective of linguistics and translation studies with regard to the language pair French-German. There are some studies in the fields of (legal) history and German linguistics, but, until now, no studies dealing with the interdependencies of language, translation and law from the perspective of French-German translation history (the applicant carried out studies for the language pairs French-Dutch and French-Italian in the context of two DFG-funded projects). The submitted project aims to close a part of this research gap. It focuses on translations of texts directed to a wide public, e.g. laws (including collections of laws and legal codes), decrees and public 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). We will take a comparative look on the town of Landau in the Palatinate region. Landau had been under French administration since 1680 and belonged to the Department Bas-Rhein (Northern Alsace) during the analyzed period. The submitted project has the following goals: 1. Creation of a database of the translations in question on the basis of the existing databases for translations from French into Dutch and Italian, implemented during the two former DFG-funded projects. 2. Description of linguistic translation problems and their solutions (on the following levels: lexicon/terminology, syntax, text structure, rhetoric). 3. Analysis of the role that the translations played for the development of the German language of law and administration (including a comparative look to corpora from before and after the studied period). 4. Documentation of the translation policy (analysis of documents dealing with the organization of translations).

• DFG Programme: Research Grants