Translation policy in/for Belgium 1792-1814 in the language-pair French-Flemish, with special reference to the Flemish departments Schelde (Escaut) and Leie (Lys).

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The project deals with the translation policy in or for Belgium, especially Flanders, during the French Period (1792-1814). For the purposes of this project, translation policy is any translation controlled by official institutions. In the French Period, translation policies concern primarily legal and administrative texts (laws, decrees and other official proclamations), other political genres (e.g. speeches, pamphlets), all translated from French into Dutch (or Flemish) or vice versa. Until now, research has neglected this phase of the French translation policy. Studies on the language policy during the French Revolution mention translation policy only as an early stage of language policy, followed by the strict use of the national language. Publications on the linguistic situation in Belgium during the French Period do not pay much attention to translations, either. Often they claim that Belgium was completely Frenchified (see, e.g. Willemyns 2003).An exploratory study financed by the research fund of the University of Mainz has shown that the volume of the translations surpassed our expectations. Bilingual texts were omnipresent during the French Period. The bilingual official gazette (Bulletin flamand) alone, for example, contains several thousand pages. Translations were organized on different levels: centrally (in the Ministry of Justice in Paris), regionally und locally. The volume of the translations leads us to the hypothesis that these translations played an important role for the development of the Dutch legal language.The project intends to provide a comprehensive description of these translation activities, by the means of two sub-projects:1. A complete description of the translation activities in the Departments of Schelde (Escaut), with its capital Ghent, and Leie (Lys), with its capital Bruges, including the exhaustive bibliographical documentation of the archival stocks in these two departments.2. A commented edition of a representative selection of bilingual texts of all genres, including a linguistic and translatological analysis of the texts focusing on language contact phenomena on the lexical, syntactical and textual level.