The translation of legal, administrative and political texts from French in to Italian during the Napoleonic period. The example of Milan and Genoa

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This project deals with translation of legal, administrative and political texts from French into Italian during the Napoleonic period. These translations, that will be analyzed from the perspectives of linguistics and translation studies, are a consequence of a translation policy which was implemented during the French Revolution and which seems to contradict the strictly monolingual language policy of that period. The so called triennio rivoluzionario (1796-1797) saw the foundation of a couple of sister-republics under French influence which caused a growing number of official translations from French to Italian. These translations have not yet been studied thoroughly from the perspective of linguistics and translation studies. There is especially a lack of studies focusing on the interdependence of language, translation and law. This projects intents to fill a part of this gap. The focus will be on texts directed to a non-specialized public, e.g. laws (incl. collections of laws and codes of law), decrees, announcements and political speeches. Geographically speaking, the project deals with the situation in Milan and Genoa. Milan had important functions in Napoleonic Italy: capital of the Cisalpine and the Italian Republic and later of Napoleons Kingdom of Italy. Genoa will be included since the Ligurian Republic was one of the relatively long living sister-republics whose history has not often been studied until now. The project has the following goals: 1. Creation of a database of the translation in question (especially of archival texts that have not yet analyzed bibliographically) 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 creation of an Italian language of law and administration (with regard to contrastive corpora from before and after the studied period) 4. Documentation of the translation policy (analysis of documents dealing with the organization of official translations).