Michael Schreiber

Klump, Andre; Lobin, Antje: Vorwort.
Hechinger, Michael: Geleitwort des Verlags.
Klump, Andre; Lobin, Antje: Die Zeitschrift RomGG (1/1995 – 28/2022) – Rückschau und Bilanz.
Eckkrammer, Eva Martha: Tempora mutantur – es lebe [...]

It is well known that a monolingual language policy was applied during the French Revolution. However, the translation of political, legal and administrative texts played an important role for the diffusion of the ideas of the Revolution. This paper deals with regional translations into a non-European language: proclamations of the representatives of the French government in the French colony of Saint-Domingue (later: Haiti), which had been translated from French into a variety of Haitian creole. As the analyzed examples will show, the translations into creole, which were read aloud, show some procedures that had probably the function to make the text better understandable.

Participle clauses are often seen as typical for the syntax of the Romance languages. It is not surprising that many constructions that include a participle or a gerund, are translated “literally” from one Romance language into another. This is particularly true for our bilingual French-Italian corpus of legal and administrative texts, dating from the Napoleonic period in Northern Italy. However, this paper focuses not only on the cases where such a construction is rendered “literally”, but also on the possible reasons for those cases where we find other equivalents, e.g. a relative clause or a prepositional phrase.