Zur Wiedergabe von Partizipialkonstruktionen in Rechts- und Verwaltungstexten der Napoleonischen Zeit im Sprachenpaar Französisch-Italienisch

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.