Droit comparé et législation plurilingue face à la traduction : les codes civils allemand et suisse en français (1897-1914)
(2005)
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- Authors
- Supervisors
- Jucquois, Guy
- Abstract
- This thesis studies the influence of situational factors in translation choices in law, based on a corpus of historical interest : the four French translations of the BGB (1896 German Civil Code) published between 1897 and 1914 and the French text of the 1907 Swiss Civil code, a trilingual code which was first written in German (ZGB). Common factors to both translations are the type of text, the field, the linguistic combination and the period in which they were drawn up. They are, however, clearly different in the legal language characteristic of the source text, the situation and purpose for which the translation was made and the approach of the translators. This corpus illustrates in particular a distinction made by the proponents of functional theories of translation and often referred to in the field of law, i.e. the distinction between the function of a document (the translation provides information on foreign law) and the function of an instrument (the translation per se is a legal text). Research was carried out on three points. It combined a study of the translations (terminology and phraseology, stylistic conventions of legislative discourse), work on the cultural contexts and analysis of the reflections made by the translators. It made use of the documentation available in addition to the corpus, in particular, the debate to which two translators contributed, the French comparative lawyer, Raymond Saleilles and the Swiss lawyer, writer and politician, Virgile Rossel. History provided the hindsight needed to evaluate the course the translations took, i.e. how they were received and, in the case of the Swiss Civil Code, how the trilingual text was applied, which could be clearly seen in the jurisprudence of the Federal Court. This research emphasizes the role of cultural factors in influencing the way translators, when faced with a source text, interpret the situational constraints of a particular field. Thus, reflections on comparative law prevalent in France during the 1900s led to an ambitious concept of documentary translation, as can be seen in the detailed work in the paratexts (introduction, footnotes, lexicons, tables) of some BGB translators. The Swiss translators, on the other hand, contributed to codifying a civil law based on several traditions according to procedures suitable to a plurilingual, federal and democratic state. In this context, the instrumental translation is seen as a medium through which a new law would be assimilated into the culture of the French speakers. It is target-oriented, distancing itself from the German text to openly refer to the language of the Code Napoléon. The significant work of interpretation carried out by the translators was validated by their close collaboration with Eugen Huber, the author of the German text. In legal translation the cultural element is often seen as a source of difficulties (terminological problems caused by the relativity of legal concepts, stylistic problems related to differences in drafting traditions). The conclusions of this thesis suggest that culture could also be taken and studied as a factor that influences legal translators in perceiving their task.
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Citations
Dullion, V. (2005). Droit comparé et législation plurilingue face à la traduction : les codes civils allemand et suisse en français (1897-1914). https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/91502