‘La Tour de Babel,’ 35 years later: challenges and tools relating to the translation of archival terminology from English to French

ABSTRACT

In 1985, Michel Duchein published ‘Les Archives dans la Tour de Babel: Problèmes de Terminologie Archivistique Internationale’ in La Gazette des Archives. To this day, his article remains the most articulate expression of the difficulties linked to the translation of archival terminology between French and English. It was written as a reaction to the publication of the Dictionary of Archival Terminology by the International Council on Archives (1984). Departing from Duchein’s work, this article assesses the current situation regarding the translation of archival terminology from English to French. The article mainly considers four existing tools dealing exclusively with archival terminology: the Elsevier Lexicon of Archive Terminology (1964), the International Council on Archives’ Dictionary of Archival Terminology (1984), the Association Française de Normalisation’s Vocabulaire des Archives (1986) and the International Council on Archives’ Multilingual Archival Terminology database (2012- …). This article is based on an analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of each tool, and on practical tests carried out during the translation of a corpus of texts for Comma, the journal of the International Council on Archives. This article intends to show that the existing tools for translating archival terminology from English to French lack either up-to-date content or reliability.

KEYWORDS:

• Archival terminology
• translation
• Michel Duchein

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Dr James Lowry for his advice throughout this research project and for proofreading drafts of this article. I am also grateful to Dr Margaret Procter for providing me with the opportunity to translate for Comma, which has been instrumental to this study, and to Dr Alex Buchanan for her suggestions in the early stages of this work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. ‘Si la France est absente des groupes de travail internationaux sur les outils et la normalisation, elle ne peut faire valoir son point de vue et ses besoins de préservation’, VITAM, @ProgVitam, Twitter, 5 April 2019, available at <https://twitter.com/ProgVitam/status/1114065616703455232>, accessed 30 May 2020.

2. VITAM programme presentation, available at <http://www.programmevitam.fr/pages/english/pres_english/>, accessed 30 May 2020.

3. Paul Delsalle and Margaret Ruth Procter, A History of Archival Practice, Routledge, Abingdon, 2017, p. ix.

4. International Council on Archives Website, ‘Our History’, available at <https://www.ica.org/en/international-council-archives-0/ica-70-years-of-international-influence-timeline>, accessed 16 May 2020.

5. International Council on Archives, ‘Proceedings of the 2^nd International Congress on Archives, The Hague, 1953’, Archivum, vol. 3, 1953.

6. International Council on Archives Website, International Council on Archives Language Policy, available at <https://www.ica.org/en/international-council-archives-language-policy>, accessed 16 May 2020.

7. Archivum is a former name of the journal published by the ICA, today called Comma. International Council on Archives Website, ‘Glossary of terms often used in ICA’, available at <https://www.ica.org/en/glossary-terms-often-used-ica>, accessed 30 May 2020.

8. Anne Gilliland, Sue McKemmish and Andrew Lau (eds), Research in the Archival Multiverse, Monash University Publishing, Clayton, Victoria, 2017, p. 27.

9. Amany Mohamed, ‘International Trends in Standardizing Archival Terminology: The Multilingual Archival Terminology (MAT) as a Model’, Comma, vol. 2017 no. 2, 2019, pp. 135–61.

10. Archival Discourses (International Intellectual History of Archival Studies Official Website), ‘Call for Papers, Archival Science: Special Issue on Archival Thinking: Genealogies and Archaeologies’, available at <https://archivaldiscourses.org/activities-and-outputs/>, accessed 3 May 2020.

11. Archival Discourses, ‘About’, <https://archivaldiscourses.org/about/>, accessed 3 May 2020.

12. ibid.

13. Jean Herbert (ed.), Elsevier’s Lexicon of Archive Terminology, Elsevier, Amsterdam and London, New York, 1964.

14. Peter Walne and Frank Bernard Evans (ed.), Dictionary of Archival Terminology – Dictionnaire de Terminologie Archivistique: English and French, with Equivalents in Dutch, German, Italian, Russian and Spanish, International Council on Archives, München, 1984.

15. Bruno Delmas (ed.), Vocabulaire Des Archives: Archivistique et Diplomatique Contemporaines (Vocabulary of Archives: Contemporary Archival Science and Diplomatics), AFNOR, 1986.

16. International Council on Archives, ‘Multilingual Archival Terminology’, available at <https://www.ica.org/en/online-resource-centre/multilingual-archival-terminology>, accessed 7 June 2020.

17. ibid.

18. Natália Bolfarini Tognoli, José Augusto Chaves Guimarães and Gilberto Gomes Cândido, ‘The terminological dimension of provenance description in the Multilingual Archival Terminology – ICA: Some translation problems’, AIDAinformazioni, vol. 34, no. 1–2, June 2016, pp. 117–25.

19. A distinction is made with French overseas territories and other Francophone countries, as linguistic variations can occur.

20. Description of the fonds generated by the Inspection générale des Archives de France on the France Archives catalogue, available at <https://francearchives.fr/findingaid/2286ebf629bcea87f5773a3017f83ee931ce4b30>, accessed 5 June 2020.

21. Association des archivistes français, ‘Michel Duchein, Biographie professionnelle’ (‘Michel Duchein, Professional Biography’), Etudes d’Archivistique 1957–1992, Association des Archivistes Français, Paris, 1992, p. 203.

22. Michel Duchein, ‘A propos de la terminologie archivistique’ (‘About archival terminology’), La Gazette des archives, no. 50, 1965, pp. 157–8.

23. Michel Duchein, ‘Lexicon of Archive Terminology’, La Gazette des archives, no. 49, 1965, pp. 102–3.

24. Michel Duchein, ‘Les Archives dans la Tour de Babel: Problèmes de terminologie archivistique internationale’ (‘Archives in the Tower of Babel: Problems of international archival terminology’), La Gazette des archives, no. 129, 1985, p. 103.

25. ibid.

26. Michel Duchein, ‘Vocabulaire des archives. Archivistique et diplomatique contemporaines, 1986. Les dossiers de la normalisation’ (‘Archival vocabulary, Contemporary archival science and diplomatics. Standardisation files’), La Gazette des archives, no. 136, 1987, p. 90.

27. Michel Duchein, ‘Archives, archivistes, archivistique: Définitions et problématiques’ (‘Archives, archivists, archivistics: Definitions and problems’), in Jean Favier (ed.), La pratique archivistique française (French archival practice), Archives Nationales, Paris, 1993, pp. 19–39.

28. Patrice Marcilloux, ‘Michel Duchein’, in Luciana Duranti, and Patricia C Franks (eds), Encyclopedia of Archival Writers, 1515–2015, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Lanham, Maryland, 2019, p. 189.

29. Google scholar references for Michel Duchein’s ‘La Tour de Babel: Problèmes de terminologie archivistique internationale’ (1985), available at <https://scholar.google.com/scholar?start=0&hl=fr&as_sdt=0,5&sciodt=0,5&cites=8174846027779098160&scipsc>, accessed 5 June 2020.

30. Translators often have to work from a foreign language and translate into their mother tongue. Because of this, they need to take extra caution regarding the content of any text, either explicit or implicit. Other common challenges include adaptation of syntax and tone rendition.

31. Duchein, ‘Les Archives dans la Tour de Babel’.

32. Carol Sanders, ‘Introduction: Saussure today’, in Carol Sanders (ed.), The Cambridge companion to Saussure, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2004, p. 1.

33. ‘Si les mots étaient chargés de représenter des concepts donnés d’avance, ils auraient chacun, d’une langue à l’autre, des correspondants exacts pour le sens; or il n’en est pas ainsi’. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, translation by Roy Harris, Bloomsbury, London, 2019 (1983), p. 136.

34. Gilliland, McKemmish and Lau, p. 28.

35. Eugene A Nida, ‘Science of Translation’, Language, vol. 45, no. 3, 1969, p. 484.

36. The aim of the PIAF is to gather Francophone archivists and archival educators across the world and provide them with common resources on archival science.

37. ^‘afin de faciliter la compréhension et l’assimilation du cours par nos différents publics, sommes-nous convenus d’un vocabulaire de base sans chercher à proscrire les variantes lexicales locales … nous avons privilégié les mots de cette langue que nous avons tous “en partage”’, PIAF Website, available at <http://www.piaf-archives.org/se-former/le-glossaire>, accessed 7 June 2020.

38. ‘Sir Winston Churchill affirmait, dit-on, que l’Angleterre et les États-Unis étaient deux pays amis séparés par une langue commune. Dans aucun domaine cette boutade n’est mieux vérifiée qu’en archivistique, au point que le Dictionnaire a dû à maintes reprises, différencier les definitions “US” (États-Unis) des définitions “UK” (Royaume-Uni), voire “Canada” ou “Australia”’, Duchein, ‘Les Archives dans la Tour de Babel’, p. 106.

39. Theodore R Schellenberg, The Management of Archives, Columbia University Press, New York, 1965, pp. 122–3.

40. ‘l’archivistique est étroitement liée aux systèmes juridiques gouvernementaux et adminstratifs de chaque pays, et … par conséquent, son vocabulaire reflète tout un ensemble de concepts qui, par définition, sont difficilement transposables d’un pays à l’autre’, Duchein, ‘Les Archives dans la Tour de Babel’, p. 105.

41. ‘l’ensemble des documents, y compris les données, quels que soient leur date, leur lieu de conservation, leur forme et leur support, produits ou reçus par toute personne physique ou morale et par tout service ou organisme public ou privé dans l’exercice de leur activité’. Article L211-1, Code du Patrimoine, La Bibliothèque Juridique, Paris, 2018, p. 31.

42. Viviane Frings-Hessami, ‘Developing cultural understanding in the international recordkeeping discourse: An exploratory study of the causes of misunderstandings of Continuum concepts among Francophone archivists’, paper given on 11 July 2019, Archival Education and Research Institute Conference 2019, Liverpool.

43. ISO 30300 and ISO 15489:2001.

44. ISO 16175 and MoReq 2.

45. MoReq 2.

46. ISO 16175.

47. Geoffrey Yeo, Records, Information and Data, Exploring the role of record-keeping in an information culture, Facet Publishing, London, 2018.

48. Elodie Bouillon, ‘L’évolution du vocabulaire français des archives, du milieu du XXe siècle à aujourd’hui’ (‘The evolution of French archival vocabulary from the middle of the 20th century until today’), Mémoire de recherche de Master 2 sous la direction de Céline Guyon, Septembre 2018, p. 41, available at <https://www.enssib.fr/bibliotheque-numerique/notices/68355-l-evolution-du-vocabulaire-francais-des-archives-du-milieu-du-xxe-siecle-a-aujourd-hui>, accessed 30 June 2020.

49. ibid.

50. Duchein, ‘Vocabulaire des archives’, p. 90.

51. Françoise Bourdon, ‘The French Translation of the EAC DTC: A Few Thoughts on Interoperability with Reference to Authority Data’, in Bill Stockting and Fabienne Queyroux (eds), Encoding Across Frontiers: Proceedings of the European Conference on Encoded Archival Description and Context (EAD and EAC), Paris, France, 7-8 October 2004, The Haworth Information Press, New York, 2005, p. 231.

52. International Council on Archives, Multilingual Archival Terminology.

53. Jay Atherton, ‘From Life Cycle to Continuum: Some Thoughts on the Records Management – Archives Relationship’, Archivaria, vol. 21, 1985, pp. 43–51.

54. A new version of the Abrégé d’archivistique was published in June 2020.

55. ‘L’environnement numérique bouleverse la théorie des trois âges des archives: le moment de la prise en charge des archives est radicalement avancé. Le document à archiver doit être pris en charge dans un système approprié dès sa validation … ou même dès sa création, et non de manière différée’, Association des archivistes français, Abrégé d’Archivistique, 3^rd ed., AAF, Paris, 2012, p. 67.

56. Frings-Hessami, ‘Developing cultural understanding’.

57. Viviane Frings-Hessami, ‘La Perspective du Continuum des archives illustré par l’exemple d’un document personnel’ (‘The Records Continuum perspective illustrated by the example of a personal document’), Revue Électronique Suisse de Science de l’Information, no. 19, 2018, available at <http://www.ressi.ch/num19/article_149., accessed 5 June 2020.

58. Frings-Hessami, ‘Developing cultural understanding’.

59. Andrew Flinn, ‘Community Histories, Community Archives: Some Opportunities and Challenges,’ Journal of the Society of Archivists, vol. 28, no. 2, 2007, pp. 151–76.

60. Patrice Marcilloux, Les ego-archives: traces documentaires et recherche de soi (Ego-archives: documentary traces and the search for the self), Presses universitaires de Rennes, Rennes, 2013, p. 138.

61. Gérard Ermisse, ‘Archives de Bayonne et du Pays basque’ (‘Archives from Bayonne and the Basque country’), La Gazette des archives, no. 199, 2005, pp. 113–9; Marcilloux, pp. 143–5.

62. Collectif Archives LGBTQI, ‘Qui sommes-nous?’ (‘Who are we?’), available at <https://archiveslgbtqi.fr/qui-sommes-nous/historique-du-collectif/>, accessed 7 June 2020.

63. Ashley Gosselar, ‘“We out here and we’ve been here”: the role of university archives in student-led campus history initiatives to remember and reassert black presence in American higher education’, Comma, no. 2018/1–2, 2020, pp. 87–97.

64. ‘Representational belonging’ was coined by Michelle Caswell, Marika Cifor and Mario Ramirez in their 2016 article ‘To Suddenly Discover Yourself Existing: Uncovering the Impact of Community Archives,’ published in The American Archivist, vol. 79, no. 1, pp. 56–81.

65. See Eric Ketelaar, ‘The Archivist’s Creed, Task and Aim. Revisiting the first two international congresses 1950, 1953ʹ, in: F Daelemans (ed.), Miscellanea in honorem Caroli Kecskeméti, (Archives et bibliothèques de Belgique, numéro special 54), Brussels, 1998, pp. 241–51; Eric Ketelaar, ‘Ethnologie archivistique’ (‘Archival ethnology’), La Gazette des archives, no. 192, 2001, p. 7–20.

66. On Herbert see: IdRef – Identifiants et référenciels pour l’enseignement supérieur et la recherche, ‘Herbert, Jean (1897–1980), Identifiant IdRef: 026919745ʹ, available at <https://www.idref.fr/026919745>, accessed 5 June 2020.

67. ibid, p. ii.

68. ibid., p. iii.

69. ibid., p. vii.

70. Duchein, ‘A propos de la terminologie archivistique’; ‘Les archives dans la Tour de Babel’.

71. He wrote: ‘I am not talking here as much about inter-language translations as I am talking about issues of definition and “proper usage” in our own language. It is quite sure that we often use terminology rather loosely and to some extent illogically’, Duchein, ‘A propos de la terminologie archivistique’, p. 7.

72. Delmas, p. 7.

73. InterPARES, ‘About the research’, available at <https://interparestrust.org/trust/about_research/summary>, accessed 5 June 2020.

74. Luciana Duranti, ‘Jenkinson Disrupted? The InterPARES Journey’, paper presented at University College London, 16 May 2019.

75. MAT is available at <http://www.ciscra.org/mat/mat>.

76. International Council on Archives, Multilingual Archival Terminology, available at <https://www.ica.org/en/online-resource-centre/multilingual-archival-terminology>, accessed 7 June 2020.

77. Available at <http://ciscra.org/index.php>, accessed 5 June 2020.

78. International Council on Archives, ‘List of Language Administrators’, <https://www.ica.org/en/online-resource-centre/multilingual-archival-terminology/list-contributors>, accessed 29 August 2020.

79. Delmas, cover.

80. Duchein, ‘Les Archives dans la Tour de Babel’, p. 103.

81. Jean Laveissiere, ‘Le statut des archives en France: à propos de la loi n°79-18 du 3 janvier 1979 et de ses décrets d’application’ (‘The status of archives in France: on the law no. 79-18 of 3 January 1979 and its implementing decrees’), La Revue administrative, no. 194, 1980, p. 142.

82. Duchein, ‘Vocabulaire des archives’, p. 90.

83. MAT database, ‘Document’, available at <http://www.ciscra.org/mat/mat/term/156>, accessed 30 June 2020.

84. Duchein, ‘Les Archives dans la Tour de Babel’, p. 112.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Pauline Soum-Paris

Pauline Soum-Paris is a Project Archivist at the Bodleian Libraries in Oxford. She completed a Master of Archives and Records Management at the University of Liverpool in 2019. The dissertation completed for this MA was entitled ‘Revisiting Babel: Translation of Archival Terminology between English and French since Michel Duchein’s “Tour de Babel”.’ Pauline is French and prior to coming to the UK, she completed a BA and a MA in Anglophone Studies at Sorbonne University in Paris, for which she studied translation for five years. Additionally, she translates into French for the ICA’s journal Comma.