Protolocalization in the late seventeenth century: translating the English scientific article into French

Abstract

The standard definition of localization restricts the phenomenon to digital documents, but adaptation of texts for different readerships began long before the digital era. This paper looks at two examples from the late seventeenth century; they are both translations from the Philosophical Transactions to the Journal des Sçavans in 1675. They display a strategy of selective translation, combined in the second case with reorganization of the text. While thematic analysis reveals only minor differences, analysis of process types shows that there is a move towards physical factors at the expense of human involvement. It can be hypothesized that the reason for this derives from the different types of readership of the two periodicals. This phenomenon can be termed “protolocalization”.

Keywords:

• Journal des Sçavans
• localization
• Philosophical Transactions
• process type
• seventeenth century
• thematic structure
• translation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The transcription of the texts conserves, as far as possible, the spelling and typesetting of the originals, with the exception of “long s” which has been replaced by a modern “s”.

2. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 39e Colloque du GERAS, Mons, Belgium, 15–17 March 2018.