29(1) - 2017

Practice before policy: Translation and translators in French military strategy on Ireland 1792-1804

Sylvie Kleinman

Titre

Practice before policy: Translation and translators in French military strategy on Ireland 1792-1804

Résumé

From ca. 1792 to 1804, Irish revolutionaries lobbied the French Directory for military intervention in Ireland in a continuous stream of oral and written acts of communication. Petitions, memorials and correspondence were translated into French to facilitate circulation among decision-makers. Once the deployment of troops was decided, more texts were produced in both English and French, but also translated into either language. A key negotiator, Theobald Wolfe Tone (1763-1798), not only described the translation practices producing these texts in his diary, he also identified two exiled Irishmen working in a government ”Bureau de traduction”, and the dynamics of interacting with them. A substantial corpus of texts has survived and goes against the standard anonymity of the translator’s task, as the scope of their influence and agency emerges vividly from these sources. In the specific historical context of this case study, the first French Republic’s territorial expansion against the backdrop of the Revolution, they seemed free to influence the shaping of policy on Ireland in French military strategy, produce propaganda or communicative texts for logistical purposes. Overall, these translators did much more than just translate. This case study will locate these intense translation and communicative practices within a constant needs-driven political process fuelled by war, availing of ideologically-motivated bilinguals who were also subservient exiles serving their paymasters. Arguably, their ad hoc practices ”from below” helped drive the formulation of future policies, though they have been overlooked in both traditional historical metanarratives and the history of institutionalised and professionalised translation.

Mots-clés

Translator, interpreter, bilingual, ideological warfare, propaganda, ad hoc practices

DOI 10.17462/para.2017.01.02

21 avril 2017
  29(1) - 2017