Writing the History of French Translation in the 21st Century. Towards a New Paradigm?

To write the history of translation in the digital age, we must devise and use new analytical tools. Starting from this premise, this study proposes to examine the ways in which recent technologies influence (the quality of) research in the history of translation as well as to discuss scientific work that seeks to “modernize” the history of translation in accordance with contemporary trends. By adopting a descriptive approach, I will review several traditional materials and instruments of analysis that can be identified in the specialized literature, and then I will move on to modern ones. A corpus of academic texts about the history of French translation serves my purposes well, given the existence of a large body of translation studies of “French expression” produced since the latter half of the 2oth century by numerous Francophone researchers. Main preliminary findings show that we can witness a paradigm shift and that research in the history of translation must change and adapt itself to the current developments that have impacted every field of work.