Grew and de la Roque, 1677–1678. Continuing Oldenburg’s Heritage

During the period when Grew was editor of the Philosophical Transactions and de la Roque of the Journal des Sçavans, four translations appeared in the English journal, one of which was a composite item derived from four book reviews in the French periodical. Overall, there are a smaller number of paragraphs and clauses in the translations, but this is mainly due to the reviews item which is considerably shorter than the original. The translations enhance material process at the expense of mental process. Over half of the themes refer to the object of study in both journals, but themes referring to humans are much less common in the translations than in the source texts. Modality tends towards the dynamic in the French and epistemic in the English. About two-thirds of the nominalized processes encode material processes in both journals. The differences reflect the more empirical stance of the translator and the different readerships of the two periodicals.