Übersetzung als Medium nationaler Selbstbehauptung – am Beispiel deutsch-französischer Wissenschaftsübersetzungen im 18. Jahrhundert

Taking as its point of departure G. Toury’s concept of ‘translation policy’ – that is, the question of what is even translated into a certain language at a certain point in time – this article calls attention to the boom in translations intended to optimize domestic ore mining in eighteenth-century France. As many relevant publications on mineralogy and mining of the time were in German, translations from German into French contributed greatly to shaping that boom, as has already been pointed out by research into cultural transfer. Yet whereas existing studies scarcely take the formal design of the translations into account, here that aspect is the main focus. It is conspicuous how the paratexts of the translations, for example, attempt to counter the relevance of the source texts with a ‘quality of their own’ in a compensatory manner, as it were, not least of all as a way of mobilizing the symbolic capital of French. The translations thus also became the site of a competitive process with the aim of securing the national capital of the target culture.