In einer Fremdsprache zu schreiben bedeutet nicht nur, dass man diese Sprache beherrscht, sondern auch, dass man mit den damit zusammenhängenden kulturellen Codes vertraut ist. Das historiographische Schreiben hat in Frankreich eine lange Tradition der literarischen Eleganz, welche die Ansprüche prägt, die an Wissenschaftlerinnen und Wissenschaftler gestellt werden. Diese Ansprüche werden hier anhand von exemplarischen argumentativen, rhetorischen, typographischen und gattungsspezifischen Aspekten skizziert. Im ersten Teil des Aufsatzes wird auf den traditionellen, dreiteiligen und rhetorisch beladenen Bau von wissenschaftlichen Texten in Frankreich eingegangen. Im zweiten Teil geht es um die typographischen Unterschiede zwischen deutschem und französischem Satz (insbes. bei der Verwendung der Interpunktion), die bei der Veröffentlichung wissenschaftlicher Texte zu berücksichtigen sind. In einem letzten Teil werden vergleichend drei zentrale Formen der wissenschaftlichen Textproduktion vorgestellt: die Dissertation, die Rezension und der briefliche Verkehr.

French military interpreters attached to the British troops during the First World War often experienced considerable difficulty in explaining their position even to close relatives. They felt the need to justify the fact that they were not exposed to the same immediate danger as most of their French comrades in arms. Furthermore, their daily work in ensuring the military coalition ran smoothly was mostly unintelligible to their contemporaries. This paper explores the different strategies employed by three interpreters in choosing photographs to convey aspects of the role in personal communications to their family. The analysis necessarily includes questions on power relations as experienced by these rank-and-file soldiers whose specific tasks led them to work almost exclusively alongside British officers, their hybrid status exemplified by their uniform, which combines elements from both national traditions, and their conception of the corps of military interpreters as a specific and cohesive unit. Our work in the French military archives on the individual interpreters’ case files enables us to combine a close reading of the images with surrounding background information on their previous experience and social standing.

Military interpreters were crucial to the functioning of the Allied coalition on the Western Front during the First World War. These French soldiers maintained the links between the different military hierarchies, but also between the British troops and the local French civilians. In this case study we examine the material concerning them (both archival material and published sources) in the light of two exemplary metaphors. On the one hand we have chosen that of “go-between” which has recently found considerable application in transnational history, especially in colonial contexts. On the other hand, Translation and Interpreting Studies have long used the “gatekeeper” -metaphor which originally stems from organisational sociology. These two approaches underline and explain very different aspects of the case study and raise important questions regarding the articulation of different disciplinary angles on the history of translation and interpreting more largely.

This paper examines dictionaries produced for military interpreters on the Western Front during the First World War as a source on the history of military interpreting. Methods from lexicography, translation studies, and the cultural history of the First World War provide us with possible approaches to this unique trace of language use in the past. History of translation and interpreting is thus shown to be in construction on the boundaries of several disciplines which mutually enrich each other.