Emergence of local translation policies in Switzerland between 1848 and 1918 – The cases of Bienne/Biel, Bern and Geneva

Estelle Gross

In this dissertation, Estelle Gross focuses on the following research problem: what translation policies emerged in Swiss cities between 1848 and 1918 and how did they interact with the federal linguistic framework? To address this question, the researcher uses data from archival documents. These materials are sourced from local archives services in Switzerland, more specifically in the cities of Bern, Bienne, and Geneva. The selection of the cities is based on their sociolinguistic realities, as they cluster many characteristics of Swiss cities in the 19th and 20th centuries. To be brief, Bienne/Biel is a bilingual city (German and French) in a bilingual canton (a member state of the Swiss Confederation), Bern is a German-speaking city, in a bilingual canton, and the federal city of a multilingual country, and Geneva is a French-speaking city in a French-speaking canton. These three cities also faced at some point waves of immigration that shaped their linguistic landscape.

In total, six public archives and one online service dedicated to Swiss journals provide most primary sources. The documents collected are various types of institutional documents, such as minutes of councils, administrative reports, budgets and lists of employees. These sources are catalogued and analysed on macro- and microlevel. The first step is to gather references to relevant documents into a catalogue. The collected documents come from paper and/or digital sources. This step helps the researcher to gain an overview of the primary sources available and to highlight absent sources, as well as the asymmetry between relevant documents found in Swiss archives. Based on the catalogue, the researcher creates a documentary database on a database management system to carry out a macroanalysis of the sources. This step is crucial to point out topics with richer research potential. The researcher then conducts a detailed computer-assisted analysis (with qualitative data analysis software) of the sources selected to offer a more-detailed insight on specific topics. The outcomes of the analyses serve as a basis for the comparison between the cities, and for the contrast with the federal linguistic frame.

The aim of this research is to show historical realities of practices of translation, specifically in Swiss local institutions. The researcher expects to discover to what extent official multilingualism challenged Swiss cities during the 19th and 20th centuries and how the local institutions addressed (or not) these challenges with translation policies. Another expectation is to reveal whether local political principles satisfy practical needs or not, and to what extent translation was institutionalised.