Early Academic Periodical Translation

This book looks at the translations which appeared in the Philosophical Transactions and whose source texts had appeared in the Journal des Sçavans during the period 1665 to 1700. The theoretical background of the study is Systemic Functional Linguistics. The book provides linguistic analyses of both translations and source texts, considering in particular process types, the nature of themes, modality and nominalization of processes. The periods looked at are defined in terms of the editors of the respective journals. Differences in the linguistic features of the translations and source texts are explained in terms of the historical context. Since these were the first two academic periodicals, the texts studied here were the first attempts at translating academic articles, and thus have particular significance.