Les manuels français-italien «grammaire-traduction» du XVIIIe au XIXe siècle : de l’oralité vivante à l’écriture passéiste
French-Italian "grammar-translation" textbooks from the 18th to the 19th century: from living orality to old-fashioned writing

Author(s): Viviana Agostini-Ouafi
Subject(s): Language studies, Language and Literature Studies, Foreign languages learning, Applied Linguistics, Translation Studies
Published by: Universitatea de Vest din Timişoara
Keywords: translation method;translation textbook;bilingual textbook;modern foreign languages (MFL)
Summary/Abstract: This study analyzes the changes undergone by the “grammar-translationˮ type French-Italian bilingual textbooks, used especially in the teaching of Modern Foreign Languages in Europe in the eighteenth century, following the institutionalization of MFL teaching in the nineteenth century. The treatment of common conversation idiomatic expressions is here examined in four avatars of Giovanni Veneroni’s 1678 textbook (published in 1737, 1786, 1821 and 1864). It shows that it is not the grammar-translation method of these textbooks that should have been challenged in the late nineteenth century, but a shift in the conception of language from living orality to old-fashioned writing. The identification of historical, social, linguistic and political causes that motivated this educational involution allows us today to re-assess the key role of translation in the teaching of MFL and at last gives these old bilingual textbooks the place they deserve, especially in the eighteenth century, in the history of Franco-Italian translation.

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