Coding continental: information design in sixteenth‐century E nglish vernacular language manuals and translations

This article explores the late‐sixteenth‐century I talian‐ E nglish translated book via an investigation of its visual, textual, and paratextual expression on the page. Drawing on approaches from textual and material history, bibliography, and translation studies, I unpack the constituent elements of the page to draw new conclusions about the functions of the forms of these specific book‐objects. Using a selection of texts of I talian origin, printed in L ondon in a variety of publishing genres in the latter part of the sixteenth century (mostly, but not exclusively the 1580s and 1590s), I approach these books as much in terms of their visual design as their Italian content. Target editions discussed include three translations from B occaccio, landmark print productions of other authors such as A riosto, C astiglione, and T asso, as well as parallel‐text bilingual or polyglot language‐learning books. How far do the visual codes and organization of the book‐object create its status as a translation, and can these be differentiated from those of the non‐translated book? In answering this question, I ‘translate’ key terminology from the discipline of translation studies more usually applied to linguistic transfer (such as ‘equivalence’, ‘domestication’; ‘foreignization’), and newer approaches such as multi‐modal theory, to the information design of the early modern page.