Peut-on traduire l'identité ? De la différence entre textes traduits et textes originaux en Suisse romande

As a multilingual country, Switzerland heavily relies on translation for countrywide public communication, for companies as well as for governmental institutions. All, but especially the latter, face the challenge of providing all citizens with the same information, regardless of the language they speak. This study investigates a possible influence of German, the main language in major companies and institutions in Switzerland, on Swiss-French at the discourse level. This influence, resulting from a disproportional number of French texts being translations from German, is evidenced by major differences concerning the topics they address. Evidence is found by investigating a large text corpus, Swiss-AL: keywords and toponyms contained in translated vs. original texts show differences in the weight of the various levels of political administration and in the associations made with specific places in Switzerland. These differences go beyond the expected co ntrast between nation-wide and local texts. This research has been conducted with texts mostly written before the explosion of neuronal machine translation, which arises the question of whether the newest improvement and instant availability of automatic translation might increase exponentially this influence.