‘La Tour de Babel,’ 35 years later: challenges and tools relating to the translation of archival terminology from English to French

Abstract

In 1985, Michel Duchein published ‘Les Archives dans la Tour de Babel: Problèmes de Terminologie Archivistique Internationale’ in La Gazette des Archives. To this day, his article remains the most articulate expression of the difficulties linked to the translation of archival terminology between French and English. It was written as a reaction to the publication of the Dictionary of Archival Terminology by the International Council on Archives (1984). Departing from Duchein’s work, this article assesses the current situation regarding the translation of archival terminology from English to French. The article mainly considers four existing tools dealing exclusively with archival terminology: the Elsevier Lexicon of Archive Terminology (1964), the International Council on Archives’ Dictionary of Archival Terminology (1984), the Association Française de Normalisation’s Vocabulaire des Archives (1986) and the International Council on Archives’ Multilingual Archival Terminology database (2012- …). This article is based on an analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of each tool, and on practical tests carried out during the translation of a corpus of texts for Comma, the journal of the International Council on Archives. This article intends to show that the existing tools for translating archival terminology from English to French lack either up-to-date content or reliability.