Abstract

It is well known that a monolingual language policy was applied during the French Revolution. However, the translation of political, legal and administrative texts played an important role for the diffusion of the ideas of the Revolution. This paper deals with regional translations into a non-European language: proclamations of the representatives of the French government in the French colony of Saint-Domingue (later: Haiti), which had been translated from French into a variety of Haitian creole. As the analyzed examples will show, the translations into creole, which were read aloud, show some procedures that had probably the function to make the text better understandable.