Translation and Its Effects in the First Franco-American Newspaper

This chapter examines the role of translation and its effects in the first Franco-American newspaper, the Gazette Françoise (1780–1781). The newspaper was founded to serve the officer class of a French fleet which had docked in Newport, Rhode Island, in July 1780 in order to support the American revolutionaries. The chapter starts by situating the Gazette Françoise in the wider context of French and Francophone diasporas in the USA. It then presents the newspaper's history and brings together existing scholarship to emphasize the central role played by translation in both its founding and production. This leads into an empirical study of a new parallel translation corpus which consists of all editions of the Gazette Françoise alongside all available corresponding English-language versions of the news items it published. The analysis draws on tools and methods from a range of fields to explore the status of translation in the Gazette Françoise , the strategies which were used to translate the news, and the impact which the translation had. This chapter draws attention to the importance of translation in the development of the ethnic press in the USA and underscores its potential impact at a range of levels, including the linguistic.