FRENCH–ROMANIAN BILINGUALISM APPROACHED THROUGH A NEW DIGITIZED CORPUS

Abstract

This article presents a new research tool, i.e. a large French-Romanian electronic corpus, which makes possible the study of the French influence on Romanian through translations. This corpus already contains nearly 2,000 French texts, aligned with their Romanian translations, most of which were produced before 1900. This new resource will allow us to perform a more precise evaluation of the influence exerted by French on Romanian, during the time of the intense modernization of the latter, in the 19th century. Based on the data provided by this tool, we intend to illustrate the way in which various lexical and phraseological units have been translated from French into Romanian. Often this method will enable us to establish (or to confirm) the French origin of certain lexemes and phrasemes, as well as the stages of their introduction and adaptation to Romanian.