« Uno piccolo dono ». A software tool for comparing the first edition of Machiavelli’s The Prince to its 16th century French translations

Résumé En

HyperMachiavel (HM) is a software package designed to assist research into aligned corpora encoded in XML-TEI. It compares the editio princeps (Blado 1532) with the four French translations of the XVIth century (Jacques de Vintimille (1546), Gaspard d’Auvergne et Jacques Cappel (1553), Jacques Gohory (1571). This paper begins explaining the reasons, hypotheses and translation practises which led me to conceive of the usefulness of such a tool: the importance of translations in the western world; a conception of the coherence in the act of translation; an approach to the texts based on “political philology”. Then, it develops the first reflections concerning the use of the HM tool and its possible developments by dealing with the translations of stato and presenting the first hypotheses on the practises of the sixteenth century translators: it is thus possible to state a thesis about the language of The Prince and the effects of translations of the vocabulary of politics.