Traduction et linguistique diachronique: une relation de pourvoyeur à bénéficiaire

Translations, which are frequently used in contrastive linguistics to analyse syntactic or semantic features in different languages, are also precious instruments for the diachronic study of linguistic phenomena, especially if the corpus texts imply several historical stages of one language. These successive translations are all authentic testimonies by native speakers to the most appropriate expression of one and the same message in their language system.In this paper, we present the methodology underlying our approach and describe the basic corpus. Next, we sketch the current state of (the) research which is being carried out in this respect at the Catholic University of Leuven (K. U. Leuven). Recently, two new projects have enabled us to enlarge the corpus texts and to give a new orientation to our approach. We will therefore outline the prospects of our research.