All Belgians are equal, but some languages are more equal than others? 19 th century parliamentarians and their translation beliefs.
In translation studies, the importance of translation to multilingual countries today is widely acknowledged 1 . Moreover, interest has increased in the translation of non-commercial (e.g. administrative and legal) documents 2 : a key feature in nation-states with multilingual populations, of which there were many at the time ideals of equal rights and national integration emerged. Yet, translation scholars still have difficulty penetrating the disciplines that this kind of research could be advanced by and add to the most, such as political history. Much as we might learn from previous attempts at managing multilingual states, these two fields have so far only flirted. Given today’s massive migration and attempts at running a polylingual European Union, maybe they now should get married and have babies, read: sensible translation policies, informed by history.
This doesn’t mean that studying a multitude of cases will provide us with a one-size-fits-all panacea 3 .
Introducing a study on nineteenth-century Belgium (1830-1895), I will demonstrate the complexity of translation policy history, by highlighting the numerous personal interests and beliefs that contribute to what end up as official policy measures. From a reconstruction of the discourses of parliamentarians on the need to publish translations into the Flemish vernacular of policy documents and of their own parliamentary discussions 4 , it will become clear that translation policies are shaped by many more elements than just grand ideologies, such as that of one language for one nation, identified as typical of the age 5 . Furthermore, reflecting in their subsequent opinions on this matter, are a number of recurring translation beliefs held by these representatives, i.e. views on the merits, limits and desirability of certain translations, underlying translation policies , defined after Spolsky as ways of managing translation, based on translation beliefs and practices 6 . It becomes clear from assessing how these views relate to other political ideals, particular images of the Belgian nation, larger processes and personal strategies, among other things, that the role of institutional (government) translation in history is not only underresearched but also undervalued. Conversely, the historical approach will remind translation scholars, if necessary, of the almost infinite amount of motives impacting on decisions on how and whether to translate or not: a choice certainly worth incorporating in studies of translation processes.
1 Cronin 2006, Meylaerts 2011, 2012, Tipton 2012, Koskinen 2014, Nuñez 2014, Schäffner, Tcaciuc and Tesseur
2014, De Varennes 2015 et al.
2 Koskinen 2011, Meylaerts 2012, Koskinen 2014, Schäffner, Tcaciuc and Tesseur 2014, Wolf 2015 et al.
3 Koskinen 2014: 482-483, Nuñez 2014: 316, De Varennes 2015: 34 et al.
4 Published respectively in the Bulletin officiel des décrets du Congrès National de la Belgique et des arrêtés du pouvoir exécutif. Staetsblad (1830-1831), Bulletin officiel des lois et arrêtés royaux de la Belgique (1831-1845),
Annales parlementaires (1844-) and Moniteur belge (1845-), next to some less important publications.
5 Angenot 1989: 140, Kaplan and Baldauf 1997: 195, Kymlicka 2007: 505, Spolsky 2012: 30, Koskinen 2014:
483, Wolf 2015: 36 et al.
6 Spolsky 2012: 5.

Bieke Nouws
KU Leuven
Belgium
Keywords: translation policy, translation beliefs, translation history, history of Belgium, institutional translation
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