Vinay and darbelnet biography sample

Way back in the 1950s, two French scholars named Jean-Paul Vinay and Jean Darbelnet explored the linguistic aspects of translation. The field of Translation Studies didn't really exist at the time, so most of what Vinay and Darbelnet did was considered comparative literature.

When looking at the work of Vinay and Darbelnet, the term contrastive linguistics seems much more appropriate, as what they did was look at the differences between two languages in order to inform their understanding of both of them.

While other scholars sought to merely compare two languages in order to inform the relationship between them, Vinay and Darbelnet looked at the process of translation.

Their efforts culminated in what is considered their seminal work in the linguistic turn of translation studies, Stylistique comparée du français et de l'anglais : méthode de traduction, which around four decades later was translated into an English version, Comparative stylistics of French and English :