Commerce Numérique: traffic signals for the crossroads between cultures

Abstract

Commerce is a literary French journal founded by Princess Margherita Caetani, involving three prestigious collaborators: Paul Valéry, Léon-Paul Fargue, Valéry Larbaud.It is composed by 29 volumes published between 1924 and 1932. Each volume collects different literary material of various well-known and unknown writers as poems or novels, translating some of the most important authors like Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Pirandello, Ungaretti, Saint-John Perse, Rilke, Hofmannsthal.Considering the historical, literary, and cultural importance of the Commerce journal, our project "Commerce numérique" aims to digitize and to make the journal contents freely available online to both the general public and the research community.This article presents how the journal was encoded. Also, we give importance to the coding of poems present in Commerce. Indeed, some poems are original in another language and they are accompanied by their French translation. Other poems are a French-translated form without original text. In order to fully and accurately express the phenomena and their structures, we have adopted some aspects of the TEI framework, which we will explain in detail.Particular attention was paid to the French translation of a Moroccan Arabic poem from the 13th century.On the one hand, the original Arabic poetry is interesting because it presents some aspects of the Moroccan dialect and some aspects of the oral text.On the other hand, the study and the encoding of Arabic poetry in parallel to its translation highlight some important structural differences between Arabic poetry and Western poetry.