Lost and Found in Translation: The Early French and German Reception of Robert Dodsley's The Oeconomy of Human Life

Abstract

Abstract Drawing on a corpus of five French and five German eighteenth‐century versions of Robert Dodsley's The Oeconomy of Human Life , this article examines the work's early European reception through the combined perspectives of book history, translation history, and translation criticism. The French and German texts are analysed as situated acts of moral mediation shaped by target readerships, publishing contexts, paratextual framing, and differing understandings of translational fidelity. The article distinguishes between several forms of textual transformation: source‐oriented rendering, reader‐oriented adaptation, rhetorical intensification, indirect translation, editorial reframing, and textual corruption. It argues that the French and German versions of The Oeconomy formed a dynamic multilingual text family, in which Dodsley's moral‐philosophical bestseller was repeatedly repurposed for different courtly, commercial, pedagogical, and literary environments. The case shows how a single, unusually mobile moral text makes visible the plurality of translation practices through which Enlightenment moral discourse circulated across linguistic and cultural boundaries.