Commerce Numérique: traffic signals for crossroads between cultures

Commerce is a French literary journal - founded by Princess Margherita Caetani - which relied on the collaboration of three prestigious writers: Paul Valéry, Léon-Paul Fargue, and Valéry Larbaud. The journal is composed of twenty-nine volumes published between 1924 and 1932. Each volume includes different literary material like poems and novels, written by both well- known and unknown writers, who also translated important authors like Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Pirandello, Ungaretti, Saint-John Perse, Rilke, and Hofmannsthal. Considering the historical, literary, and cultural importance of the journal Commerce, 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 describes the way in which the journal was encoded. Particular importance is also given to the encoding of poems present in Commerce. Some poems are in the original language and are accompanied by their French translation, other poems are in the French-translated form without the original text. In order to fully and accurately express the phenomena and their structures, we adopted some aspects of the TEI framework that will be explained in detail. The French translation of a Moroccan Arabic poem from the 13th century is also considered. The original Arabic poem is interesting because it presents aspects of both the Moroccan dialect and the oral text. The study and the encoding of the Arabic poem in parallel to its translation highlight some important structural differences between Arabic poetry and Western poetry.