Mairi McLaughlin is Professor in the Department of French and an Affiliated Member of the Departments of Linguistics and Italian Studies at UC Berkeley. She specializes in French/Romance Linguistics and in Translation Studies. She has published extensively on language contact in French and Romance, on the language of the media, and on journalistic and literary translation. She has a particular interest in the language of the media, especially the role that it plays in language variation and change, the use that is made of reported speech, and the linguistic and textual effects of news translation.
Mairi’s first book, Syntactic Borrowing in Contemporary French: A Linguistic Analysis of News Translation was published by Legenda in 2011 and her second book, La Presse française historique: histoire d’un genre et histoire de la langue, was published by Garnier in 2021.
She published a digital edition of the first periodical devoted to the French language itself, François-Urbain Domergue's Journal de la langue françoise, soit exacte, soit ornée (1784-1795) (McLaughlin 2022) and a critical paper edition of the same periodical is forthcoming with Garnier. Mairi is co-editor (with Wendy Ayres-Bennett) of The Oxford Handbook of the French Language which was published by Oxford University Press in 2024. She is also co-editor (with Janice Carruthers and Olivia Walsh) of the volume Historical and Sociolinguistic Approaches to French which was also published by Oxford University Press in 2024.
Mairi’s newest project is on language and translation in the Franco-American press in the (very) long nineteenth century (1780-1914).
With Léa Huotari (University of Turku) and Franz Meier (Dresden University of Technology), Mairi is currently editing a special issue of the journal AI Linguistica called “Rethinking AI at the Linguistics-Translation Studies Interface”.
Selected Publications
“Translation and its Effects in the First Francophone American Newspaper, the Gazette françoise (1780-1781)”, in Translation and Diaspora: The role of translation in émigré communities in the USA, ed. by Brian James Baer and Nike K. Pokorn, Routledge, 2026.
“Language and Translation in the Early English and French Press (1620-1649)”, with Nicholas Brownlees, in News Translation and Intertextuality in the British and International Press, 1600-1960s, ed. by Matylda Włodarczyk and Nicholas Brownlees, Palgrave Macmillan, 2026, pp. 25-50.
“A Mixed-Methods Analysis of the Translation of Quotations in International News”, co-authored with Léa Huotari, Target: International Journal of Translation Studies, 38(1), 2026, pp. 51-83.
“Morphology and Syntax” in The Oxford Handbook of the French Language, ed. by Wendy Ayres-Bennett and Mairi McLaughlin, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024, pp. 65-102.
“Women and Language in the Journal de la langue françoise (1784-1795)”, in Historical and Sociolinguistic Approaches to French, ed. by Janice Carruthers, Mairi McLaughlin and Olivia Walsh, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024, pp. 121-143.
The Oxford Handbook of the French Language, co-edited with Wendy Ayres-Bennett, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024.
Historical and Sociolinguistic Approaches to French, co-edited with Janice Carruthers and Olivia Walsh, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024.
“Translation and the Press”, co-authored with Nicholas Brownlees, in The Edinburgh History of the British and Irish Press, Vol I 1640-1800, ed. by Nicholas Brownlees, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2023, pp. 384-403.
Journal de la langue françoise, soit exacte soit ornée (1784-1795), by François-Urbain Domergue, in Grand Corpus des grammaires françaises, des remarques et des traités sur la langue (XIVe-XVIIIe s.), Paris: Garnier, 2022.
“The Future of Translation in Higher Education”, a special issue of L2 Journal, 14(2), 2022. Includes a single-authored “Introduction” (pp. 3-11) and co-authored closing “Reflections” (pp. 107-114).
La Presse française historique: histoire d’un genre et histoire de la langue, Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2021.
“La représentation de l’oral dans la Gazette d’Amsterdam à la fin du XVIIIe siècle”, Langages, special issue: ‘L’oral représenté en diachronie et en synchronie: que nous apprend-il sur l’oral spontané?’, ed. by Florence Lefeuvre and Gabriella Parussa, 217, 2020, pp. 133-146.
“When Romance meets English”, in Manual of Romance Sociolinguistics, ed. by Wendy Ayres-Bennett and Janice Carruthers, Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018, pp. 644-73.
“Why Retranslate the Classics? Griselda in French from the Renaissance to the Twentieth Century”, co-authored with Linda Louie and Diana Thow, in Cultural Reception, Translation and Transformation from Medieval to Modern Italy. Essays in Honor of Martin McLaughlin, ed. by Guido Bonsaver, Brian Richardson and Giuseppe Stellardi, Oxford: Legenda, 2017, pp. 52-68.
“Prolégomènes à l’étude des idéologies et attitudes linguistiques dans la presse périodique sous l’Ancien Régime”, Circula: revue d’idéologies linguistiques, 1, 2015, pp. 4-25.
Syntactic Borrowing in Contemporary French: A Linguistic Analysis of News Translation, Oxford: Legenda, 2011.
History of the French language; Variation and change in contemporary French; Translation studies; Language of the media; History of the press; French press in North America; Renaissance and Early-modern Studies; Comparative Romance linguistics; History of the Italian language; Syntactic change; Speech reporting; Contact linguistics
