Socioterminology is an approach to technical and scientific languages which describes their effects ad uses in different discursive contexts, especially non-technical, and in the context of translation practices. However, several textual fields remain unexplored: this article aims to analyze the French translation of an Italian literary text, Primo Levi’s Il sistema periodico (1975), a ‘biography' of his professional career as a chemist. The novel (organized through a series of chapters, each devoted to an element of the periodic table) is typologically ambiguous. “Questo non è un trattato di chimica” (« this is not a chemical treatise »), says the author at the beginning of the last chapter, while suggesting the porosity that exists between discursive genres (technical-scientific; fictional). We aim to analyze the French translation (Le système périodique, 1987, trad. André Maugé) in order to account for the symbolic and literary uses of terminologies, their contextualization in literary discourse and the interlinguistic and intercultural relationship between Italian and French.
