Entry | Research on the history of translation in Spain

SPA Investigación sobre la historia de la traducción en España

Introduction

Philosopher, literary critic, and translation theorist Antoine Berman (1984: 12) made a famous claim that the first task of a modern translation theory involves the constitution of a translation history. In the specific case of the history of translation in Spain, numerous researchers, both Spanish and foreign, have dedicated their efforts to achieving this goal, providing a huge bibliographical collection, with no fewer than 8,000 references on this subject. See thus, the bibliography compiled by Lafarga and accessible online. For a far more detailed overview of the research carried out in the field of Spanish translation history, see Pegenaute (2019). It is noticeable, as pointed out by Santoyo (2012), one of its most renowned specialists, that the bulk of the research has focused on issues such as biblical translation and the translation of classical languages, as well as that of texts written in the main languages of Europe, such as French, Italian, English and German, but that there are far fewer studies dedicated to other aspects such as, for example, the translation of children's and young people's literature, audiovisual or contemporary theater translation or the role played by translators and interpreters in colonial and post-colonial contexts –although it should be noted that there have been notable attempts in recent times to reverse all these shortcomings– and that there are virtually no studies devoted, for example, to translation in Roman and Visigothic times, to the pragmatically oriented medieval translation – that is, the one that pursued a practical utility and was often carried out anonymously in contexts such as monasteries, ports, chancelleries or borderlands–, to the translations developed by Jewish and Muslim translators or by missionaries in the Far East, mainly in the Philippines. To those “blank spaces” pointed out by Santoyo others can be added such as, for example, the translations carried out by Spanish translators outside the borders of the country (many times by exiles), the phenomenon of non-translation (in contexts of censorship or as a consequence of following certain selective translation processes), the use of translation as a didactic tool (in teaching not only dead languages, but also modern ones, at least until the 70s of the last century, which seems to be experiencing a small turn today), the translator's tools over time (from medieval glosses and glossaries to the sophisticated lexicographical and documentary resources we have today) or collaborative translation (developed by teams of translators not always easily distinguishable, as was the case, for example, in Toledo, when under the patronage of Alfonso X Arabic texts were turned into Latin and from this language into Castilian Romance, with the intervention of at least one Arabist and one Romancist and. sometimes also, a reviser (“enmendador”), a person in charge of adding glosses (“glosador”) or a person in charge of arranging the material (“capitulador”).

Historians

The first systematic attempt to reconstruct the history of translation in Spain was probably that of Joaquín de Lorga, a priest and professor of Rhetoric, who included in his Memoirs –currently lost– many of the notes he had taken to offer an overview of the outstanding Spanish translators in the history of Spain, but he left the project unfinished when he died in 1769. A short time later, in 1778, the bibliographer and Cervantist Antonio Pellicer y Saforcada published his Ensayo de una bibliotheca de traductores españoles, in which he recognized his debt to Lorga. In its first part this presented three studies not related to the title of the work (on, respectively, the brothers Argensola and Cervantes); but the second one included thirty-six studies on translators arranged alphabetically. In many instances, they were interpreters of the Bible, which forced him to include many names of heterodox persecuted by the Inquisition, which is the reason why so he does not quote directly from them. There are also some medieval translators into Castilian, both classic and ancient works. In any case, the emphasis is put on the translators from the Spanish Golden Age, which he justifies by saying that:

[…] en el Siglo XVI y XVII se aplicaron tanto los españoles a este ejercicio, que trasladaron a lengua castellana lo mejor de Italia y Grecia, por donde se verá que no sólo se adelantó España en este estudio a otras naciones, especialmente a los franceses que no le emprendieron seriamente hasta el reinado de Luis XIV sino que las iguala, si ya no las excede, en la multitud de versiones (Pellicer 1778: 7).


Two pioneering pieces of work on the history of translation in Spain: Pellicer y Saforcada (1778) and Menéndez Pelayo (1952-1953)

Pellicer traced a biographical sketch of the translators, faithfully reviewed the titles of the translations and pointed out the libraries where they could be found. He also frequently mentioned French and Italian translations. With authentic philological care, he referred to those sources of information authorities he had consulted, in order to give notice of those editions he had not had access or in order to provide further information.

It is also necessary to refer to the contributions made by Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo, who, apart from authoring many other fundamental works of literary criticism, translated Greek authors (Sappho, Anacreon or Theocritus), Latin authors (Lucretius, Catullus, Tibullus, Horace, Virgil ), Italians (Foscolo, Monti, Leopardi), French (Chénier) and English (Byron, Shakespeare) and between 1873 and 1878 he prepared the studies that would constitute his monumental Biblioteca de traductores españoles (published in four volumes in 1952 and 1953). In that contribution, which is still an obligatory reference today, he presented 293 studies on translators. Menéndez Pelayo included both ancient and modern, peninsular and American, secular and religious translators. In each entry he presented a biographical sketch and exhaustive bibliographic data, including the location of the sources; he also transcribed fragments of original works, which he compared with the translations, and offered his own critical opinion.

In the 40s, 50s and 60s there were some relevant –although sporadic– contributions of a historical nature. Thus, for example, José Fernández Montesinos published a catalog of translations in 1955, preceded by a study in which attention was paid to foreign influence in the development of the Spanish nineteenth-century novel (Introduction to a history of the novel in the nineteenth century Followed by the outline of a bibliography of translations of novels). In any case, the bulk of historical studies focused in those years on the analysis of the medieval period. Thus, we have, for example, that by historian Gonzalo Menéndez Pidal, “Cómo trabajaron las escuelas alfonsíes”, published in Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica in 1951 and which dealt with the so called Toledo School of Translators”. For his part, Ramón Menéndez Pidal presented in 1952 –as the closing conference of the "Course for foreigners in Segovia"– a text entitled “Spain and the introduction of Arab science in the West” which he later published in Revista del Instituto Egipcio de Estudios Islámicos (1955, in España, eslabón entre la cristiandad y el Islam (1956), and in the first volume of España y su historia (1957).


Some works by Valentín García Yebra.

Equally important are the works by historian, Arabist and Hebraist José María Millás Vallicrosa, who was also a translator of numerous medieval Andalusian, Hebrew or Latin-speaking authors. Throughout an extensive scientific production that includes more than thirty books, he researched the presence of Andalusian poetry in medieval literature, the history of science in al-Andalus (mainly in the Catalan space) and the Influence of Andalusian mathematics and astronomy on the European scientific scene. He presented his noteworthy studies on the translation of Arabic scientific texts in the Late Middle Ages throughout a long career that spans from the 40s to the 60s (although he has an early article in 1933 on the «Literalismo de los traductores de la corte de Alfonso el Sabio»). He published most of his contirbutions in journals such as Al-Andalus and Sefarad or in compilations of pieces of work, such as Estudios sobre historia de la ciencia españoal (1949) and Nuevos estudios sobre la historia (1960). It is also worth mentioning José Llamas, a Hebraist scholar, with outstanding contributions on biblical translations into Spanish, which he published throughout the 1940s and the first half of the 1950s in journals such as Estudios Bíblicos, Sefarad and La Ciudad de Dios and which culminated with the edition of Biblia medieval romanceada judeo–cristiana. Versión del Antiguo Testamento en el siglo XIV, sobre los textos hebreo y latino (1950-1955), based upon a manuscript preserved in the library of El Escorial. For her part, Italian Hispanist Margherita Morreale, who specialized in the study of Humanism, Erasmism and Italian-Spanish relations in the Renaissance, published in 1949 a monograph on the humanist and translator Pedro Simón Abril. In Castiglione y Boscán: el ideal cortesano en el Renacimiento español (1959) she also evidently dealt with the translation that the latter made of the former. At the end of the 1950s and beginning of the 1960s she also published numerous articles on medieval biblical translations into Spanish and Catalan, on Enrique de Villena, etc. The study of biblical translation remained in vogue in the 1960s and 1970s, thanks to the numerous contributions by one of the most authoritative researchers on this topic, Luis Alonso Schökel, a professor at the Biblical Institute of Rome, who complemented his research work. with the translation practice, preparing, in collaboration with Juan Mateos, Salmos y Cánticos del Breviario (1966) and Nueva Biblia Española (1975). His knowledge of the exigencies of biblical translation and its history are condensed in La traducción bíblica. Lingüística y Estilística (1977), written in collaboration with Eduardo Zurro

In more recent times, it is necessary to mention Valentín García Yebra, probably one of the greatest Spanish scholars in the field of translation history and a true pioneer in its study, who also stood out for his contributions on Contrastive Linguistics and for his own practice as a translator, both of classical authors (Aristotle, Caesar, Cicero, Seneca) and modern ones (for example, pieces of literary criticism and essays by Aguiar e Silva, Gilson, Kayser, von Le Fort or Moeller), as well as the famous essay by Schleiermacher, Ueber die verschiedenen Methoden des Uebersezens. His speech at the Royal Spanish Academy in 1985, Traducción y enriquecimiento de la lengua del traductor (published in expanded form in 2004) is a magnificent essay on the history of translation. Some of his most important contributions in this field –mainly devoted to medieval times, the Golden Age and the 20th century– were included in volumes such as En torno a la traducción. Teoría. Crítica. Historia (1983), and Traducción: historia y teoría (1994).


Some works by Julio César Santoyo Mediavilla.

Julio-César Santoyo has been one of the most notable successors of García Yebra in this area. In 1987 he published his well-known anthology on the thought surrounding translation in the Spanish language, Teoría y crítica de la traducción, and throughout his career he has presented numerous studies that he later compiled in en Historia de la traducción: quince apuntes (1999) e Historia de la traducción: viejos y nuevos apuntes (2008). Also very outstanding are La traducción medieval en la península ibérica: siglos III-XV (2009), the most complete contribution ever written on this issue, and his anthology Sobre la traducción: textos clásicos y medievales (2011). In addition to being the translator of numerous English-speaking authors, Santoyo was the director of Livius journal, which between 1992 and 1999 collected the proceedings of international conferences on the history of translation held at the University of León.

Other important historians of translation in Spain have been Miguel Ángel Vega, founder of Hieronymus Complutensis journal, translator of many German-speaking authors, author of numerous works on the history of translation, and compiler of the book Textos clásicos de teoría de la traducción (1994); Francisco Lafarga, translator of the main French authors of the Enlightenment period, specialist in the reception of French literature in Spain –mainly in the 18th century–, author of numerous specialized works on the history of translation and (co)editor of some thirty works on this subject, among them La traducción en España: 1750-1830 (1999), Neoclásicos y románticos ante la traducción (2002), El discurso sobre la traducción en la España del siglo XVIII (2004), Traducción y traductores, del Romanticismo al Realismo (2006) o Pensar la traducción en la España del siglo XIX (2016); the medievalist and romanist Carlos Alvar, who in 1982 won the Fray Luis de León National Translation Award with Poesía de trovadores, and is the author of volumes such as Repertorio de traductores del siglo XV, in collaboration with José Manuel Lucía Megías (2009) or Traducciones y traductores. Materiales para una historia de la traducción en Castilla en la Edad Media (2010).

Translators

After having referred to some of the most outstanding historians of translation in Spain, I shall present a brief state of the matter on the main aspects related to practice and theory. In relation to the first one, it is worth studying who has translated what, under what circumstances and in what sociopolitical context (Woodsworth 2001: 101), which corresponds to the archeology of translation referred to by Pym (1998: 5), and which constitutes one of the three areas into which the history of translation is divided, along with historical criticism and the justification of the reasons why those translations were developed. This approach is clearly indebted to the conceptualization mode of the rhetorical discourse around inventio (D'hulst 2001, 24-31; 2014, 28-41).Although male and female translators are, as it is evident, the main agents of translation, only in recent times have they been the object of systematic study in the articulation of a history of translation. In his monograph Method in Translation History, Pym (1998) grants them a privileged space in this historical articulation, while Chesterman (2009) emphasizes that in the most current tendencies –mainly sociological– the emphasis is to be placed more on translators rather than in translations. Pym himself (2009) makes two fundamental proposals: to study translators before translations and to consider them as intercultural mediators, although they are difficult to locate in a single social or geographical context. The truth is that it can be difficult to trace the life and professional development of translators, since their work in many cases becomes invisible, as Venuti (1995) has pointed out, because with the aim of creating a work that can be read as if it were an original written in the target language, they very often submit the original texts to a domestication (bear in mind that this term comes from the Latin domus, that is, “home”), in which the trace of their own intervention fades out, which reverts to their invisibility and their peripheral position in terms of social consideration, despite their central importance as cultural intermediaries. This invisibility is evidently increased in the case of female translators, for reasons of gender discrimination. This is the case, for example, in the works that María Lejárraga translated into Spanish in collaboration with her husband, the playwright Gregorio Martínez Sierra, in which all evidence of her participation often disappears.


Some significant female translators in the Spanish Silver Age: María Lejárraga, María de Maeztu and Emilia Pardo Bazán.

On the other hand, there is no doubt that it is difficult to trace the life and professional trajectory of translators, since their very condition as mediating agents means that their existence is located metaphorically and literally on the border between various cultures, which is why they often feed the ranks of exiled, exiled, expatriate, refugee, emigrated or, simply, displaced people. I shall briefly analyze this issue to highlight the problems they pose for the constitution of translation histories based on national criteria. The frequency with which émigrés and exiled people people practice translation must certainly be attributed to the fact that geographical displacement often forces the development of a double linguistic competence, which is the reason why it ends up being a lucrative activity, but also to the possibility of translating texts ideologically connoted and that could not have been translated in their native country. We can thus, for example, refer to the case of the many liberal exiles in the years between 1814-1820 and 1823-1834, as a consequence of the absolutist persecution of Fernando VII, and who practiced translation in their place of destination, either France (José Miguel Alea, Francisco Altés y Gurena, Pedro Bazán de Mendoza, Juan Florán, Luis Lamarca, José Marchena, Francisco Martínez de la Rosa, Eugenio de Ochoa, Manuel Norberto Pérez de Camino or Vicente Salvá) or England (José María Blanco White, José Joaquín de Mora, Pablo de Mendíbil, Telesforo de Trueba y Cossío or José de Urcullu). Both in France and in England a prosperous publishing industry in Castilian was developed, which tried to fill the commercial vacuum left by Spain by interrupting its relations with the Latin American colonies, for which reason much of what was published there was addressed not only to emigrants, but also to transatlantic readers. On other occasions, exile allows the use of a translation language that could not be used in Spain. This is the case of the republicans exiled after the civil war. Thus, for example, Andima Inbinagabeitia translated Ovid and Virgil into Basque during their exile in France and Guatemala; Plácido Castro, together with Lois Tobío and Florencio Manuel Delgado Gurriarán, published in Buenos Aires in 1948 Poesía inglesa e francesa vertida ao galego; Xabier Benguerel was able to translate Victor Hugo, Valéry, Ronsard, Baudelaire or Poe into Catalan in the 40s and 50s, during his stay in Santiago de Chile. These examples serve as proof of the cross-border character of translators, which can serve as an argument to corroborate the possible convenience of carrying out transnational histories of translation, instead of national ones.

There exist various repertoires and studies on Spanish translators. In some cases, they are specialized repertoires according to the field of translation or following a chronological cut. For reasons of space, I shall refer exclusively to the two most comprehensive and will only point out one specialized one. Dicccionario histórico de la traducción en España (Lafarga & Pegenaute 2009) has been updated, expanded and published in open-access electronic format. In its digital version, DHTE has approximately one thousand entries prepared by more than four hundred specialists, and it is divided into two large sections: “Output”, with a subsection that includes foreign authors (conveniently classified according to their language ) and one containing overviews of different literary traditions; “Input”, in which you can find articles on translators, both in Spanish and in Catalan, Basque and Galician, as well as information on different theoretical and practical aspects of translation in the receiving context. The articles are accompanied by their corresponding bibliography and provide exhaustive details of an editorial nature. For its part, Diccionari de la traducció catalana (Bacardí & Godayol 2011) presents a thousand entries on translators into Catalan born before 1950. Its eighty editors present biographical and bibliographical data, in addition to the pertinent critical consideration and secondary sources. It can be consulted electronically in a section of Visat, the digital journal of literature and translation of the Catalan PEN. A different approach follows, for example, the volume edited by Romero-López (2016), Retratos de traductoras en la Edad de Plata, which focuses on the translation activity of Emilia Pardo Bazán, Carmen de Burgos, María Lejárraga, Isabel Oyarzábal, María de Maeztu, Matilde Ras, Zenobia Camprubí, María Luz Morales and Ernestina de Champourcin.

Translations

When developing a translation history, it is essential to have specific inventories of translations, although sometimes we can face real definition problems. This is the case, for example, in a very marked way, in the theatrical field. For illustrative purposes, to stick to a specific period, we see that in the Spanish romantic period, not only is the work of the researcher hindered by the enormous bulk of pieces produced –with numerous works written, adapted, translated, recast and also performed–, but she also faces an ontological problem, since it is not always possible to reliably ponder the degree of originality of the works, separating those that are entirely personal from those that are the result of imitation, adaptation or translation. It must be borne in mind that the different rewriting practices are subject to the monitoring of highly variable ethical and aesthetic codes over time. For example, in the specific case of translation, the legitimacy of working from intermediate versions, the possibility of ideologically manipulating the original text, the convenience of applying cultural filters conducive to ensuring that the target reader recognizes the work as inserted in an environment family, etc).

Frequently it is a problem of authorship or, rather, of the degree of originality: to what extent is the translator worthy to be entitled as of creator? In what way is this consideration modified from a diachronic point of view? The scholar studying the translations of playwrights also sees the difficulty of her research increased by the frequent transfer of genres: from novel to drama (and viceversa), from poetry to drama, etc. As if all this were not enough, there is the problem of the interrelation between the page and the stage, since many times works were translated that were not performed and translated works were performed that were not published. By way of example, in order to illustrate the sometimes fragile difference between creation and recreation, we can cite the case of Larra, who on some occasion sought inspiration in a foreign work to reformulate a new and supposedly autonomous text (thus, for example, No más mostrador, presented as an “original comedy” when in fact it was an adaptation of Les adieux au comptoir by E. Scribe).

If there are translations that claim to be originals, we cannot fail to mention here the occasional presence of their opposite, pseudo-translations. In this case, we are dealing with texts that are presented as translations when in reality they are originals, thus reversing the traditional hierarchical relationship established between original text and translation. Although, obviously, it is a narrative resource which seldom aspires to provoke an authentic fraud, in some instances, during some interval of time, they may present cataloging problems. The best-known Spanish pseudo-translation is, obviously, Cervantes' Don Quixote (1605), but we could add Joanot Martorell’s Tirant lo Blanch (ca. 1465), Antonio de Guevara’s Reloj de príncipes (1529), Diego Ortúñez de Calahorra’s Espejo de príncipes (1555), the Civil Wars of Granada by Ginés Pérez de Hita’s Guerras civiles de Granada (1595), Cervantes’ Persiles y Segismunda (1616) and, in much more recent times, Camilo José Cela’s Mrs. Cardwell habla con su hijo (1953) or Nancy's thesis by Ramón J. Sender’s La tesis de Nancy (1969).


Some significant pseudotranslations

Translation historians obviously need to make use of various catalogues. Thus, for example, the Index Translationum, the UNESCO database on translations in book form, which contains indexes of authors, publishers and translators in a hundred and a half countries. Despite its limitations and gaps, this project, which began to take its first steps in 1931, contains more than two million entries from the following disciplines: literature, humanities and social sciences, natural and exact sciences, art and history. There is an electronic version for books published between 1979 and 2009. For data on years prior to the first of these dates, the printed version must be used, which clearly makes it difficult to consult cross-data. On the other hand, although they do not constitute specific resources on translation, it may be convenient to consult Diccionario general de bibliografía española by Dionisio Hidalgo (1862–1881), Manual del librero hispanoamericano by Antonio Palau (1948–1977), Catálogo general de la Librería española e hispanoamericana, 1901–1930 (1932–1951), Catálogo general de la Librería española, 1931–1950 (1957–1965) or Bibliografía de autores españoles del siglo XVIII by Aguilar Piñal (1981–1995), in addition to, as it obvious, the catalog of the National Library of Spain or the Library of Catalonia. In electronic format we have Proyecto Boscán. Catálogo de las traducciones españolas de obras italianas (hasta 1939), Traduccions d’obres literàries al català (s. XIX-XX) or Catálogo da tradución galega. On the other hand, the website Traducciones y traductores de literatura y ensayo allows access to various translations, in some cases edited and annotated specifically for the portal, as well as studies on these translations. Biblioteca de traducciones españolas has also digitized a good number of translations that until now were not easily accessible, but that have some type of interest that makes their recovery desirable, either because of their intrinsic quality, or because of the influence they exerted in their time, for the public success obtained when they were published, for being the first Spanish versions of a certain foreign author, etc. Like the previous website, here too the translations are accompanied by introductory studies.

Thought

Spain, as other geographical areas, has produced a significant body of thought translation. This theoretical corpus, at least until the 20th century, has been nourished mainly by the considerations offered by translators themselves and appears scattered in different peritexts (generally, prologues to translations), epistolary correspondence, criticism of translations, treatises and independent essays. Broadly speaking, it is characterized by its apologetic character (whether in defense of a certain translation behavior or as a rhetorical resource, as a captatio benevolentiae, when the possible defects of the version are justified against the excellence of the original); by the fact of presenting intuitive, introspective (based on the translator’s own experience), essayistic and unsystematic considerations; for making use of topics, similes and continuous allusions to previous authorities. Very often these considerations project a normative and evaluative orientation since they can become means of evaluating the quality of future translations.Fortunately, there exist a good number of anthologies that have gathered the thought that has been generated in Spain about translation, compiling the considerations presented by, for example, Alonso de Cartagena, Alonso Fernández de Madrigal, Boscán, Vives, fray Luis de León, José Francisco de Isla, Larra. Clarín, Ortega y Gasset, Ayala, and many others. In some instances, these anthologies cover a long historical projection, including texts from medieval times to the 20th century, as in Teoría y crítica de la traducción: antología (Santoyo 1987). A pan-Hispanic approach can also be added, as in El tabaco que fumaba Plinio: escenas de la traducción en España y América (Catelli & Gargatagli 1998). In other cases, we find a compartmentalization by historical periods, such as, if we follow a chronological order, La contribución de España a la teoría de la traducción: introducción al estudio y antología de textos de los siglos XIV y XV (Cartagena 2009), En la teoría y en la práctica de la traducción. La experiencia de los traductores castellanos a la luz de sus textos: siglos XIV-XVI (Hernández González 1998), Traducción y elementos paratextuales: los prólogos a las versiones castellanas de textos latinos en el siglo XV (González Rolán & López Fonseca 2014), El discurso sobre la traducción en la España del siglo XVIII (García Garrosa & Lafarga 2004), Pensar la traducción en la España del siglo XIX (Lafarga, Fillière, García Garrosa & Zaro 2016) y Teoría y práctica de la traducción en la prensa periódica española (1900–1965) (Toro Santos & Cancelo López 2008. In the Catalan space we find Cent anys de traducció al català (1891–1990): Antologia (Bacardí, Fontcuberta & Parcerisas 1998) and in the Galician one Galician with Babel entre nos: escolma de textossobre a traducció en Galicia (Dasilva 2003). For a joint study of all these anthologies, Sabio & Ordóñez (2012) can be consulted. Numerous essays included in the anthologies indicated here have been incorporated into the section devoted to Spanish thought on translation in the website Portal de Historia de la Traduccion en España.

Histories of translation in Spain

Ruiz-Casanova (2000) published the first comprehensive overview of Spanish translation history, in a volume which included five long chapters (the Middle Ages, the Golden Ages, the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries), as well as an introduction to translation in Spanish literary history, with considerations on the emergence of translational activity, the purpose and scope of the translation, the differences between literary periods and translation periods, etc. Each chapter is accompanied by a study on the language and literature of the period. This book has been revised and updated under the title of Ensayo de una historia de la traducción en España (2018). Another contribution has been Lafarga and Pegenaute’s Historia de la traducción en España (2004), in which they counted on a small group of specialists for the different cultural and linguistic fields (not only about the Castilian space but also the Catalan, Galician and Basque ones), providing long panoramic chapters dealing with each particular historical period. A completely new Historia de la traducción en España, also edited by Lafarga and Pegenaute, is currently accessible in electronic format. It has been ensured that its articulation in some hundred and twenty studies, prepared by some hundred researchers, can constitute a global vision of the practice and theory of translation in Spain. It pursues different objectives: to characterize the relationship of Castilian with classical languages and with the Peninsular Romance languages over time; to contribute to a better understanding of the specific ways of translating in each particular period; to put in relation translation with other rewriting procedures (adaptation, imitation, paraphrase); to characterize the relationship between creation and translation in the case of authors who translate; to define the means of diffusion of translations; to characterize the role of translation in the development of Spanish literature; to study the translation of humanistic texts (poetics, rhetoric, philosophy, history, politics, etc.); to study the translation of specialized texts (legal, administrative, economic, scientific and technical); to define the translation tools (lexicographic and documentary), as well as the grammatical repertoires in the different periods, etc.

Potential for research

The aim of this article is to be of help in the development of studies on the history of translation in Spain, providing not only information on the main works of reference in the field – both in terms of the history of translation practice and thought about translation– but also some methodological considerations regarding the historiography of translation (that is, the construction of the discourse itself) in this space. At the same time, it supposes, in some way, a meta-theoretical reflection on the own history of the history of translation in Spain (understood as a disciplinary field. The importance of the history of translation within an approach of Descriptive Translation Studies is highlighted, as well as the importance of knowing the history of translation theory in order to build a modern theory of translation.