On translating historical sources: 16th and 17th century Spanish and Portuguese primary texts

“Modern spelling has been used in citations for the ease of understanding of the reader.” This statement is given as a note in a book I have just begun translating on artwork in a Portuguese church spanning the 16th and 17th centuries. It reminded me of just one of the difficulties tackled by Jeremy Roe, an art historian and translator, as he navigated us through the collaborative translation of four different historical sources.

Cautius. Jeremy began with the Latin for carefully, cautiously, circumspectly. An image flashed on screen showing two pages of a barely decipherable manuscript, not so much because of the fanciful script but because of the water and other damage to the paper itself that rivalled the most spectacular coffee spills at my own desk. The next image of a text, not ravaged by moisture and mildew, was difficult to read. Bang goes the idea of translating a comfortable 250 finished words per hour, in that case.

Jeremy mentioned that the economic benefits of translating such works are minimal at best. The final product has a limited readership and publication can take a long time. On the upside, submission dates are often flexible and the volumes produced are of high quality, circulated in academic libraries and reviewed in journals.

The requisites for a successful translation include subject-specific knowledge and a research background complemented by a personal interest in the topic. Jeremy stressed that a translator should not go it alone: collaboration is essential.

Collaboration with the client proves necessary, for example, to confirm specifics about Jewish burial rights, Inquisitorial practices in Goa, the Inquisition hierarchy and the syntax predominant at the time. The Philippine History Retrieval Project involved a complex collaboration network, given that the work spanned three volumes of a bilingual text and featured photos of the original. The team also learnt quite a lot about early 16th-century navigation at sea, and just how sensible it was to commission a transcription for ease of reading and for use in a CAT tool, as well as in modern or critical editions of the work.

Producing cohesive, comprehensive target texts requires consideration of punctuation and style, the use of insertions and the creation of footnotes with supplementary information, themselves requiring careful revision. The integration of existing translations of other literary works and biblical texts into the translation of the work at hand presents its own problems.

Meeting these many challenges calls for time and the use of diverse resources. Access to the Biblioteca de Catalunya proved invaluable, as did the OED Historical Thesaurus and other historical bilingual dictionaries, glossaries, corpora and academic publications. Such long-term projects are intensive and demanding, yet they provide the means for forging closer ties with existing and new colleagues and clients and serve to enhance one’s profile as an academic translator.

Each successive project of this type offers the potential for more extensive collaboration between subject specialists, editors and translators. It was this triumph of coordinated teamwork that left the most indelible mark on my impression of Jeremy’s disciplined and comprehensive presentation.

Works discussed

The Trial of Catarina de Orta by the Goa Inquisition. Ed. Miguel Rodrigues Lourenço, Susana Bastos Mateus and Carla Vieira. Trans. Jeremy Roe. India: Under the Peepal Tree, 2024.

On Christian Iconography. Selections from “The Art of Painting” (1649). Francisco Pacheco. Ed. Jeremy Roe and Carles Gutiérrez-Sanfeliu. Trans. Jeremy Roe, Carles Gutiérrez-Sanfeliu and José Solís de los Santos. Early Modern Catholicism and the Visual Arts 16. Philadelphia: Saint Joseph’s University Press, 2017.

Portugal in the Sea of Oman: Religion and Politics: Research on Documents. Abdulrahman Al-Salimi, Michael E. Jansen, Pedro Pinto, Karsten Ley and Helmut Siepmann. Georg Olms Verlag, 2015.

The Philippine History Retrieval Project – Portugal. Working Group: Jeremy Roe, Miguel Rodrigues Lourenço, Paulo Jorge de Sousa Pinto and Pedro Correia Pinto. Lisbon, 2022.

This METM24 presentation was chronicled by Allison Wright.

Featured photo courtesy of MET. Slide reproduced with presenter’s permission.