La traducción inglesa de las voces del reino animal y vegetal en la "Historia natural y moral de las Indias" (1590) del p. José de Acosta

Résumé

The Historia natural y moral de las Indias (1590) [English translation: Natural and Moral History of the Indies (1604), by Edward Grimston] is Father José de Acosta’s most famous work. In it, Central American, South American and Caribbean natural world, as well as pre-Columbian peoples’ idiosyncrasies, are finely dissected. Among the subjects discussed by the Jesuit clergyman, there is a tract dedicated to indigenous animals and plants which shall be our object of study. Our quest seeks to analyze the way in which those new animal and vegetal realities were named in Spanish and how they were later translated into English. We shall select a number of names belonging to the animal and vegetal kingdoms and examine how they were translated into English and how contemporary bilingual dictionaries and lexicons dealt with them. From a methodological standpoint, we started from the Spanish text by selecting names of interest and then carried out the same procedure in the work’s English edition. Once the words were extracted, we had recourse to the Nuevo tesoro lexicográfico del español (s. xiv–1726) [‘A New Spanish Lexicographical Thesaurus (14th century – 1726)’] by Lidio Nieto and Manuel Alvar (2007), in order to become acquainted with the lexicographical treatment given them in several 16th-, 17th-, and 18th-century bilingual (Spanish–English, English–Spanish) dictionaries and lexicons, such as the works by R. Percivale (1591), J. Minsheu (1599; 1617), or J. Stevens (1706). Our purpose was to know how the new reality of that part of the Americas became interpreted and translated into the English language. For instance, we wanted to know whether, when it came down to naming those new animals and plants, already-existing words were employed (tigre ‘tiger’), new ones were concocted (armadillo ‘armadillo’), or Indigenous names were used (chuño).