Adaptation strategies in historical texts: The Spanish version of History of the Reign of Philip the Second, King of Spain, by William H. Prescott

Abstract

According to a relevance theory view and bearing in mind that translation is another communicative act, a reader of a translation carries out a metarepresentation of the original author's intentions through the utterances constructed by the translator. The translator's position is thus one of power and responsibility: He or she is in a position to alter the conceptualization of reality as linguistically represented in the original. Historical texts are ideally suited to demonstrating ideological manipulation in translation, and in this article, we compare the first volume of William H. Prescott's work, History of the Reign of Philip the Second, King of Spain, published in 1855 with the Spanish version published in 1857, translated by Cayetano Rosell, focusing on fragments that are particularly sensitive to manipulation in the translated text because of their connection with the stereotype of the Spanish as inflexible Catholics, and the activities of the Tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition. Our analysis shows that Rosell tries to adapt this view to the cultural models of the target receivers.