Galician. A history of translation

Translation in the Galician domain refers to the production translated from and into the Galician language as a result of an autonomous and differentiated cultural reality. The first documented texts in the Galician language date from the twelfth century. They are cantigas de amor, de amigo, de escarnio and maldecir ['songs of love, friendship, satire and scorn']. The appearance of narrative prose dates from later (14th and 15th centuries), when important literary and historiographical works were translated, especially from Latin, which are preserved in a very fragmentary form. From the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, there was hardly any writing in Galician and it was not until the middle of the nineteenth century that translations appeared again: biblical texts, parts of classical Latin literature and short romantic or costumbrist literary pieces. The civil war followed by Franco’s dictatorship radically paralysed any publication in Galician and stalled the translation process started in earlier periods. It was not until well into the 1980s that translation into Galician took a quantitative and qualitative leap forward, with the support of standardizing legislation and the determination of a part of society to recover equality and democratic rights. Analysing the data on translation production collected since the beginning of the twenty-first century requires the context surrounding the reasons to commission translations, the translation process itself and even the outcome. They comprise disparate elements, such as the prestige of the language, the authorship of the translation or the source text, the role and ideology of the mediators, the publishers, the distribution circuits, etc. Overall, translation focuses on what is considered innovative, but the phenomenon of importation, as well as that of exportation, which is on the rise in Galicia at the beginning of the new millennium with clearly defined behaviours, issues from various factors ranging from personal motivation to socio-political or economic interests