The scientific and technical French-Spanish translation in the field of oenology (1750-1850)

Abstract

This article makes a contribution to the history of scientific and technical transla­tion within the domain of Enology. From the second part of the 18th century, the number of scientific and technical publi­cations on the growing of grapes and vinification increased notably in France. L’Art de faire le vin, by Chaptal, together with other treaties such as those by the abbé Rozier, Le Gentil, or Maupain, constitute the starting point for Enology to become a science. This article will try to explain how the new agronomic and enological knowledge reached Spain by means of translation. A corpus of translations dated between 1750 and 1850 has been compiled in order to study the texts, translators, languages, and translation poetics involved. It will demonstrated that translators are faithful not to texts but to science instead.