| Summary: | In the last decades English has become the undisputed lingua franca of
scientific and technical communication. This has not always been the case and it is
well documented that scientific production used to be shared among German, French
and English up to the beginning of the 20th century (Baethge, 2008, p. 37). This paper
looks at scientific literature written in German by means of analysing translated
papers published in Spanish journals. A traditional recipient of German research, the
Spanish scientific community relied on translations in order to keep up with the swift
progress of the so-called Natural Sciences at the turn of the century. Thus, Spanish
was the first language into which Freud’s complete works were translated (Martin &
Gallego, 2011, p. 309). Following prior research on science and translation
(Montgomery, 2000; Olohan & Salama-Carr, 2011; Byrne, 2014), this study explores
the works of translated scientists (German-Spanish) in the fields of microbiology and
biochemistry in the 19th century. The aim is to ascertain which scientific articles and
topics were translated and published in Spanish at the time, to analyse textual features
of the genre and translation techniques applied to them. The results also offer some
points for comparison with current scientific translation. This work also aims to
highlight the long-standing role of translation in the dissemination of specialised
knowledge.
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