La obra de Claude Bernard, Introduction à l’étude de la médecine expérimentale. De la difusión del conocimiento a la traducción

Abstract

In this work, we will study the scientific translation of a text that made a great impact long time ago within the sphere of science. We study the Spanish translation of Claude Bernard’s masterpiece: Introduction à l’étude de la medicine expérimentale (1865) translated as Introducción al estudio de la medicina experimental (from now on Introduction). Given that this work is too long, we have studied the first part of the Introduction, which is divided in two chapters. The first is subdivided in six chapters and the second in eight. Since its publication, the Introduction has been the object of two significant translations: on the one hand, that provided by Antonio Espina y Capo (1880); on the other, Jaume Pi- Sunyer’s 1976 version. Espina y Capo was born in Toledo 1850 and died in Madrid in 1930. He was a doctor and innovator in Spanish radiology. He wrote a lot of scientific works in his field of knowledge, which included a wide range of disciplines such as cardiology, epidemiology and tuberculosis. Moreover, he was an outstanding translator of scientific texts, as shown by his Introduction. Jaume Pi-Sunyer was born in Barcelona in 1903 and died in New York in 2000. He belongs to a family of eight generations of doctors. He was professor of physiology at the University of Santiago de Compostela. In 1936, he went into exile in Mexico where he continued his scientific research. Then he went to New York where he got into the pharmacist industry, where he achieved a brilliant career.

We will focus on the translations of Antonio Espina y Capo and Jaume Pi- Sunyer. Firstly, we will study the peculiar characteristics of the original text. We will deal with expressive and terminological aspects. We will observe the problem of reference (personal / social deixis). We will scrutinise if the first-person subject used by the author Claude Bernard has been respected in both translations, and the problem of time reference (i.e. we will examine if the translations have used the same verbal tenses as the original text). As regards terminology, we have found differences in the translation of the French term “experiences”, translated in Pi-Sunyer’s version by “experiencias” and by “experimentos” in Espina y Capo’s translation.

There is another term for which different translations are provided. That is the Latin term “criterium”. To conclude, we have established a number of convergences and differences between the original text and its Spanish translations.