NUISANCES OF THE TRADE. TRANSLATIONS OF A BAD REPUTATION

The essay intends to briefly outline some of the semantical and symbolical implications, in the social imaginary of the Spanish cultural world, of the figure of translator as a social actor, through a textual and etymological journey over the history of two words that in former times designated the practitioner:faraute and Ladino. A beam of revealing ideologemes unfolds from the componential analysis of the nuances of the meanings of the two words, from the picaresque novel to dictionaries, among other textual genres. There emerges a negative side, subterranean but pertinacious, born from the distrust that the translator may be, worse than an incompetent, a fraudster, overlapping the semantical-symbolical space of the translator with that of other traditionally suspicious trades (e.g., the actor), or with belongings to historically marginalized groups such as the Jews in Spain, and the indigenous in the American continent.