Traducción del mundo animal: El caso del Vocabulario de lengua guarani de Blas Pretovio

Abstract

The objective of this article is to analyse the lexicographic equivalents in the Spanish-Guarani bilingual dictionary composed by the Jesuit Blas Pretovio, Vocabulary of the Guarani language (1728), a copy of which is currently in the Jagiellonian Library. The research corpus consists of the excerpted names of animals because it is a semantic field in which, we can assume, the differences in the extra-linguistic reality will be reflected in various translation mechanisms. Although at first glance we are dealing with a classic list of equivalents in a bilingual dictionary, it turns out that the microstructure of the dictionary reveals a lot about the author’s lexicographic awareness, whether it is the definiendum (which names seem important to the potential dictionary reader) and the definiens (how the names of the animals are translated, what other information we find in the dictionary entries, etc.). In addition, this study constitutes material to help investigate the state of the Spanish language in the 18th century and the so-called Jesuit Guarani used in the Guarani missions and, to the same degree, it reveals much about the extralinguistic world and linguistic-cultural contacts in the Jesuit reductions. This study, beyond its evident lexicographic focus, is situated within the so-called missionary linguistics and, even partially, is an attempt to help complete the vast and relatively little-explored area of Hispanic-Amerindian lexicography.