The translation of Arabic letters in a 16-century Granadan lawsuit. The phenomenon of Romanceado as a judicial act: Juan Rodríguez and Alonso del Castillo’s readings of the same document

Abstract

The aim of this article is to show the structure of the procedure which led to the production of Romanceado texts and the features which originals were required to display. We approach such texts, which are documents of exceptional importance for historians, Arabists, Hispanists and translators, as a highly formalised example of everyday written translation, carried out by specialised translators or romanceadores. Both the process and the romanceamientos themselves follow a series of well-defined phases which are outlined in the article. For this study we have used an unedited 16th-century boundary dispute which contains two romanceamientos by the famous Granadans Juan Rodríguez and Alonso del Castillo.