Translation as the Convergence of Politico-economic and Linguistic Matters: The Portuguese Version of Adam Smith’s Considerations Concerning the First Formation of Languages (1816)

This chapter studies the Portuguese translation of Adam Smith’s Considerations Concerning the First Formation of Languages (1761), published in Lisbon in 1816, but most likely made at the turn of the nineteenth century. The author of this translation is Francisco Xavier Ribeiro de Sampaio (1741– 1812?), a prominent figure in the Portuguese administration between the time of Pombal and the decades of the late eighteenth century that followed the ascent to the throne of Dona Maria I and the dismissal of the Marquis in 1777. The analysis we propose in this paper suggests a convergence, frequent in eighteenth- century and early nineteenth- century culture, but even more accentuated in the case of Portugal: that between linguistic and economic interests, between the study of grammatical, lexicological, and traductological issues, on the one hand, and an attention to political economy and its applications to society, on the other. This interweaving is typical of those who, in Portugal, devoted themselves to the translation of economic texts, many of whom were also authors of grammars and dictionaries or, as in the present case, of linguistic observations of an ethnographic and comparative nature. This paper attempts to show that one of the keys to this convergence is the intrinsically political nature, in modern Europe, of both the promotion of national economic development and the teaching and defence of national language.