The infrastructure of globalisation: the Southern Netherlands as translation centre for the Spanish-Portuguese monarchy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Recent sociological research considers the translation of books as an essential component of the formation of the cultural world-system that is emerging as a consequence of actual globalisation processes. While in the past translation was considered as an ancillary task carried out backstage, at present translators and translations are increasingly looked upon as vital agents in the world language system, as much of the communication between different language groups and cultural communities depends upon them. Historians have demonstrated that globalisation is not a recent phenomenon, limited to the Post World War II period. Already in the sixteenth century the Spanish-Portuguese monarchy built an empire 'upon which the sun never set', as contemporaries described it. For the first time in world history, this empire connected language communities from four continents and with different scripts, from spoken languages in Africa to Maya glyphs in America and Japanese characters in Asia. In this context, translations were indispensable tools in the transfer of information between these communities and, more important, in the process of imposing royal authority on the newly conquered territories. The present project aims to analyse the fundamental role of the translation activity performed in the Southern Netherlands in function of the construction of this Spanish-Portuguese global empire in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Keywords:Translation, Globaslisation, Southern Netherlands, Spanish-Portuguese monarchy, Empire building

Disciplines:Theory and methodology of literary studies