Entre la traducción y la historia. El enfoque funcionalista en el trabajo del historiador en el ejemplo de la traducción del tratado „Discurso sobre la forma de reducir la disciplina militar a mejor y antiguo estado”

This paper analyses the possibilities of application of some elements of translation studies into historical investigation. When analyzing a historical source, a historian works also as a translator and often, unaware of this, changes the meaning of the original information, that will eventually reshape the results of his final results [?]. History as a science does not use the language separated from the original terms (for example concerning institutions, laws, religions), therefore the risk of mistake in the process of decoding the source is serious, as emphasized by Marc Bloch. The functionalist approach in translation, presented by German scholars Christiane Nord and Hans J. Vermeer and the theory of equivalence by Eugene Nida, prove helpful in the historical analysis of Spanish 16th-century military treatise Discurso sobre la forma de reducir la disciplina militar a mejor y antiguo estado. Using the military charges and early modern military law as examples, we can see how translation studies can improve the fidelity of historical analysis of sources.