Giuseppe Baretti's 1778 revision of Giral Delpino's Spanish-English Dictionary (1763)

This essay deals with Giuseppe Baretti’s 1778 revision of Joseph Giral Delpino’s A Dictionary Spanish and English, and English and Spanish (London, 1763). Although a native speaker of neither English nor Spanish, Baretti was an experienced reviser, as in 1760 he had edited, and published under his own name, Ferdinando Altieri’s dictionary of Italian and English (1726-27); moreover, he did rely on the monolingual dictionaries published by Samuel Johnson and the Real Academia Española. In the essay I will focus on the English-Spanish section of the bilingual dictionary in its 1763 and 1778 editions: firstly, after selecting a small but representative sample of the section, I will analyse what Baretti removed from, added to and modified in Delpino’s work; and secondly, a qualitative sample of entrywords defining political institutions and ideas, religious differences and social issues will be described and commented on in order to highlight the impact of ideology on dictionary-making in the 18th century.