ABSTRACT
As geographical publicist Richard Hakluyt played a dual role: he presented the English contribution of Renaissance travel and discovery – chiefly in the two editions of the Principall navigations – and by his involvement with many translations he also presented a portion of the foreign contribution. A example of Hakluyt's activity as translator concerns Theodor de Bry, to whom Hakluyt suggested the idea of publishing the famous illustrated volume on the New World which appeared in Frankfurt am Main in 1590 in Latin, English, French, and German. By his own criteria Hakluyt had the makings of a 'good' translator. Of course Hakluyt took certain liberties which the twentiethcentury translator of a sixteenth-century work would not take. The modern translator would not correct an error in an ancient text, but he would be most likely to do so in a contemporary text.
