In the course of the 19th century, many religious texts were translated into one of the Basque dialects. Prince Louis Lucien Bonaparte (1813–1891) played a key role in this, entrusting others with translations which he would publish and use for his research on the different Basque dialects. Bonaparte published various translated parts of the Bible. Among these translations, the translation of the entire Bible into the Labortan dialect (1859–65) by the French Basque Jean Pierre Duvoisin (1810–1891) especially stands out.
Apart from these linguistically motivated translations, Protestants attempted to spread Bible translations. For example, parts of Juan Leizarraga’s 1571 translation of the New Testament were published by the Trinitarian Bible Society in 1902 and 1908; his work was also published by the vascólogos Hugo Schuchardt (1842–1927) and Theodor Linschmann (1850–1940) in 1900, and, in part, by Julien Vinson (1843–1926) in 1874 and Willem Jan van Eys (1825–1914) in 1877. The French-Basque priest Joanes Haraneder had been the first Catholic to translate the New Testament in 1740, which finally appeared in 1855 in Bayonne, edited by Mauricio Harriet (1814–1904). As regards the Old Testament, a translation of Genesis and part of Exodus, made around 1700 by the French-Basque Huguenot Pierre d’Urte, was published in 1894, edited by the Welsh scholar Llewellyn Thomas (1840–1897).
Apart from religious texts, classical and neoclassical fables were translated: Aesop in Ipui onac (“Good tales”, 1804) by the Spanish-Basque Vicenta Moguel (1782–1854), and other fables by Juan Mateo Zabala (1777–1840) and Agustín Pascual Iturriaga (1778–1851). In the French Basque Country, translators of La Fontaine were Jean Baptiste Archu (1811–1881) and Martin Goyhetche (1791–1859).
Contests were organized and prizes were handed out for the best translations of religious or classical texts, like in Guipuzcoa in 1863 for the best translation of the Gospel of St John or in 1881 for the best translation of a fragment from Calderón.
The first novel in Basque, Atheka gaitzeko oihartzunak (1870), came into being as a convoluted retro-translation of a pseudo-translation. It originally appeared as Les échos du Pas de Roland (1867, with a Spanish edition, Ecos del Paso de Roldan, appearing in the same year in Bayonne). The author, Jean-Baptiste Dasconaguerre (1815–1897), had originally written the work (which carried a dedication to Prince Lucien Bonaparte) in French, claiming it (falsely) to be a translation from Basque. When the purported “original” appeared three years later, it was in fact a Basque translation from the French.
Translations of various world classics were published in the 1920s and 1930s. Nicolás Ormaetxea (“Orixe”) stood out as translator of famous literary works into Basque, such as the ninth chapter of Don Quijote (1928), Lazarillo de Tormes (1929; Orixe changed the ending and as a result was also forced to change the ending of the original, printed in the same volume) and the Occitan classic verse narrative Mirèio by Frédéric Mistral (1930). Other translations from the pre-war period were Shakespeare’s Macbeth (1926), Heine’s poems (1927) and the Brothers Grimm’s fairy tales (1929).
