There is no correspondence at all between the Spanish-Portuguese translation practice and the limited parallel expansion of studies on the translation to and from these two languages, or the urgent necessity to promote a mutual knowledge of them in Latin America. This article tries to trace the history of the interlinguistic studies published so far regarding all aspects of S/P and P/S translation practice. It also defends a contrastive linguistics specific development as the right basis for the development of a methodology for the translation between both languages. In addition, a translation teaching frame is also proposed that only partially coincides with a second-language teaching and learning programme.