Who made the first English translation of Don Quixote?

Thomas Shelton made the first English translation of Don Quixote.

Shelton’s translation of the First Part was published in 1612 under the title The History of the Valorous and Wittie Knight-Errant Don-Quixote of the Mancha. It was the first English rendering of Cervantes’s Spanish novel and helped introduce the work to English-speaking readers only a few years after its Spanish publication.

Shelton claimed that he had translated the first part in about forty days, several years before publication, for a friend who could not understand the Spanish original. His version uses lively early-seventeenth-century English and sometimes takes considerable liberties with Cervantes’s wording.

Readers sometimes confuse Shelton with later translators such as John Ormsby, Samuel Putnam, or Edith Grossman. Shelton translated Part One in 1612 and later translated Part Two; a combined English edition appeared in 1620.