This study examines Juan García Purón's Spanish translation of "La educación intelectual, moral y física" (1890) from Herbert Spencer's "Education: Intellectual, Moral, and Physical" (1860), both published by Appleton. In view of Lépinette's (1997) model on the history of translation and Toury's (1995) norm-based approach, this work firstly tackles the description of both texts (biographical sketch of the translator, paratexts, and editorial context) to determine the initial and preliminary norms. In parallel, an analysis of the operational norms, including matricial (segmentation, additions and omissions) and textual-linguistic (Latinisms, cultural references, and units of measurement, weight and mass), is also presented.