The Interpreter: A Colonial Figure in Relation to Language Policy Situations

Abstract

The panorama of the American colony after the discovery appeared complex: a clash of different cultures and languages between conquerors and conquered peoples. Communicative understanding and the relationship between two different worlds were sought.

Two types of social actors were highly important in shaping the new reality, both of them bilingual: the Indigenous interpreter who understood Spanish, known as a ladino, and who collaborated in the social and legal actions of the colony; and the Indianized Spaniard, a missionary who had to learn the Amerindian language in order to instruct Indigenous people in the Christian faith. The colonial documents of Jujuy reflect both cases. Our work emphasizes the figure of the Indigenous interpreter as a linguistic mediator.

In order to understand the relevance of this figure, we analyze the utterances in the documents that make up the corpus, voiced by the legal authority, who, through procedures of reported speech—direct and indirect style—reflects the functional role of the interpreter.

Since this role was imposed according to the provisions of the Spanish authorities, we consider that the performance of the figure of the interpreter was an action linked to language-policy practices, since Spanish culture and language were being covertly imposed. Within this difficult linguistic framework, one of the relations of understanding between conquerors and conquered peoples was intersemiotic; the other consisted of the actions of interpretation and translation carried out by the interpreter, a long-standing figure in the Spanish cultural world who was imposed in America by the authorities on the grounds of defending the rights of those who did not speak Spanish.