THE INTERPRETER, A CHARACTER OF THE COLONY, RELATED TO SITUATIONS OF LINGUISTIC POLICIES

Abstract

The outlook of the American colony, after the discovery, was complex: a clash of cultures and different languages between conquerors and conquered. It was sought a communicational understanding and the relationship of two different worlds. Two kinds of social actors were very important in shaping the new reality, both bilingual: the Indian interpreter who understood Spanish, called Ladino and was a collaborator in social and legal actions of the colony, and the indianized Spanish, a missionary who had to learn the native american language, in order to instruct the indians in the Christian faith. Colonial documents of Jujuy reflect both cases. Our work emphasizes the figure of the indigenous language interpreter as a mediator.
In order to understand the relevance of this figure we analyze the statements in the corpus of documents provided by the legal authority who, by means of   discourse procedures: direct and indirect style, it reflects the functional role of the interpreter.
As this role imposed under the provisions of the Spanish authorities, we consider that the performance of the interpreter´s figure was an action linked to linguistic policies, since it was covertly imposing the culture and Spanish language. With this difficult idiomatic context, one of the relations of understanding between conquerors and conquered was intersemiotic one; the other consisted in the actions of interpretation and translation performed by the interpreter, longstanding figure in the Spanish cultural world in America imposed by the authorities on the grounds of defending the rights of those who did not speak Spanish.