Within the context of the history of interpreting and focusing on Catholic Europe, with special attention to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain, this paper looks at linguistic mediation between a penitent and his confessor who do not speak the same language. After outlining the evolution of the sacrament of penance up to the regulations arising from the Council of Trent, the ecclesiastical provisions that established the degree of intervention of interpreters in the sacramental confession are presented. Evidence of its implementation in several multilingual groups (pilgrims and crusaders, Spanish soldiers, the Moriscos, Euskera speakers, Europeans living in Spanish territory, and indigenous Canary islanders), as well as in the concurrence of sacramental confession and the making of the will is then provided. This is an initial approach to an area of traductology still to be explored, which opens new lines of research.
From the mid-fourteenth century to the end of the fifteenth, the kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula used the Canary Archipelago as a testing ground for their later conquests and colonization in the Americas. Numerous interpreters, among them many women, enabled communication between Europeans, indigenous islanders, and groups on the North African coast. The paper describes the linguistic context of their work and how it related to the successive stages of conquest and acculturation. Attempts are made to identify the interpreters, to explain how they learned their languages, to analyze the situations in which they participated and to assess the philosophical precepts that may initially have guided their training. These factors are used to group the interpreters into various categories.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.