Chapter 2. Indigenous interpreters on trial in the Spanish Empire

Abstract

In 1610, the Maya interpreter don Hernando Uz was accused of encouraging a rebellion against don Pedro Xiu, the Indigenous governor of Tekax, in Yucatán, New Spain. Building on the analysis of the trial, the chapter aims at distinguishing three categories of interpreters who provided services of cultural and linguistic mediation in the justice system of the Spanish empire: the General Interpreters officially appointed at the royal courts in the Americas, the Spanish governors’ personal interpreters, and the interpreters who sought informally to meet the Indigenous people’s needs for justice. I will show how thin the line between linguistic mediation and legal advice was, and how the concepts of trust and mistrust applied to the interpreters shaped the space where those professionals were required to act at court and, more broadly, in the vice-royal society.

On the Trail of the First Interpreters in Early British Colonial Trinidad: An Exploration of Relevant Historical Aspects

“…Additionally, with perhaps greater geographical relevance for the purposes of this contribution, there are also some studies of early translators and interpreters in the Americas, especially in the first centuries immediately after initial contact with Europeans (e.g. Alonso-Araguás 2016; González Núñez 2020;Cunill 2023). Indeed, the latter study is part of Lucía Ruiz Rosendo and Jesús Baigorri-Jalón's path-breaking edited collection on the intercontinental history of interpreters (2023), which also examines the trajectories of practitioners in contexts as varied as Oceania, the Ottoman Empire, and elsewhere.…”