“Trujimán”,
“truchimán”, “nahuatlato”, “lenguaraz”, “amanuense”. What do these terms refer to? Through times,
interpreters have had several denominations. Let’s see what happened in the
beginning of the epoch of the creation of the interpreters’ labor.
In
1563, laws gave interpreters a professional and well defined status:
-
They
received a fixed salary according to the number of questions they have to
interpret.
-
They
had a schedule: certain days and hours of work.
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There
should be a certain quantity of interpreters in the audience.
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Interpreters
had to swear they would use the language appropriately and accurately without
being favorable to any party.
Already at the beginning of the XVI
century, interpreters were designated to act as mediators between people which
spoke different languages. Interpreters were also asked to obey to several requirements,
for example: fidelity, clarity and impartiality. They were asked Christianity
and kindness, virtues outside linguistic knowledge and even more interesting,
it was said that they could suffer several punishments if they had a deficient
performance.
A very surprising fact is that at
that time, monolingualism existed, which meant that in 1770, Amerindian
languages turned to be illegal, so finally all languages in the different
dominion could extinguish and then Castilian(Spanish) would be the only
language spoken.
However, there were no many official
efforts to spread Castilian, because really it wasn’t easy to do it. Sacristans, natives and mestizos were not
capable to teach Castillian to millions of people and missionaries didn’t want
to teach. Also, some people held that natives were not in conditions to learn a
European language.
Regarding languages, some American languages
remained being used to evangelize or in other types of oral contact, but in the
written culture, laws, documents, university studies and books were always
published in Latin or Castilian. The later finally spread due to colonization
and the result was another Spanish culture.
In that epoch, the complex economic,
political and military situation of the Aztec empire forced Hernan Cortés to
give and ask for information, negotiate, to make pacts, look for allies, etc.
And for that purpose he needed interpreters.
We are witnesses of the importance
of our labor throughout the generations and today, thanks to the advancements
and new technologies we can improve techniques to have a better performance
every day. Finally, to make things good it’s necessary that we go back in time
and see how things were done and how we can do it better.
By Estefanía Sanhueza Vásquez
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