BI-REFERENTIALITY IN TRANSLATING KEY NEGOTIATING TERMS SPANISH-MAPUCHE. SOME EXAMPLES FROM THE RECORDS OF THE PARLIAMENTS OF THE PERIOD OF AMBROSIO O’HIGGINS (1770-1803)

Abstract

In contrast to other territories colonised by Spain, in Chile there are no authentic records of the Mapuche language-in the sense that they were written by the Mapuche people or gathered by third parties with minimal intervention-prior to the nineteenth century. However, traces of the language can be found in certain Spanish documents, which are, strictly speaking, translations: the minutes of the Hispano-Mapuche ‘parliaments'. Duration of the colonial period, the Spanish monarchy regularly established cooperation agreements with the Mapuche authorities in the context of official assemblies referred to as ‘parliaments'. In anthropology, these have been defined as hybrid instances: a mixture of the rituals of European diplomacy and those of the indigenous people. These assemblies lasted for various days and the parties expressed themselves in their own language by means of interpreters. However, the minutes of these parliaments, some of which go into considerable detail, were written only in Spanish. Studying these minutes from the perspective of translatology, which can be justified insofar as they are transcriptions of the oral translations, reveals the construction of equivalences of the key terms in these negotiations. This paper considers a number of examples to illustrate the potential of such an analysis. This research has been undertaken as part of the Chilean National Fund for Scientific and Technological Development regular research projects 1090459 and 1220995, awarded by the National Commission for Scientific and Technological Research.