The Southern Star/La Estrella del Sur: Bilingual Contact Area and Translation in the Early Press of Montevideo (1807)

Abstract

The Southern Star/La Estrella del Sur, Uruguay's first newspaper, was established during the British invasions of Montevideo, spanning its activity from May to July 1807. It was delivered in a bilingual English-Spanish format and was not openly run by the invaders. This work analyzes the bilingual nature of this newspaper and the relationship between translation operations, understood here as “transediting”, with the media and material constraints of the publication: collaborations, format and orthotypographic features. Considering that The Southern Star/La Estrella del Sur was not addressed to a reader who could read in both languages, our purpose is to determine to what extent the English and Spanish languages worked as two independent domains, despite being together on the physical dimension of the page. Meanwhile, we seek to demonstrate that some seemingly negligence and the omission of literary fragments in translated texts into Spanish obey to an editorial line that was aware of the importance of translation, and that omissions are a result of a specific image of the Spanish-speaking reader. With this aim, firstly this article discusses previous critical input about bilingualism and translation in this newspaper; then, it describes the main features of the relationship brought about by bilingualism, and finally it analyzes translation strategies in literary quotations, the network of collaborators —in poetry, especially—, and the metadiscourse about translation in several excerpts of the journalistic text.