Search

Since 2012, the Peruvian State, through its Ministry of Culture, has been training indigenous translators and interpreters. Their remit is to facilitate communication between the indigenous population of the country and its institutions, against a socio-political background of historical marginalization of, and discrimination against, indigenous peoples, their languages and cultures. This paper is based on research and fieldwork conducted by the authors in Peru between October 2014 and June 2016. It will focus specifically on the role that the indigenous interpreters play in guaranteeing access to justice for speakers of minoritized languages. Relevant contextual information about Peru will be provided, including the legal framework for the provision of interpreting services between Spanish and indigenous languages. The paper will further describe the training program put in place by the State, before critically addressing the challenges that practitioners and institutions face. We will also report on ad hoc interpreting initiatives that are beginning to emerge in the country, beyond the remit of the State training programs, and will conclude with some general observations derived from our research.

New language rights legislation in Peru has triggered State training of indigenous translator-interpreters to work in public service and prior consultation settings. A spin-off of the training has been the translation of the text of the 2011 Languages Act from Spanish into a range of indigenous languages. This article focuses on the challenges of the translating process to Quechua and Aymara. These challenges were presented by the structural differences between source and target languages, the divergent conceptual systems that embed the original text and its translations, and the different trade-offs between orality and literacy of the cultural systems involved. Finally, issues concerning the relationship between the translators' cultural identities and the translation process arose; these are also addressed.

Desde el año 2012, el Estado peruano ha asumido por primera vez la responsabilidad de desarrollar un programa de capacitación para traductores e intérpretes de lenguas originarias. Entre los países andinos esta es la primera iniciativa que será posible relacionar en el futuro con una ‘política de traducción’ destinada a favorecer los derechos de los pueblos originarios; de allí la necesidad de documentarla y analizarla. En este artículo nos concentramos en dos aspectos de la experiencia que están vinculados con los capacitados: caracterizamos el activismo que parece estar consolidándose entre ellos a favor de los derechos lingüísticos y sociales de los pueblos indígenas, y estudiamos algunas ideologías lingüísticas observadas en sus discursos y prácticas, relacionándolas directamente con el ejercicio de la traducción y la interpretación., INDIANA, Bd. 35, Nr. 1 (2018)