Ideología y selección lingüística en los textos históricos: las traducciones españolas de "History of the Conquest of Mexico" de W.H. Prescott

Abstract

It is often stated that an original text may be translated in as many different ways as translators work on it, and that translators imbue their work, consciously or unconsciously, with their mental and cultural perspective. This idea of translation as an ideological activity leads us to view the target text as the result of a continuous process of selection at all levels of language that reveals both the power and the responsibility of the translator. We believe that historical texts are particularly vulnerable to ideological manipulation, and that they therefore constitute valuable material in studies aimed at identifying the intervention of the translator. This article presents a contrastive analysis of two translation into Spanish of History of the Conquest of the Conqueror, Hernando Cortés (1843), written by William H. Prescott, one of the great Anglo-american historians to have worked on the Hispanic world. His books on the Spanish colonial period invariably present the conquerors' point of view. The translations studied were both published in 1844, and this concurrence in time underlines the value of our findings as the divergences identified are not attributable to time-specific ideological differences. Thus, we can see that one of the translators voluntarily mirrors the voice of the author of the original text and adopts his vision of the conquest of Mexico, while the other translator takes an appreciably different view, offering a version of the conquest that is closer to the viewpoint of the conquered.