Misión y traducción en el Brasil colonial: los misioneros jesuitas como mediadores lingüísticos y culturales

Abstract

First, this article presents an overview of the multilingual and multicultural communication framework that is configured between European missionaries and native catechumens in Brazil. In this context we place the term «Translation without textualized source», essential for the historiographical study of the missionary translation in the time of colonial expansion. 

Subsequently, we deal with the cultural (un-)sustainability of the translation procedures carried out by the Jesuit mission in Brazil, in which we observe a greater effectiveness and cultural implementation of translations combined with rituals than those based solely on the Eurocentric logos.

In order to get closer to the protagonists involved in this process, we finally discuss some of the proposals by the Jesuits Nóbrega, Azpilcueta and Anchieta to solve the problems that arose in their work as linguistic and cultural mediators between colonizing Europeans and colonized natives.