In the chronicles of the Indies there is one word that recurs so often it becomes invisible: the «tongue» (la lengua). It did not mean the organ or the idiom, but the person. The tongue was the interpreter, the man or woman who stood between two worlds that shared not a single word and made them, against all odds, understand each other. Without such figures, the conquest of the Americas as we tell it would simply have been impossible. An army that cannot negotiate, threaten, promise or ask for directions is not an army: it is a band of lost strangers.
It is worth recalling the starting point. When Hernán Cortés sailed from Cuba and touched the coast of Yucatán in 1519, neither he nor any of his men understood a single word of Maya or Nahuatl. The linguistic gulf was total. And yet, in barely two years, a handful of Castilians brokered alliances with entire peoples, sowed discord among them and finally entered Tenochtitlan. The key to all this was not only gunpowder and the horse: it was translation.
Aguilar, the castaway who learned to speak again
The first link was supplied by chance. Years earlier, around 1511, a Spanish ship had been wrecked off the coast of Yucatán, and a few survivors were taken captive by the Maya. When Cortés put in at Cozumel he learned, from rumours among the natives, that there were bearded men inland. He managed to ransom one: Jerónimo de Aguilar, a cleric who had spent eight years among the Maya and had learned their language. Aguilar returned to his own people almost a stranger, his Spanish rusty and his skin weathered, but he carried something priceless: he could translate from Maya into Spanish.
The detail popular memory tends to forget is that Aguilar was not alone. Gonzalo Guerrero had been shipwrecked with him, and his answer to the offer of rescue was the exact opposite. Guerrero had tattooed his face, married a Maya woman, fathered children and risen to the rank of war leader. He refused to leave. As Bernal Díaz del Castillo relates in his True History of the Conquest of New Spain, he asked what people would say seeing him like that. The two castaways read almost as a parable: one became an interpreter in the service of the Crown; the other crossed over entirely and, it is said, died fighting against the Spaniards. To translate, to assimilate, to choose a side: all of it fit inside a single shipwreck.
Malintzin, the woman who held two tongues
Aguilar, however, solved only half the equation. He knew Maya, but on the central plateau the language was Nahuatl, the tongue of the Mexica empire. The missing link arrived as spoils. After a clash in the region of Tabasco, the local lords handed over to the Spaniards, among other gifts, a group of women. One of them spoke Nahuatl —her mother tongue— and also Maya. Her name was Malintzin; the Castilians baptised her doña Marina, and tradition fixed her as La Malinche.
For the first months a chain of translation operated that is a small logistical marvel: the Mexica spoke in Nahuatl to Malintzin, she rendered it into Maya, and Aguilar turned the Maya into Castilian for Cortés. And back again in reverse. Every sentence crossed two languages and two interpreters before reaching its destination. Soon Malintzin learned Castilian and the bridge grew shorter: she alone sufficed. Bernal Díaz, who knew her, speaks of her with a respect rarely shown to an indigenous figure, and stresses again and again how essential her role was.
Later memory has been less serene. For part of the Mexican tradition, La Malinche is a symbol of betrayal —hence the term malinchismo—; for other readings, especially recent ones, she is an enslaved woman who survived with the only tool she had: her tongues. Both are interpretations, and they say as much about those who frame them as about the sixteenth century. What is verifiable is more sober: without her, communication broke down.
The Requerimiento: translating in order not to be understood
Against that living, effective translation, the conquest also left the perfect reverse: the Requerimiento. Drafted around 1513 by the jurist Juan López de Palacios Rubios, it was a legal text to be read aloud to the natives before waging war on them. It informed them of the existence of God, the pope and the king of Castile, and summoned them to submit; if they did not, the blame for whatever followed would be theirs.
The problem is glaring: it was read in Castilian, often without an interpreter, before people who could not understand a word. There are accounts of it being recited from the deck of a ship, or at night before sleeping villages, or to populations that had already fled. Bartolomé de las Casas wrote that, faced with such a thing, he did not know whether to laugh or weep. Here translation is missing not by accident but by design. The Requerimiento sought not to communicate but to tick a legal box. It is the extreme example of a language used as an instrument of power rather than of understanding.
From improvised trade to regulated office
In time, that improvisation of castaways and captives hardened into an institution of colonial law (the derecho indiano). As the American Audiencias took root, the Crown grasped that the fate of an indigenous litigant could hinge entirely on whoever translated his words, and it moved to regulate the trade. The Recopilación de Leyes de los Reynos de las Indias of 1680 gave it a whole title of its own — Book II, Title XXIX, "De los intérpretes" — setting out how they were to work.
The rules map the anxieties of the age. Court interpreters were appointed and swore an oath to serve "well and faithfully", carrying over what was said without cutting or adding. They drew a fixed salary and were forbidden to accept gifts from the parties, whether Indians or Spaniards. Nor could they handle the Indians' affairs on their own account or receive them in private, so that no one could use language as a lever for personal gain. Behind each rule you can sense an abuse that had already happened: the interpreter who twists a testimony, the one who overcharges, the one who cuts deals behind the court's back.
That the Crown troubled to legislate in such detail says a great deal. Translation had ceased to be a campaign anecdote and become a cog in the government of the Indies, the interpreter's fidelity raised — on paper, at least — to a legal guarantee.
Heirs to an ancient craft
Between the tongue that makes dialogue possible and the document read out so as never to be understood lies the whole craft of translation. Aguilar and Malintzin remind us that a faithful translation can alter the course of history; the Requerimiento, that a text badly —or never— translated can become pure violence with a legal signature.
Five centuries on, that craft is still alive, humbler but no less serious. At Textualia we feel ourselves, on our own scale, heirs to those «tongues»: every time a document crosses from one language to another with official standing —a sworn translation— someone once again makes two worlds understand each other without misunderstanding.