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Lookup NU author(s): Professor Rosaleen Howard
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND).
Since 2012 the Peruvian State has been developing and delivering training courses in translation and interpreting for speakers of indigenous languages. Some 250 speakers of 35 languages, both Amazonian and Andean, have been trained to date. The trainees have a wide range of professional and ethnic-social profiles, but the majority are people who self-define as members of one or other of Peru’s indigenous peoples. In this article we will focus on two aspects of the trainees’ experience of this process. Firstly, we identify and characterise the form of activism that is emerging among the trainees in favour of indigenous peoples’ linguistic and social rights. Secondly, we examine some of the trainees’ discourses and practices in relation to the exercise of translation and intepreting, as observed in the course of our fieldwork, with particular reference to the language ideologies that these express. We discuss manifestations of linguistic purism and ideologies of authenticity in our data, which may influence the practice of translation and interpreting in indigenous languages in formal settings, especially among the Andean trainees. With regard to the emergent activism, this is characterised by its combination of demands for language rights and wider political claims by the indigenous peoples, especially on the part of trainees from Amazonia. Our study reveals that indigenous translator and interpreter training in a postcolonial, pluricultural and multilingual country like Peru, is inevitably bound up with the wider indigenous rights agenda of the peoples who the trainees, in their great majority, represent.
Author(s): Andrade L, Howard R, Pedro R
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Indiana
Year: 2018
Volume: 35
Issue: 1
Pages: 139-163
Online publication date: 01/08/2018
Acceptance date: 23/11/2017
Date deposited: 13/12/2017
ISSN (print): 0341-8642
ISSN (electronic): 2365-2225
Publisher: Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.18441/ind.v35i1.139-163
DOI: 10.18441/ind.v35i1.139-163
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