“Do You Say to the Sorcerer: ‘Prophesy For Me’?” – Grammatical Functionality in the Quechua Translation of Five Colonial Confession Manuals

Abstract

The 16th and 17th centuries colonial Quechua Peruvian confession manuals are testimonies of the translation efforts of Spanish missionaries who had become fluent and knowledgeable in the native language. Complementing existing analyses of some semantic fields, this contribution aims at studying how they translated Spanish grammar into Quechua. This will be exemplified by using sentences from the first and sixth commandments and centre on the transmission of tense and indirect speech as well as other grammatical and syntactic challenges. After presenting the history of the origin and composition of the five confessionaries I will, embedded in the field of Translation Studies, approach the functionality of the translations, the translators’ (in)visibility as well as domestication vs. foreignisation. It becomes evident that, although no clear translation strategies or consistencies within certain religious orders can be found and the translators are not always visible, the authors/translators had a good understanding of the Quechua language, which becomes particularly clear in their awareness of morphology and syntax. This led to a higher degree of grammaticalisation than in the Spanish original. Translation nuances reveal the authors’/translators’ familiarity with complex structures.