Translation as food and other teachings: a thematic exploration of prologues of American missionary doctrinal works

Abstract

This paper consists of a first exploration of eighteen paratexts that precede American missionary doctrinal works published between the mid-sixteenth century and the mid-eighteenth century. Starting from the detailed analysis of the prologue that Juan de la Anunciación included in his Doctrina christiana muy cumplida (1575) we discover several issues such as the role of religious writings for the learning of indigenous languages, food as a metaphor, linguistic relativity, the strategy of translation, the question of style, the «topos» of humility and the competence of the translator, topics which, in a second movement, recur in other prologues and paratexts of the corpus. This first panorama offers us clues about how the authors/translators considered and expressed their responsibility to their recipients that deserve to be explored in future research.