Of the four concepts this special issue of Target is devoted to, namely, language, translation, empire and America, the fourth one is probably the most controversial, the one that serves as a spatial and temporal link between the other three and yet the one that defies definition, partly because of the complexity of its origin, partly because America as a sociopolitical construct continues to evolve in unexpected ways even as we speak. I have consciously referred to ‘America’ here even though for the title of this special issue I have opted for ‘the Americas’. Not one America, but the many Americas that emerged since the arrival of the first Europeans: the multifaceted geographical, economic and cultural areas that we know today.

As Edwin Gentzler (2008Gentzler, Edwin 2008 Translation and Identity in the Americas. London: Routledge., 5) argues in his book Translation and Identity in the Americas, “‘America’ is a mistranslation, a word imposed from the outside that has little connection with the lands to which it refers, a word that represents its submission rather than its life.” But, although the name is an imposition from outside, I would like to suggest that ‘America’ does have a strong connection with the land it refers to, as it summarizes the encounters, conflicts, evolutions and fusions that have resulted in today’s contemporary spaces, a collection of places where European empires imposed and changed languages, where translation was necessary to execute imperial rule, and where translation remains a must across the continent. Translation serves to embody the conflict of a continent that has become more than a continent, as ‘America’ became ‘the Americas’ to allow the appropriation of the word by the new (and most powerful) empire emerging from the ashes of the former colonies.

Admittedly, Europeans imposed the term ‘America’ on the whole continent and, much later, in the nineteenth century, other Europeans coined the new term ‘Latin America’ to define the non-English-speaking territories in the area, as Anglophone Europeans needed ‘America’ to create their own identity, or perhaps superiority. As Gentzler (ibid.) puts it, this results from “another form of mistranslation, and a cultural imperialism of its own kind,” which created the illusion of the existence of many ‘Americas’ within one. In fact, it could be argued that these Americans of the north appropriated the term ‘Latin America’ to distance themselves from those ‘other’ Americans, geographically as well as culturally. In time they began to use terms like ‘Hispanic’ in order to establish yet another difference among Americans, this time among those living within their own national boundaries. Thus, back in the 1960s U.S. officials began to use the concept of ethnicity to differentiate between Hispanics and non-Hispanics, white Hispanics and non-Hispanic whites, black Hispanics and non-Hispanic blacks (Valdeón 2010Valdeón, Roberto A. 2010 “The Use of Latin American, Hispanic and Latino in US Academic Articles, 2000–2010.” Terminology 19 (1): 112–137. ), doing so regardless of the little value that these distinctions may have with respect to the biological make-up of their population, but in full awareness of the important cultural divisions such labels entail.

The cultural and linguistic differences that have characterized and continue to characterize the Americans are explored in the articles contained in this special issue. The contributors approach the interface between language, translation and empire as reflected in the evolution of America as a continent under colonial rule, starting with the translation of the conqueror of Mexico and concluding with an article from Brazil that analyzes a different type of imperialism – the gradual imposition of English as the lingua franca of academia – from a historical perspective. The articles study the many roles of translation between the early colonial period and the emergence of the U.S. as a superpower, and of English as its linguistic tool. They examine the significance of translation in the dissemination of the images of the conquerors, the use of translation as an ideological weapon in the rivalry between European colonial powers, the appropriation of foreign texts in the struggle for independence, and language and translation policies in Puerto Rico as enforced by the U.S. right after the Spanish-American War of 1898. The texts cover in one way or another the four periods in the history of translation identified by Echeverri and Bastin (2019)Echeverri, Álvaro, and Georges L. Bastin 2019 “Translation in Hispanic America.” In Routledge Handbook of Spanish Translation Studies, edited by Roberto A. Valdeón and África Vidal, 72–84. London: Routledge. . Although these researchers focus on the history of Spanish-speaking America, their periodization is useful to scrutinize the whole continent: encounter and conquest; colonization; pre-independence and emancipation; and, finally, the creation and consolidation of the different republics.

In the opening article, “Images of Cortés in Sixteenth-Century Translations of Francisco López de Gómara’s Historia de la conquista de México (1552),” Victoria Ríos Castaño discusses the images of Hernán Cortés, one of the most polemical conquerors in the Americas. Although the Spanish and Portuguese (and, in general, the European) conquest of America was similar in many respects, there were also a number of differences, including the production of narratives of/by the conquerors. Spanish histories or chronicles provide a unique repertoire of voices that record the encounter and conflict between the Europeans and the native populations. From the letters of Christopher Columbus to the accounts of Cieza de León, these narratives offer polyphonic voices of the conquest (MacCormack 1991MacCormack, Sabine 1991 Religion in the Andes. Vision and Imagination in Early Colonial Peru. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press., 98–118; Mackenthun 1997Mackenthun, Gesa 1997 Metaphors of Dispossession. American Beginnings and the Translation of Empire 1492–1637. Norman, OK: The University of Oklahoma Press.). Translations into other European languages later homogenized these accounts for the benefit of the target readership and, sometimes, for the colonial projects of their nations. In her article, Ríos Castaño discusses López de Gómara’s Historia de la conquista de México, a controversial text in itself that was banned a year after its publication because of the extremely positivized image of Cortés. Gómara’s account seems to be partly based on interviews conducted with Cortés and partly on reports dictated by the conqueror. Thus, together with the fact that Gómara was Cortés’s personal secretary, the laudatory nature of the text should come as no surprise. In Ríos Castaño’s words, Cortés is presented as “a pious, brave and noble conqueror, yet at the same time fallible.” The Italian, English and French translations of the book, which enjoyed varying degrees of success, retained the positive images of Cortés although the purpose of these versions differ, as the paratexts demonstrate. While the Italian versions focused on the historical importance of Cortés and the wonders of the so-called New World, the English and French versions also served to encourage England and France to follow the Spanish model.

In the same line, the next article looks at the use of translations of Spanish colonial texts into English, but instead of considering the different versions of one text, it delves into what four translators of Spanish chronicles had to say about the events and about themselves. In “Translation, a Tudor Political Instrument,” Roberto A. Valdeón starts with a discussion of the seminal work by Harvard scholar F. O. Mathiessen on the importance of translation for the creation of a literary canon in England. Although Mathiessen focused on the contribution of translators to the cultural achievements of the Elizabethan period, he was also aware of the political relevance of translation for the creation of England’s national identity. Valdeón’s article questions to some extent Matthiesen’s book-length work by examining the significance of English versions of Spanish political, historical and scientific texts as well as the translators who produced them, focusing more specifically on the paratexts that accompany those translations. The article discusses Richard Hakluyt, Michael Lok, Edward Grimeston and John Frampton.

However, translation was not only instrumental in the creation and consolidation of the American empires. It was also crucial in the events that led to the independence of the former colonies, as demonstrated by Aura E. Navarro and Catherine Poupeney Hart. Their contribution, “Translating from/for the Margins of Empire: The Gaceta de Guatemala (1797–1807) and the Enlightened Elites,” probes into the use of translation in the periodical press of Guatemala, drawing on Lépinette’s sociological-cultural model in order to shed light on how the translation of European texts contributed to the emergence of the new states. Given the complexity of the texts borrowed by the writers, Navarro and Poupeney Hart rely on categories such as ‘Translation’, ‘Indirect translation’, ‘Reference to translation’, ‘Reference to a foreign work’, ‘Reference to linguistic issues’, and ‘Foreign language’ to understand the ways in which foreign texts were appropriated by this periodical. Navarro and Poupeney Hart also provide us with the views on translation expressed by the journalists themselves.

The next article serves to signal the transition from the old colonial states in the early modern period to the new forms of colonialism that emerged at the turn of the twentieth century, as the U.S. positioned itself as the new global superpower. In “Puerto Rico as Colonial Palimpsest: A Microhistory of Translation and Language Policy,” Christopher Mellinger analyzes the complex situation in Puerto Rico as a result of the Spanish-American War. In this new situation, the U.S. government both imitated and enhanced colonial practices to take control of the island. Translation was crucial in this transitional process, during which language policy and translation contributed to the replacement of one colonial power by another one. As many U.S. politicians had considered expansion towards the Caribbean, translation was indeed used for the establishment of the so-called Commonwealth of Puerto Rico. General Miles, for instance, promised the advantages of civilization in English and in Spanish translation.

Mellinger posits that the initial regulations aimed to establish the two languages as equal, as proved by the fact that English was the language of the courts and education together with Spanish. However, failure to implement these policies during the military period (1898–1900), often as a result of a lack of linguistic knowledge and cultural mediation, led to the passing of a series of laws aiming at Americanizing the island during the first two decades of the twentieth century. These regulations imposed English as the de facto language of education and the justice system, even though the existence of translations may give the impression that the two languages enjoyed a similar official status. However, Mellinger concludes that Puerto Rico is a unique example of how an imperial power attempted to replace the language and culture of its predecessor and failed, as Spanish has continued to be used 120 years after the Spanish-American War.

In the final article of this special issue, “Between Empires: Language and Identity in Brazilian Science since the belle époque,” William Hanes explores the connection between language policies and empire in the translation of scientific texts. Hanes turns his attention to the importance of the study of tropical medicine for the European powers, and explores the relationship between the work carried out by Brazilian and European scientists as well as the role of multilingualism and translation in transnational and multilingual scientific projects, which involved lectures as well as publications. In his survey of the Instituto Oswaldo Cruz, he recalls that its journal used to be highly multilingual with versions of its articles in Portuguese, English, French and German. Nowadays it is published only in English. Hanes shows how the trajectory of the Memórias do Instituto Oswaldo Cruz reflects the emergence of a new type of imperialism that has gradually eliminated translation and multilingualism in favor of an English-only policy that will be familiar to researchers in most disciplines today.

To conclude this brief introduction, I would like to stress that the five contributions to this special issue show the role of language and translation in the creation of an American identity, or rather of various American identities. But they also serve to showcase the many avenues of research into the role of translation in colonial America, or in what we now call ‘the Americas’. The papers collected here delve into some of the topics suggested in the original call for papers, which included the status of language and translation in the colonial societies, the problems in contact zones between Native American and European languages, the use of translation in the various administrations, the role of translation in the European accounts of the conquest and settlement in the Americas, the translation of those accounts into other European languages, and the study of the texts and the paratexts. Given the space limitations of a special issue, several of these topics could not be discussed. However, the efforts of several individual scholars and the existence of research groups such as Histal11.In full: “Groupe de recherche en Histoire de la traduction en Amérique latine.” See http://​www​.histal​.net​/nous​-joindre/ based at the Université de Montréal, working on these and other related themes, anticipate new publications on this fascinating period in the history of translation.