ABSTRACT
A typology of recent scholarship on non-European linguistic intermediaries in colonial Latin America sets the stage for this chapter’s methodological reflection on how to interpret the participation of enslaved black interpreters in colonial evangelical efforts in Spanish America. The chapter argues that scholarship on non-European intermediaries should continue to read against the tendencies of colonial texts to alienate the products of translation from the processes, people, and backgrounds producing them, but in doing so it should also avoid speculative readings that over-emphasize anti-colonial or otherwise subversive effects of translation.
