Al filo del malentendido y la incomprensión: el padre Luis de Valdivia y la mediación lingüística

Summary

Jesuit Luis de Valdivia is known not only for his work as a grammarian, lexicographer and translator, but for his intense diplomatic/political activity as the advocate of the Defensive War policy, in which negotiations mediated by interpreters played a significant role. This paper, in which, the combined perspectives from the discipline of translation studies, historical anthropology and intercultural philosophy are used to analyze Valdivian sources, we propose that in spite of the initial failure of his mission it was the translational ethos of Luis de Valdivia that, forcing the possibilities of mutual intelligibility, allowed for the instauration of the conference mode of negotiation embodied in the “parlamentos”.