Paper short abstract:

Translation processes in plurilingual institutional contexts and spaces of interaction include not only denotational meanings, but index ideological, ambivalent and creative aspects of understandng and communication going beyond power relations and established dichotomies.

Paper long abstract:

In the Central Andes, the contact situations between (inter-) national institutions and indigenous communities and languages are typical settings in which diversity affects various layers of communication and cultural life. Until the present the Quechua language has been regarded as an oppressed or marginalized language in relation to Spanish due to colonial histories, ideologies and particular embeddings in relations of power between language that endure in new constellations .

Departing from conversation analysis and ethnography in institutional settings (courts, public institutions) and other "spaces of interaction" in the provincial capitalHuanca velica (fieldwork 2004, Schneider 2007), where Quechua speakers or confronted with the national juridical system coded in a foreign language, it will be described how processes of translation, mutual understanding, but also manipulation and ideologically informed interpretations take place, in what ways relations of power are enacted and created, but also undergone or reversed. This includes not only alternative vocabulary and a given context, but also includes conversational strategies or social practices aimed to establish peace and order in a given community. However, conversational features will not be analyzed as independent structures in their own right, rather it will be shown how those concepts are evoked indexically in people´s social relations and linguistic utterances. So indigenous perspectives do not only refer to the cultural or societal background and specific meanings, but include creative potentials indexing underlying (invisible or implicit) processes of interpretation and communication.