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ATISA 2010
Founded in AmbiguityNarrative Manipulation in Bilingual Versions of Puerto Ricos
Foundational LawsAlejandro lvarez Nieves Universidad de Salamanca
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Introduction
Ever since the United States took control over Puerto Rico, as part of the
Spanish American War of 1898, and until the creation of the Commonwealth of
Puerto Rico in 1952, Puerto Ricans tried repeatedly to establish an autonomic
government pursuant to the will of its people. The issu e has surpassed the
limits of Commonwealth itself, for most Puerto Ricans believe that the final
political future requires the elimination, or major changes to the political status
quo of the island. Since the American Invasion, the issue of identity has b ecome
one of the main problems in Puerto Rican sociology and the humanities, an
identity completely intertwined with political status, a narrative inherited from
Spanish rulethe issue of whether Puerto Rico should attain independence, or
remain in a territorial status, or annex itself to the metropolis. It is our conviction
that most Puerto Ricans believe that until a final political status is reached, none
of the cultural and sociological issues regarding identity will be (re)solved.
In order to accomplish a government by the people of Puerto Rico, the
1948 Muoz Marn administration, the first one to be elected by the population,
had one main goalto return to an autonomy similar to the one already agreed
in 1897 with the then Kingdom of Spain, which gav e some sovereign power to
the island, and also a voting participation in the Courts. One if the first steps by
the Muoz Marn administration was to declare Spanish the official
administrative language of the islandmeaning that the government will
communicate only in Spanishand also to appoint a commission in charge of
creating a bilingual version of the Puerto Rican legal codex. This is a significant
event because it fulfilled two key purposes. The first one is that it adjusted the
government to linguistic realityPuerto Ricans are Spanish speakers, and most
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of the population (84%) either cannot sustain a conversation in English, or just
do not speak English at all, leaving an elite 4% fully bilingual population (2000
Census). The second achieved purpose derives from the first one: it allowed
Puerto Ricans to have a voice heard by the American colonizer by means of
translationbringing about an autonomic government implied mediating
through a linguistic barrier only translation can surpass, and also meant
breaking with a politics of silence.
By this we mean that the former Spanish colonies had no voice in the
peace negotiation of the Spanish American War: they were not allowed to
speak; they were summarily silenced (Torruella 2008: 28). For the first time, the
Muoz Marn administration used translation as a tool which could open the
door (and did) for direct negotiation with U.S. Congress in order to forge what
today is the Commonwealth1. We have a bilingual legal codex, the Laws of
Puerto Rico Annotated, which include in the first title, Historical Documents,
the legal instruments that lead to our current political status. A comparison of
each version puts in evidence some translational disparities and asymmetries
which point to an interesting sociolog ical situation. Furthermore, we suggest
that, if translation is credited as the essential tool for the creation of our current
political structure, it is not illogical to believe that the 1948 administration
employed several translational operations within their legal discourse for the
purpose of convincing Congress to approve a law enabling the creation a local
constitutional government for the island. Our purpose is to identify these
translational operations, which consist mainly in ambiguity and linguist ic
1 Although Puerto Rican members of the House of Delegates would speak English, because the Senate
before Commonwealth was conformed by American politicians appointed by the President, we refer here
as Puerto Rico speaking in its vernacular language as a political entity, at a governmental -institutional
level.
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uncertainty, given that Puerto Ricos identity issues revolve around an indefinite
political status, which is itself founded upon legal terms. In this way, translation
can prove to be an innovative and useful approach to the identity issue among
Puerto Ricans.
LPRA Title 1
The Laws of Puerto Rico Annotated are the result of Law 395 11 May
1950, providing for a commission authorized to revise, classify, arrange, and
publish in English and Spanish a scientifically annotated recodification of all the
codes and laws in force in Puerto Rico (LPRA1: 5) In 1999 the codifying
commission was dissolved because the Legislature believed its members could
not keep up with the task assigned to commission members; therefore, law
codification became a responsibility of the secretary of each legislative house.
The secretaries, under Law 354 22 December 1999, have the authority to hire
private publishers to help in revising and publishing the LPRA.
Title 1, Historical Documents, Federal Relations, and the Constitution, includes the relevant legal instruments preceding the laws pursuant to the
creation of the Commonwealth, the laws enabling the Commonwealth, and the
Constitution of the United States , followed by the Constitution of the
Commonwealth of Puerto Rico . They are indexed as follows, with their
respective translation combination:
I. Documentos Histricos Historical Documents
1. Carta Autonmica de 1897 Charter of Autonomy, 1897 (ES > EN)
2. Tratado de Pars de 1898 Treaty of Paris, 1898 (EN >
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3. Carta Orgnica de 1900 [Ley Foraker] Organic Act of 1900 [ForakerAct] (EN > ES)
4. Carta Orgnica de 1917 [Ley Jones] Organic Act of 1917 [Jones Act]
(EN > ES)
5. Creacin del Estado Libre Asociado de Puerto Rico Establishment ofthe Commonwealth of Puerto Rico (EN> < ES)2
Establecimiento de la Comisin del Status Poltico Establishment ofStatus Commission (EN> ES)
Ley de Relaciones Federales con Puerto Rico Puerto Rico FederalRelations Act(EN>ES)
Constitucin del Estado Libre Asociado Constitution of theCommonwealth (ES>EN)
Pretextual level: narrative theory applied to translation
At a linguistic level, translation works as an interactive vessel between
the narratives of different linguistic communities; such is the case of Puerto Rico
since its watershed moment in contemporary history: the consequent American
invasion at the end of the Spanish American War of 1898 (lvarez -Curbelo
1998). From the moment in which bilingual versions of foundational
documentsa selection which constitutes a narrative in its own rightwas
authorized in 1950, translation became the mediating channel between the
colonized, the people of Puerto Rico, and their colonizer, the United States of
America. There are several narratives, then, uniting the people of P uerto Rico
and the United States in a territory -metropolis political relationship, an inevitable
process which reaches beyond linguistic and cultural borders, and which is
mediated by translators.
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The first translational act by the Puerto Rican government in order to reach
autonomy was to enable translation, to become the starting point of interaction
between narratives. Once the language issue had been dealt with, the problem
is how translation affects narratives. In an unequal relationship, we suggest, the
subalterns public narrative becomes diluted when it is translated, because it
only becomes a small fraction of the public narrative of the hegemonic power:
But narrativity being what it is, the translator and
ethnographer both necessarily reconstruct narratives by weaving
together relatively or considerably new configurations in every
act of translation, and re -siting these new configurations in
different temporal and spatial settings. Each new configuration
modifies and reinterprets the narratives th at went into its
making. One consequence of this process is that translating a
narrative into another language and culture inevitably results
in a form of contamination, whereby the original narrative
itself may be threatened with dilution or change. (Baker: 62)
The situation changes when the hegemonic powers narrative is translated into
the public narrative of the subaltern, for their normative faculties are greater and
evidently more powerful. And, in our case, since we are referring to narratives
constructed for identity purposes based on legal discourse, the hegemonic
powers discourse seems to be legally binding, and sometimes it actually is.
Returning to Muoz Marn, it is convenient to say that his main goal was to
reach an autonomic government, with as much sovereign power as possible,
although, in the end, the Commonwealth ended up being a strictly local
constitutional government. This was not a new wave of political thought. Puerto
Rico had already achieved autonomy in 1897 by means of the Charter of
Autonomy, although it only lasted a couple of months due to the American
invasion. Therefore, the second translational operation by the Popular
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Democratic Party was the selection of the texts to be included in the codex,
deciding what was to be translated and what was to be left out. The inclusion of
the Charter of Autonomyis an affirmation of difference: it is a claim for a
Hispanic inheritance, interrupted by U.S. domination; it is also a justification for
the emergence of an autonomic government it belongs within the public
narrative of Puerto Ricans. Building an identity discourse requires this first step,
i.e., proclaiming difference. Inclusion within the national narrative in translation
was Muoz Marns way for doing so.
Microtextual level
There are several instances in which microtextual asymmetries cause
translational short circuits. A good example can be seen in the English version
of the Treaty of Paris, where the word Puerto Rico appears five times in the
document. Out of these five, the name of our island is spelled Puerto Rico
twice, and the spelling Porto Rico is present three times. We do not question
the latter way of spelling, but it must be mentioned that it is ideologically loaded,
for it was the initial way in which the colonizer wrote the name of the subaltern,
and it must be pointed out that the colonial spelling is irritating to most Puerto
Ricans, to the extent that the U.S. corrected the name of the island by Act of
Congress 15 May 1932, Chapter 190, Section 47, Line 158.
Again, we do not question the appearance of the old spelling, but the
inconsistent publishing practice by Lexis Law Publishing of Puerto Rico. The
publisher had two choices hereto keep the current spelling and, therefore,
reinforce a narrative of difference, or to keep the original spelling in order to
preserve historical legacy, despite the visual effect of such a spelling. We
believe that either choice is valid; yet the presence of both spellings creates an
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ambiguity within a narrative of identity, a split between the reaffirmation of
difference or a submissive integration into the narrative of the colonizer. It
seems to us that Puerto Rican identity reflected in its legal discourse seems to
be ambiguous, and even clustered, or divided.
Lexical Level:
The controversy over the name of the new autonomic government is worth
mentioning. One of the most controversial topics regarding translation and
political identity is the name proposed and approved for the new local
constitutional government voluntarily subject to the United States
commonwealth. It should not be surprising that the Muoz Marn administration
came up with the name for the new political status in English before proposing a
name in Spanish, because it was precisely its members who started the
mediation via translation. Resolution 22 of the Constitutional Status Assembly
defines the term:
a politically organized community, that is, a free state (using word (sic) in the genericsense) in which political power resides ultimately in the people, hence a free state, but onewhich is at the same time linked to a broader political system or other type of associationand therefore does not have independent and separate existence. (Ferns: 127)
The resolution later states that th is definition clearly falls within the semantic
scope of the definitions of commonwealthof the time. A quick consultation of
the most known English dictionaries resulted in an individual entry for the notion
of commonwealth as referring to Puerto Ricos status. Since such a definition
must have been included in the dictionary after the creation of the
Commonwealth, the argument by the Assembly seems at least doubtful, and a
clear case of translational manipulation, namely, the use of the elocutionary
effect of translated terms for a particular purpose, in this case, legitimating of a
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new autonomic government by a particular administration ( Vidal
Claramonte1995).
We believe that Antonio Ferns, Assembly chairman, forgot to mention in
the resolution that Commonwealth is included in the names of some states of
the Union. Therefore, Puerto Ricos official name is inscribed within the
semantic system of politico-geographical components of the hegemonic other.
Furthermore, the name still partially bears a colonial weight, the remains of the
old British Empire, present today in the name of a few states, as well as former
British colonies. The current use of a word does not exclude the semantic
weight of old uses.
The Spanish translation of the name does not avoid controversy either.
The resolution proposes Estado libre asociado as the translation of
commonwealth:
there is no single word in the Spanish language exactly equivalent to the Englishword 'commonwealth'...in the case of Puerto Rico the most appropriate
translation of 'commonwealth' into Spanish is the expression 'estado libreasociado inasmuch as the word 'state' in ordinary speech in the United Statesmeans one of the States of the Union. (127)
We have before us an example which illustrates that the name of the current
political structure was created by means of a translation which has been
accommodated and manipulated by the local government, that is, by means of
taking advantage of a public narrative in translation. It is our conviction that the
definition of a political entity should be stated as clear as possible, and avoidphrases like which should not be rendered as, which are ambiguous, and a
constant source of political uproars and confusion, elements embedded in
Puerto Ricos sociocultural identity.
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Pragmatic Level
Since translation is also a diachronic process (Tymoczko 2008), especially
when dealing with normative, legal discourse, translation praxis does have
repercussions within the places in which it takes place. As recently as 2005, a
task force appointed by the W Bush administration carried out a report on
Puerto Ricos status. Once again, ambiguity regarding the term
commonwealth, lexically and conceptually, surfaces as a recurrent issue
which must be clarified by hegemonic power:
However that term [Commonwealth] may be used, Puerto Rico is, forpurposes under the U.S. Constitution, a territory, as President GeorgeH.W. Bush recognized in his 1992 memorandum concerning Puerto Rico(See Appendix A). It is, therefore, subject to congressional authority,under the Constitutions Territory Clause, to dispose of and make allneedful Rules and Regulations respecting the Territory belonging tothe United States. (5)
Report By the Presidents Task Force on Puerto Ricos Status, Ruben Barrales,
chairman, 2005.
Conclusion
There is little doubt that identity has been a key issue in Puerto Ricos
sociological composition. Studies and research on the issue has been abundant
and diverse. The language of Puerto Ricos current political status, as pointed
out, is borne out of translational operations, or at least it has been heavily
influenced by translational issues within its foundational discourse. These
operations have different textual levels and cover plenty of concerns, as can be
seen from the few examples provided. Puerto Rico, it seems, has historically
drawn from legal discourse for constructing essential elements of its identity, an
identity, we suggest, which is that of a translated subject. Furthermore, the
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Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, our current political status, was created under,
and is still subject to, the Federal Relations Act, 3 July 1950, of the US
Congress, which implies that our local autonomy , historically seen by Puerto
Ricans as a space of political difference from the hegemonic other rests upon
an act of Congress.
Despite the abundance of identity studies regarding Puerto Rico, not
much attention has been given to a translational approach to Puerto Rican
identity. We suggest translation opens the door for exploration into an
ambiguous identity, a possible result of the battle between, on the one hand,
Puerto Ricos vernacular, Spanish, that is, a distinct Hispanic heritage, a hybrid
heritage, which intended up to a certain point to distance itself from Spain; on
the other, there is the English language, a language which Puerto Ricans have
consistently failed to make their own, yet also a language which they need to
use in order to claim the already mentioned hybridity. Translation, in the end,
we suggest, can be a tool, not only to reclaim difference our more that evident
hybriditybut also, by placing languages in contact, by providing an
anisomorphic mirror between the subaltern and the heg emonic other,
translation approaches can define the elements that have created the hybrid,
and thus clarify, however limitedly, issues of ambiguity among Puerto Ricans.
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