"TTranslating Mesoamerica” is a collaborative project undertaken by a group of multilingual scholars and students, including native speakers of Nahuatl, Spanish, and English. The project features an engaging and interactive platform where users can find transcriptions and translations of the most prominent Nahuatl manuscripts housed in the Princeton University Library. These manuscripts, spanning from the 16th to the 19th century, offer invaluable insights into colonial life in Mexico and Central America. Nahuatl, an Indigenous language that served as the lingua franca during the Aztec empire and the Spanish colonial period in Mesoamerica, is the primary language of these documents. This project prioritizes the study of manuscripts that have never been translated into Spanish or English, especially those documenting how Indigenous peoples adopted and adapted Christianity, European laws, and Western knowledge. In addition to transcriptions and translations, the platform provides paleographic, geographic, contextual, and linguistic information. Through this information, users learn about critical issues from the colonial era in Latin America, such as syncretism, linguistic transformation, cultural appropriation and assimilation, evangelization, and resistance. It also serves as a pedagogical tool to introduce the Nahuatl language and its main features in context.
Furthermore, the platform is the backbone of Freshman Seminar 152, titled “Translating Mesoamerica,” in which students learn the basics of paleography and are introduced to the Nahuatl language, as well as the lives of the Nahuas before and after the conquest. Students work directly with the manuscripts featured on the platform and collaborate in creating its content by providing paleographic transcriptions and conducting research on the cultural production of Indigenous peoples in Mexico and Central America during colonial times.
Nadia Cervantes Pérez, Humberto Iglesias Tepec, Catalina Cruz de la Cruz, Alanna Radlo-Dzur, Ben Johnston, Alex Diaz-Hui, Daniel Dominguez
Undergraduate students in FRS 152: Michael Groh, Noah Silverstein, Amanda Hugas, Alexandra Montgomery, Sofia Rodriguez-Tucker, Beatriz Saldana, Vincent Mann, Tyler Duran