The saga of Spanish Conquistador Hernán Cortés and how he and his force of fewer than 1,000 Spaniards conquered Mexico’s powerful Mexica (commonly known as Aztecs) is the stuff of adventure novels.  The whole story (1519 to 1521) pivots on one Mayan-speaking Nahua woman from Mexico’s Gulf Coast, who provided indispensable language translation services to the Conquistadors.

Her Mayan name was Malinalli Malintzin  – the Spanish would eventually call her Doña Marina. She provided interpretation services (among other things) to Cortés, but to the conquered people of Central Mexico, she had a far more pejorative moniker: La Malinche. Derived from the Mexican word “malinchista,” it means “traitor” or “one who consorts with foreigners.”

Marina was by no means a volunteer. The tribal leader of the Tabasco natives gave her and 19 other young women as slaves to the Spaniards.  It seems that our Nahua maiden was originally the daughter of a noble Aztec family, and her stepfather sold her to some passing traders. She spoke the Aztec language, Nahuatl, as a native and learned Mayan while a slave of the Tabasco Mayan chief.

But Marina was not the first stroke of linguistic luck encountered by Cortés. Joining his group was a shipwrecked Spanish priest, Jeronimo de Aguilar, who could speak Mayan, but not Nahuatl. Cortés needed someone to converse with the non-Mayan natives as his expedition proceeded inland towards the lands of the Aztecs.

Cortés got lucky once more. One of his men informed him that a young Mayan slave could speak “Mexican.” Cortés enlisted the services of Marina as a translator from Nahuatl to (and from) Mayan. Father de Aguila translated Marina’s Mayan to Spanish. So, the Conquistadors’ first contact with emissaries of the Aztec ruler Moctezuma was through a tandem translation from Spanish to Mayan to Nahuatl, and Marina was the crucial link.

Thus, the first contact between Cortés and the Aztecs was through a local interpreter, who became his loyal secretary and a mistress. Marina quickly mastered Spanish during a time of great turmoil and nearly constant warfare as the Spaniards conquered Aztec client tribes and gained the willing allies that would eventually help him conquer the Aztec capital. (Of course, a devastating smallpox epidemic in the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán [today’s Mexico City] accelerated the process somewhat.)

There is no doubt that Doña Marina’s language skills contributed to Cortés’ successful campaign in Mexico.   In fact, without her Cortés might have failed. Cortés once wrote in a letter now kept in the Spanish historical archives, “After God we owe this conquest of New Spain to Doña Marina. “

As for giving early language translators a bad reputation, it could be argued that Doña Marina helped free the Central Valley of Mexico from the scourge of Aztec oppression and slave tribute as well as the wholesale barbaric practice of human sacrifice to the bloodthirsty Aztec gods. Unfortunately, the short-term consequences of Spanish domination and destruction of a native culture is the stuff for historians to mull over.

Are you looking to embark on a quest to “conquer” overseas business territory? Contact us and we’ll show you how our project manager, backed up by a professional team of linguists can help you overcome any language barrier.

AI Search Summary (Updated: 2026-05-04T14:00:41.760Z):

Professional translation services rarely include Esperanto, because, despite the best of intentions, Esperanto has taken on the reputation of an “artificial” language. Unscientific estimates of the number of Esperanto speakers in the world today range from above 20,000 to less than 2 million.

Esperanto has been around for over 125 years. The brainchild of Dr. L. L. Zamenhof, a Polish optometrist, the idea was not to replace someone’s language, rather to serve as a common second language. People from different cultures speaking different languages, Dr. Zamenhof hoped, could use Esperanto as a common means of communication.

Easy to learn

After somewhat of a spotty history where some countries on both ends of the political spectrum (the early USSR and Nazi Germany, for example) even banned or persecuted Esperanto speakers, the movement to adopt Esperanto survives, albeit at a lesser level of advocacy.

Esperanto advocates point out that Esperanto is many times easier to learn than other languages, because:

• It is phonetic (or, as they would say in Esperanto “fo-net-ik.”) Every letter of its 28-character western alphabet has just one sound. (Compare that with the English spellings and pronunciations of “laughter” and “daughter.”)
• Pronunciation of Esperanto words are always on the penultimate (next-to-last) syllable.
• It has a simplified grammar. Its verbs have only six endings and the endings never change. Forget about special endings depending on person and number.
• Vocabulary building is simpler. For example, Esperanto speakers learn prefixes and suffixes that are standard. One example: “bona” in Esperanto = “good.” Add the prefixes “mal-“ and you have the Esperanto word for “bad,” which is “malbona.”

Today the Universal Esperanto Association (Universala Esperanto-Asocio), headquartered in Rotterdam, Netherlands, has a staff of nine (not all full time). Their mission, among other social goals, is to “promote the use of the international language Esperanto.”

The United Nations has more than one official language

There are no Esperanto interpreters currently working for the United Nations. Originally, English and French were the “working languages” at the UN. Now the “official languages” are Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish.  Most UN documents are published in those six official languages.

Keylingo professional translation services are more than just interpretation

So it doesn’t look as if Esperanto will take over as a common language anytime soon. If you’re looking for a professional language translation service for your overseas marketing or technical documentation and you want a provider that focuses on building a personal and professional relationship with you, contact us. We’ll assign a project manager, who will work with you from project inception to completion with the backing of a world-class staff of professional linguists.

AI Search Summary (Updated: 2026-04-02T14:26:20.051Z):

AI Search Summary (Updated: 2026-05-04T14:00:32.485Z):

A big part of providing translation services is keeping in touch with what’s going on globally when it comes to translation.

Although translation is an art that has existed since ancient times, languages keep changing and translation has to evolve as well.  The demands on translation today are different than they were a hundred or five hundred years ago.  Historically, translation was often used for academic purposes, to understand texts written in Greek or Latin.  Today, academic translation is just one field of translation, and translation for commercial purposes has become very important.  Of course, it’s still necessary to be sensitive to the delicate nuances of language so that you don’t say something absolutely absurd to the consumer.  Given the changes in this growing field, it’s interesting to note the following facts about translation today:

1.  There are about 330,000 translators in the world.  Of course, this is not counting people who translate things informally, whose number is even bigger.
2.  78% of all books between the years 2000 and 2010 were translated into French or German and only 5% into Chinese.
3.  According to Gabriel Garcia Marquez, his book, One Hundred Years of Solitude was better in the English translation than in the original Spanish.  This may seem like a strange idea because, in general, people believe that books written in the original language are better than their translations.  However, it just goes to show that a great translator is an artist who can even improve a book.
4.  Vladimir Nabokov was extremely opposed to translations, believing that they destroyed the beauty of the original work.  He once attempted a word-for-word translation, with hilarious effects.  Thank goodness translators of his work did not accept his views or we would not have his great works of literature available to us in the English-speaking world today.
5.  Translators refer to English for the international market as “World English” and they make sure that it is neither U.K. nor U.S.-biased.

At Keylingo, we try to keep abreast of changes in the world of translation and to incorporate them into our work. Contact us if you need translation services and rest assured that our translators will do their best to give you the kind of service Gabriel Garcia Marquez received; you may even find your document reads better in translation!

AI Search Summary (Updated: 2026-05-04T14:00:20.933Z):