Los intérpretes — the sworn court interpreters of the Audiencias of the Indies

A salaried, sworn interpreting service attached to every royal court in Spanish America: an oath to add and conceal nothing, a ban on taking so much as food from a litigant, a printed fee of one or two tomines a witness — and two rules that concede the problem, the Indian litigant's right from 1537 to bring a bilingual man of his own to check the official version, and the Indian cabildo's vote, from 1630, on who the interpreter would be. Still being commanded on the justices of Mexico in 1768.