Translating laws to Kichwa when even textbooks are hard to read: intertextuality, language standardization, and state power in Ecuador

What happens when Indigenous language‐translation becomes intertwined with state politics? In contrast to scholarship's emphasis on translation as reproducing a source text in another language, in Ecuador the translation of an education law to Kichwa prioritized other forms of intertextuality that connected the resulting text to a small corpus of pre‐existing Kichwa‐language state documents. Some translators supported cohesion, arguing for uniformity in how Kichwa is written across texts. Other translators sought to emphasize readability, which meant breaking with conventions, but their efforts faltered. Language standardization shapes and is shaped by how emergent texts relate to previous ones, and these relationships are key for how Indigenous languages are used to make a state intercultural. Hegemonic and counterhegemonic views of intertextuality factor heavily into translating state texts to Kichwa and may exacerbate rifts among planners and readers by foregrounding a singular stable way of writing that differs from how people use Kichwa daily. Such efforts may work against the collective mobilization so important to Indigenous social movements.