My research focused on understanding how viceregal authority was accepted in Mesoamerica. Rather than approaching the problems from the perspective of institutional history, I drew on prosopographical techniques and the court-studies tradition to focus on the practice of government and the affinities that bound indigenous and non-indigenous political communities. In Chapters two and three I investigate how particular notions of nobility informed the ‘ideals of life’ of the Spanish and indigenous elites in New Spain and how these evolved up to 1535. The chapters also serve to establish a general context to the political situation that Mendoza faced on his arrival. Chapters four to seven explore how the viceroys sought to increase their authority in New Spain by appropriating means of direct distribution of patronage and how this allowed them personally to satisfy many of the demands of the Spanish and indigenous elites. This helped them impose their supremacy over New Spain’s magnates and serve the crown by ruling more effectively. Viceregal supremacy was justified in a ‘language of legitimacy’ that became increasingly peculiar to New Spain as a community of interests developed between the local elites and the viceroys who guaranteed the local political arrangements on which their status and wealth increasingly depended. I conclude by suggesting that New Spain was governed on the basis of internal arrangements guaranteed by the viceroys. This led to the development of what I define as a ‘parasitic civic-nobility’ which benefitted from the perpetuation of the viceregal system along with the crown. The internal political logic of most decision making and a defined local identity accompanied by increasingly ‘sui generis’ ‘ideals of life’ qualify New Spain to be considered not as a ‘colony’ run by an alien bureaucracy that perpetuated Spanish ‘domination’ but as Mexico City’s sub-empire within the Habsburg ‘composite monarchy.

Inom fältet för översättningsstudier har det traditionellt varit ett angeläget forskningsområde att erhålla kunskap om hur man hanterat samma källtext i olika kulturella kontexter. På våren år 1950 utkom en spansk översättning av den finske författaren Mika Waltaris historiska roman, Sinuhe egyptiläinen (Sinuhe egyptiern), och senare samma år, i Mexiko, nyöversattes verket för Latinamerika som en respons på den första. Föreliggande uppsats är en fallstudie och har genomförts i syfte att undersöka på vilket sätt och varför detta originalverks två översättningar på samma språk skiljer sig åt. Översättningarna har jämförts parallellt med dess källtext och studerats kontrastivt genom en kombination av kvantitativ och kvalitativ analys med hjälp av shift som teoretiskt verktyg. Resultaten av denna fallstudie visar att översättningarna skiljer sig åt i vissa innehållsmässiga aspekter och att dessa skillnader med all sannolikhet härrör från de samhälleliga politiska kontexter där de producerats. Genom studien uppdagas även att det finns slående likheter mellan de två måltexterna, främst i form av strykningar men också vad gäller innehåll, vilket ger skäl att tro att den ena utgåvan använts som någon form av underlag för den andra. / Within the field of translation studies, it has traditionally been an important field of research to gain knowledge of how to deal with the same source text in different cultural contexts. In the spring of 1950 a Spanish translation of Mika Waltari's historical novel Sinuhe the Egyptian was published, and later that year, in Mexico, appeared a second version translated for the audience in Latin America as a response to the first. This paper is a case study and has undertaken to examine how and why these two translations in the same language differ. The translations have been compared in parallel with its source text and studied contrastively by a combination of quantitative and qualitative analysis using the shift as a theoretical tool. The results of this case study show that the translations differ in certain aspects of the level of content and that these differences in all probability arose from the social- political contexts in which the texts were produced. The study reveals also that there are striking similarities between these two target texts, mainly in form of deletions but also in terms of content, giving reason to believe that one of these two editions was used as some form of basis for the other.