The stories of early interpreters
With thanks to Dr Evelyne Ender, Senior Lecturer, Department of Comparative Thought and Literature, Johns Hopkins University, for alerting me to this story. Athanasius Paulus must have thought his luck had changed when Jean Jacques Rousseau approached him in a café in Boudry, near Neuchâtel, in April 1731. The exotically attired Eastern Christian Orthodox monk was having trouble making himself …
II Abraham Salamé
Salamé was the last Royal Interpreter of Oriental Languages. He is best known for his account of the naval attack on Algiers in August 1816, his first assignment as royal interpreter.
II: Isaac Cardozo Nuñez and Simon Lucas The men on the list of Interpreters of Oriental Languages are not well known, and some of them have left very little trace. We have seen that John Massabecky’s story is unknown; so are those of Messrs Arbona (1763-1767), Logie (1767-1769), Deceramis (1769-1782), Tully (1794-1802), Costa (1802-1809) and Delagarde (1809-1816). They hardly appear …
In loving memory of Adrian Adams (1945-2000) When Pierre de Brazza started to explore the coast of Gabon and the Ogooué River in 1874, he relied on soldiers and sailors recruited by the French Navy – laptots – to act as his interpreters. These were the latest iteration of a system that relied on Senegalese intermediaries from the late seventeenth …
Bombay and Mabruki. H M Stanley, How I Found Livingstone, Scribner’s 1913. p. 69
Dr Robert Morrison, Sir George Thomas Staunton and the Amherst Embassy of 1816 The failure of the 1816 Amherst embassy to the Chinese court can be seen as a step toward worsening relations between the United Kingdom and China. The tensions between the two nations were clear in the embassy’s dealings with the officials who accompanied them to the emperor’s …
Li Zibiao, George Thomas Staunton and the Macartney Embassy In 1787, The British government decided to send an embassy to the Chinese imperial court to negotiate more favourable trading conditions than those afforded by the Canton system. Their goals included access to ports other than Canton (Guangzhou), an embassy in Beijing, and an island reserved for British traders’ use. While …
Recent histories of exploration and colonisation have acknowledged that early accounts tended to privilege intrepid outsiders grappling single-handedly with the unknown; scholars now recognise that these were often complex undertakings involving different kinds of intermediaries. It is interesting to consider interpreters as one of several kinds of go-betweens as a way of understanding the role they played. The British Raj provides us …