The stories of early interpreters
Looking for Interpreter Zero in the era before the Norman Conquest or the Crusades can seem unpromising. There is very little material on language use at that time, which is why the record of the Strasbourg Oaths in Nithard’s (795-844) Historiae or De dissensionibus filiorum Ludovici pii (Histories or On the Dissensions of the Sons of Louis the Pious) is so significant. What we get from this …
Fulcher of Chartres, one of the chroniclers of the First Crusade, was an insider who travelled with Duke Robert of Normandy and Count Stephen of Blois. He had every reason to know when communication within a given group might present problems. Outside observers had little time for the nuances of regional participation: Anna Komnene referred to the Crusaders as Kelts, …
After Alexios I Komnenos (reigned 1081-1118) seized power in Byzantium in 1081 he became involved in a series of negotiations, understandings and alliances as he sought to protect his land from depredations and conquest from all sides. His agreements with Normans and Turks in the 1080s can be read as a prelude to his most significant rapprochement: the embassy he sent …
The succession of rulers jockeying for position after the 1031 collapse of the Córdoba Caliphate made for a shifting cultural and political landscape on the Iberian peninsula. Christian power was slowly asserted against the Almoravid and then Almohar rulers who swept in from the Maghreb in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. By 1250, Granada was the only Moslem kingdom left …
The Portuguese slave-trade laid the foundations for what was to come, as did the Iberian conquests in the Americas. Had it not been for the need for labour in the New World to supplement reluctant and scarce native peoples, the sixteenth-century trade would not have grown to the transatlantic displacement of millions of Africans. As it was, when the Dutch, …
Accounts of early European expeditions of exploration and conquest usually paid scant attention to the role of interpreters, but there were notable exceptions. A multilingual region The Spanish empire-builders who set out from Cuba to explore lands to the west of the Caribbean took Columbus’s improvisational approach to the need for interpreting. When Francisco Hernández de Córdoba led an expedition …
How Enrique, a Malay-speaker acquired by Magellan during the siege of Malacca, became an interpreter and go-between as the explorer’s 1519 expedition searched for the Spice Islands. Pigafetta Much of what we know about the fleet initially led by Ferdinand Magellan from 1519 to1522 comes from the man he recruited as his chronicler, Antonio Pigafetta. Without him we would know …
Christopher Columbus knew he would need interpreters but did not necessarily know what languages would be needed or who would do the work. Conference interpreting has a clear history but less is known about the interpreters who assisted early travellers, diplomats or traders. I have only just started looking into this and am intrigued to note that the literature shows …