The stories of early interpreters
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
In the 1400s, navigators commissioned by the Portuguese royal family started to sail along the Guinea Coast, the shoreline from the Senegal River to South Angola. They hoped to obtain directly from the source the goods that were traditionally bought from Moorish merchants in North Africa. There was no need to brave the interior as the trading centres that had …
How a Polynesian priest and skilled navigator became an invaluable intermediary in Captain James Cook’s exploration of the southern Pacific. “It turned out that the Maori could easily understand Tupai’s Tahitian language, which differed from theirs only by a few words …” The Endeavour When Captain James Cook set sail for the Pacific on the Endeavour in August 1768 he had …
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 …