This post looks at the terms used for describe translators and interpreters in French and English since the 17th century as a way of understanding the history of interpreting.
36 – An Accidental Interpreter: Jean Jacques Rousseau and the Archimandrite
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 …
35 – Krotoa/Eva
I would like to thank Professor Simon Schaffer for letting me know about this early interpreter. [T]he Khoe comprised different nations or communities with a deep history in the region. The Gorachouqua and Goringhaiqua lived and pastured their cattle and sheep on the Cape peninsula itself. The Goringhaikona, a less organized group (sometimes identified as Strandlopers), did not own cattle …
Syria was part of the Ottoman Empire in the Eighteenth Century
32 -The Interpreters of Oriental Languages for the Georgian Kings of Great Britain
Fourteen men acted as Interpreters of Oriental Languages for the King of England from 1723. The first four were Easter Christians from Syria, then part of the Ottoman Empire.
31 – Malamine Camara and Pierre de Brazza
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 …
Portrait of Mabruki and Bombay in H M Stanley, How I Found Livingstone, Scribner's 1913 edition
30 – Selim, Bombay and Maganga, I Presume?
Bombay and Mabruki. H M Stanley, How I Found Livingstone, Scribner’s 1913. p. 69
29 – Trade, Embassies and Communication: The English in China, 1715-1842 – Part III
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 …
27 – Trade, Embassies and Communication: The English in China, 1715-1842 – Part I
Foreign traders in eighteenth-century Canton used interpreters – called linguists – in their dealings with Chinese officials.
25 – George Drouillard, Toussaint Charbonneau and Sacagawea
Lewis and Clark started recruiting interpreters when they were planning their expedition to land west of the Mississippi. Sacagawea and her husband, Toussaint Charbonneau joined them in November 1804.
24 – Columbus’s Interpreters: Some Ran Away, Some Stayed, Many Died
We associate Christopher Columbus (1451-1506) with the New World and sometimes forget that he was from the old one. “Christopher Columbus” is the posthumous, anglicised version of the Ligurian “Cristoffa Corombo”, the Italian, “Cristoforo Colombo”, the Portuguese “Cristóvão Colombo” and the Spanish “Cristóbal Colón” by which he was known in his lifetime among Ligurian, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish speakers. He …