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
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 …
Foreign traders in eighteenth-century Canton used interpreters – called linguists – in their dealings with Chinese officials.
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.
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 …
There are two buildings in Heritage Town in the former French colony of Pondicherry that are associated with men who were key to the success of French trade there: St Andrew’s Church, built in 1745 by Pedro Kanakaraya Mudaliar in memory of his son, and the 1735 house owned by Ananda Ranga Pillai, who succeeded Mudaliar as chief intermediary for …
English travellers to India on East India Company (EIC) business were well aware of the need to find ways to communicate with locals on their journey and at their destination. Sir James Lancaster, who led the first EIC fleet to explore trade prospects in 1601 had an original way of replenishing the ships’ stores while at the Cape of Good Hope. …
The Schlagintweit brothers’ account of their expedition to the Indian subcontinent in the 1850s acknowledged the crucial role of their interpreters. “During our travels in Tíbet and Turkistán, and also in some parts of Sikkim, we had to engage different men, who knew Hindostani as well as the languages of the countries we were traversing. Besides filling their office as …
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 …