The stories of early interpreters
Marina appears in sixteenth-century indigenous records of the conquest of Mexico as a powerful figure. Her status faltered with Mexican independence but today we have a better understanding of her role and significance. The woman who came to be known as La Malinche was given to Hernán Cortés early in his 1519 expedition to Mexico; she was baptised Marina and then …
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 …
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 …