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
Themistocles and his historians reflect a range of attitudes to language, identity and loyalty, thus giving us a sense of attitudes towards interpreters far back in time and memory. Themistocles was a rare example of a Greek who could speak a foreign language … This sense of a common tongue was the decisive criterion for determining who were Greeks. Herodotus …
Sir Walter Raleigh’s early attempts at settlement in Virginia informed the approach taken by the next wave of English colonists. Thomas Harriot’s Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia and engravings based on John White’s illustrations were well known, others had written memoirs and Native Americans had travelled to England. Wee our selves have taught them how to be treacherous …
In 1584, Elizabeth I granted Walter Raleigh the right to explore and settle any land on the North American continent that was held by non-Christians. Raleigh’s attempts at settlement came to grief but their story reveals something about the role played by interpreters in early English colonialism. We brought home also two of the Savages being lustie men, whose names …
The Ottoman Empire was bound to need interpreters. In the sixteenth century it extended into Central Europe, Crimea, the Middle East and Africa and had a mixed population speaking a variety of languages. It also attracted outsiders: traders, travellers and diplomats. Not everyone needed an intermediary as multilingualism or the use of a lingua franca enabled communication within the Empire …
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 …