History of Interpreting

Abstract

In the Bible, Prov. 18:21 reads “[D]eath and life are in the power of the tongue.” These ancient words convey the fact that language is a powerful tool, upon which life and death (may) depend. Solomon was certainly not referring to interpreters but, nevertheless, interpreters work with language, and they can use words to exercise power. There are many accounts of the power of interpreters. Some of these show that the question of life or death often depended on the interpreter. Other accounts illustrate the responsibility invested in interpreters and how the right or false handling of that responsibility determined the fate of individuals and even peoples. What do we know about interpreters in history? What were their tasks? Locating historical accounts of interpreters is arduous, since accounts are few and far between and most interpreters are only mentioned in passing (Hermann, 1956; Roland, 1982; Bowen, Bowen, Kaufmann, & Kurz, 1995; Wilss, 1999; Pöchhacker, 2000; Wiotte‐Franz, 2001; Andres, 2008). Although more information is now available concerning the “Eastern world” (Kaufmann, 2005; Lung & Li, 2005; Lung, 2006), most accounts refer to the “Western world,” which is thus the focus of this entry.

Interpreters and interpreting in conflict zones and scenarios: A historical perspective

“…This oversight is starkly described by Roland (1999:7), who refers to interpreters as "the missing link". This trend began to move in the reverse direction, however, at the end of the twentieth century and beginning of the twenty-first century, when scholarly interest in interpreting in conflict zones increased and began to be studied from different angles, as evidenced by the work of authors such as Andres (2012), Baigorri (2014a), Delisle & Woodsworth (2012), Gaiba (1998) and Roland (1999). In fact, the seminal works on the history of interpreting by Baigorri (2015), Delisle and Woodsworth (2012), Takeda and Baigorri (2016) and Roland (1999) provide us with an explicit weft of the role played by interpreters in different settings throughout history.…”

“…Tutu's 3 tomb), an inscription explains how the chief of the foreign delegation addressed the king through his interpreter. Both Andres (2012) and Galán (1995) describe how the interpreters represented on the tomb can be clearly distinguished, as each one is portrayed as two people-as was the custom in Egyptian hieroglyphs-probably to show that they had to carry out a task that required them to work into two languages and for two different parties.…”

The interpreter in the sacramental confession in the Catholic Church, with special attention to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain

“…Los estudios sobre historia de la interpretación (traducción oral) han vivido un auge extraordinario en los últimos años. Así lo evidencian algunos de los numerosos trabajos, por ejemplo, en el ámbito de la diplomacia (Rothman, 2015;Cáceres Würsig, 2012, 2013, recapitulaciones recientes (Andres, 2013;Baigorri-Jalón, 2015) o compilaciones de nuevos aportes (Takeda and Baigorri, 2016;The Interpreters' Newsletter, 2016), en ocasiones combinados con otros de traducción (Payàs y Zavala, 2012;Alonso Araguás, et al, 2015;Sarmiento Pérez, 2017). Tradicionalmente vinculada a conquistas, conflictos bélicos, diplomacia o relaciones fronterizas, la historia de la interpretación nos lleva aquí a la mediación en la sutil frontera entre lo humano y lo divino en la que tiene lugar la confesión sacramental en la Iglesia Católica.…”

New Insights in the History of Interpreting

“…From a methodological point of view, it can be assumed that at this early stage of colonial rule, as in other historical periods, both oral and written mediation skills -applied to many extralinguistic functions -were required and were frequently performed by the same person (Alonso-Araguás 2010;Yannakakis 2012;Andres 2013). That is why an extensive typology of mediated situations managed by a variety of so-called interpreters (Pöchhacker 2004: 15) responds better to a general category of linguistic and cultural mediation, men and women in between (Yannakakis 2008), than to the concept of interpreter as an established profession.…”