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The historic role of translators | ||
Tags: History | Translation | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| BiaHuda Triglot Groupie Vietnam Joined 5364 days ago 97 posts - 127 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish, Vietnamese Studies: Cantonese | Message 1 of 9 28 September 2010 at 9:58am | IP Logged | ||
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I have started studying Cantonese and some of the reasources I have available here in Vietnam are very old. So I started thinking about the role of interpreters, translators etc. throughout history. Alot of early translations were of a religous nature it sêêms, I believe, Jeromes Vulgate was one of the earliest translations of Aramaic, Greek and maybe Hebrew into the Latin Bible. Later John Wyecliffe translated that into English, I think around the year 1350. Obviously later on merchants, dignitaries etc. all had need of translations in some way shape or form.
Pimsluer, Rosseta Stone etc. weren't around in those days, so what resources were available and how effective were they? It would appear that these guys were quite good back in the day. Edited by BiaHuda on 28 September 2010 at 12:31pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Goethe_girl Newbie United States Joined 5185 days ago 39 posts - 44 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German | Message 2 of 9 28 September 2010 at 11:30am | IP Logged | ||
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Well, you have to keep in mind that without teachers, self study was very difficult. Even Erasmus, a Catholic Humanist genius, took three years to learn Ancient Greek.
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| janalisa Triglot Senior Member France janafadness.com/blog Joined 6891 days ago 284 posts - 466 votes Speaks: English*, French, Japanese Studies: Russian, Norwegian | Message 3 of 9 28 September 2010 at 12:09pm | IP Logged | ||
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It seems to me like your question isn't so much about translators as about how people learned languages back in the day. The latter is something that really intrigues me, though.
I'm so used to having the convenience of the Internet and countless free resources available at my fingertips, it's hard to imagine how people ever did without it. I barely even have the patience to use a paper dictionary-- electronic dictionaries are just so much faster. That anyone could learn a language just from books-- and learn it well enough to translate it, moreover-- is just amazing to me. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6704 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 4 of 9 28 September 2010 at 12:10pm | IP Logged | ||
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There must have been bilingual interpreters even before the invention of writing, and they can only have learnt their languages by immersion - i.e. by living with the locals of other communities for a long time. Some of the early named polyglots were royal (Cleopatra, Mitridates) so they could just command somebody to function as a teacher/mentor. But mostly it must have been a matter of living abroad.
You could ask: how could the whole population of Gallia Transalpina (France) swing from a Celtic language to Latin within a generation or two? Obviously they didn't use a language academy or language schools. So if you can force ordinary people to learn foreign languages then it must also have been possible for individuals who had sufficiently good reasons to learn certain languages. As for St. Jerome (Hieronymus) he was born in Dalmatia, studied 8 years in Rome, lived for several years in Trier, then Dalmatia again and Northern Italy, but in 374 he went to the desert to the East of Antiochia, and apparently he learnt his Hebraic here. Then back to Roma and finally to Bethlehem, where he died. With such a biography he had ample opportunities to learn from immersion, coupled with studies in religious texts. To Janalisa: we don't have to go far back into the history. In the 60s I actually started out learning Italian and Spanish at home from textbooks and dictionaries, and if I heard anything in those two languages it can only have been a film on Danish TV now and then - with subtitles. Edited by Iversen on 28 September 2010 at 1:43pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| BiaHuda Triglot Groupie Vietnam Joined 5364 days ago 97 posts - 127 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Vietnamese Studies: Cantonese | Message 5 of 9 28 September 2010 at 12:42pm | IP Logged | ||
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[QUOTE=janalisa] It seems to me like your question isn't so much about translators as about how people learned languages back in the day. The latter is something that really intrigues me, though.QUOTE]
You are correct, perhaps I should have chosen the title more carefully. I have wondered about some of the early explorers. Marco Polo, Captain Cook, Lewis and Clark etc.. Would they have employed translators that they brought with them? The only translator like this that I can think of off the top of my head is Sacagawea. Does anyone else know of any other famous historical translators? Edited by BiaHuda on 28 September 2010 at 12:50pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| William Camden Hexaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6273 days ago 1936 posts - 2333 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Russian, Turkish, French | Message 6 of 9 28 September 2010 at 4:44pm | IP Logged | ||
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Malinche, an Indian mistress of Cortes, was useful to him and the Spanish conquistadors in Mexico, as she had quickly learned Spanish and knew Nahuatl and some other Amerindian languages. Prior to that, Cortes used a Spaniard as interpreter who had been shipwrecked and had learned an Indian language or two during the years he lived with Indians. At first, before Malinche had mastered Spanish herself, she would translate something into the Indian language that Aguilar, the shipwrecked Spaniard, understood, and then he would render it into Spanish.
Malinche is widely thought of as a traitor for working for the Spaniards. On the other hand she had at least one child with a Spaniard she married later, thus producing one of the first mestizos - the majority of the population in today's Mexico. So her legacy and reputation are mixed. Malinchista is a term of abuse in Mexico. Captain James Cook was accompanied on one of his Pacific journeys by a Polynesian native (from Tahiti?) who acted as translator, as many of the languages encountered were different from his own but still more or less mutually intelligible. (Edited to make correction and expand original post) Edited by William Camden on 30 September 2010 at 11:03am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Iwwersetzerin Bilingual Heptaglot Senior Member Luxembourg Joined 5670 days ago 259 posts - 513 votes Speaks: French*, Luxembourgish*, GermanC2, EnglishC2, SpanishC2, DutchC1, ItalianC1 Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin | Message 7 of 9 29 September 2010 at 11:23am | IP Logged | ||
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Oh, this is one of my favorite subjects ever! I actually wrote my degree paper on translation and interpreting during the conquest and colonization of Mexico. If you read French and don't have anything better to do ;-) you can read it online here.
As was already commented above, the only method to learn a language at that time was immersion, people like Jerónimo de Aguilar, the Spaniard that shipwrecked had to learn Maya as he was stranded in Mayan territory and had no other choice. Later, the missionaries tried to learn the local languages in order to preach to the natives and convert them to christianity. You could summarize by saying that people learned a language either out of necessity, in order to survive or to pursue a precise goal, either to convert people to their religion or to trade with them. Here is some interesting bibliography on translators and interpreters in history: Translators through history Between worlds Negotiating the frontier 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5382 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 8 of 9 29 September 2010 at 3:24pm | IP Logged | ||
What happens the night of the day you go from "I haven't learned it yet" to "I learnt it"? 1 person has voted this message useful |
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