by Martha Hobart, AIB
The story of interpreters around the world through the ages is a fascinating thread that runs through history since ancient times. It is far too lengthy and complex to go into detail here so I will just give an overview and encourage you to look deeper into the practitioners of our profession who came before us.
In spite of my intentions, the “overview” became longer that I had expected, so I will post it in two parts. The history of interpreting and translating is a long one.
You can find much more in the impressive series of articles published on the AIIC website by Christine Adams starting in 2012 and still ongoing at its new home, Looking for Interpreter Zero. It was a major source of information for this article.
Interpreters in the Bible and ancient Egypt
Human groupings have been in contact with one another since the beginning of the historical record and long before. Indeed, interpreting is likely as old as language.
Interpreters have been present since biblical times, in the story of Joseph, who was sold into slavery in Egypt by his jealous brothers. He was eventually freed and became vizier to the Pharaoh.
When the Israelites’ harvest failed, the brothers travelled to Egypt to buy grain. There they encountered Joseph although they did not recognize him. However, Joseph recognized them and understood the conversation between the brothers, but spoke with them through an interpreter, as was customary in Egyptian trade relations.
In Genesis 42:23 we find this passage: “[The brothers] did not realize that Joseph understood them, since there was an interpreter between them.”
Trade was an important part of Egyptian life, as were diplomacy and captive taking, much of which was related to Egypt’s dealings in Africa and the Middle East. To this end, the ancient Egyptian bureaucracy included what they called “interlingual mediators”. Some of the earliest evidence of these interpreting practices comes from the tombs of the princes of the island of Elephantine, which date from the third millennium BCE. Their titles included “secret advisor of the southern lands of Upper Egypt” in reference to the location of the island on the border between Egypt and Nubia.
Communication with their non-Egyptian subjects and contacts was the responsibility of interpreters, whose duties were not limited to linguistic mediation but were more wide-ranging in their contacts with foreigners.
The importance of these linguistic mediators is immortalized in a bas-relief in the tomb of the pharaoh Horemheb, dating from the 14th century BCE (see the image at the top of this post). It shows an interpreter (in the middle) mediating between Horemheb (left) and foreign envoys (right). In this case the interpreter is depicted as if there were two individuals, while other archeological discoveries portray interpreters as having two heads.
Greece and Rome
Herodotus in his Histories speaks of the need for language intermediaries in ancient Greece. There was extensive contact between Greece and Egypt and there were Greek-speaking communities in Egypt. They were even entrusted by the Pharaoh Psammetichus with the teaching of the Greek language to certain Egyptian children, who subsequently became the parents of the entire class of interpreters in Egypt.
Although interpreters were essential in Greece, they were sometimes thought of as being treacherous. Herodotus recounts an incident during the Persian wars in which the Persian king Darius sent messengers to several Greek cities to demand earth and water as tokens of their submission to him. According to Herodotus, the messengers and the interpreter who accompanied them were thrown into a well to take the earth and water themselves. Plutarch, in his account, held the Athenian statesman and general Themistocles responsible for such treatment of “treacherous intermediaries” who dared to use the Greek language in the service of non-Greeks.
The Romans treated interpreters differently, perhaps because their empire covered a vast amount of territory that included many different languages. Interpreters were essential in the Senate since most of the ambassadors from far-flung territories did not speak Latin.
But interpreters are rarely mentioned in documentary sources, perhaps because they were simply taken for granted, or their presence was ignored by officials who mastered other languages but preferred to speak in Latin to mark the prestige of Latin. Even from its early days, Rome was surrounded by peoples who spoke different languages or Latin dialects; as the empire expanded to other nations, the need for linguistic assistance became greater.
Cicero’s letters and Julius Caesar’s The Conquest of Gaul often mention interpreters, especially in the Senate. They also commonly appear in contexts other than formal meetings and oratory. The term interpres included roles such as messenger, mediator, envoy or military adjuvant.
There are mentions of a few individuals who were sent by Caesar to replace what he called “ordinary interpreters” because he felt more the need for other skills in addition to language in particularly delicate situations.
The Middle Ages
The known world continued expanding and became more and more complex, as evidenced in documented accounts of the activities of interpreters after the Norman conquest in 1066. Prior to this period there is little information available.
One early event stands out: the Strasbourg Oaths of 842. The Frankish historian Nithard gives an account of three rivals for power in Carolingian Europe who competed for power in the 9th century. Charles the Bald and Louis the German fought against Lothar and won but Lothar would not concede defeat. After a bloody battle and much loss of life, Charles and Louis felt the need to ensure their followers’ loyalty in the lengthy war that was to follow. They gathered their forces in Strasbourg to renew their alliance in a highly structured event that became known as the Strasbourg Oaths.
It is not known exactly how the linguistic aspects were managed in the proceedings but what stands out is the recognition by all parties for absolute clarity in communication. Charles spoke to Louis the German’s men in Old High German (or Frankish) and Louis in regional Romance (or Proto French) to address Charles’s followers. The texts of the each lord’s oath were preserved in Nithard’s Historiae, which has survived until today.
If you are interested in details you can find more here.
The need for interpreters is rarely mentioned in accounts of the Norman Conquest but the linguistic situation in Britain at the time was already complex. English, Welsh, British, Scandanavian, Pictish, Scottish, Cornish and some Irish were spoken, while the clergy used vernacular and Latin. To this was added French by the Normans.
Old English literature gives clear evidence of professional interpreters who acted as intermediaries and translators between all the different linguistic groups. Because of the exclusive nature of their work, they were given a special name: Wealhstod.
Other records speak of latinarius (a corruption of “Latiner” which meant “interpreter”) and interpres.
The Byzantine Empire was another multilingual area characterized by sometimes fraught relations with surrounding peoples. It was a land that depended heavily on mercenaries in its military ventures and had a large immigrant community. Communicating with strangers was part of the structure of Byzantium. There was a body of interpreters who interpreted at diplomatic meetings and translated correspondence into and out of Greek. There were Nordic, Turkish and Frank contingents in the imperial army, plus guards, who needed intermediaries. Likewise, many foreigners served in the fleet that protected Constantinople and the naval bases in the Adriatic and Ionian Seas, whose commanders needed linguistic assistance.
Byzantium was constantly threatened by depredations and conquest by numerous peoples on all sides. The emperor Alexios I Komnenos was open to foreigners and willing to engage in diplomacy throughout his reign, in addition to dealing with the split between the eastern and western churches and conspiracies against Alexios in Constantinople. All this required the assistance of translators and interpreters.
After the death of Malik-Shah, Sultan of the Seljuk Empire, who had been his close ally, Alexios sent an embassy to Pope Urban II to appeal for Christian solidarity, cleverly focused on ways in which the Pope could help him rally support for the victims of Muslim incursions into the Holy Lands in a broad sense. Thus began the Crusades.
In western Europe the dominant group were the Latin Christians. Educated Christians used Latin and in this part of the world regional languages and dialects coexisted with elite vernaculars; the fighting men were divided into regional contingents with shared languages. There was no apparent need for interpreters as linguistic difficulties could be overcome by other means.
However, the elite Crusaders were accompanied by rank-and-file fighters who were peasants or townspeople who had never had need of communication outside their locality. Furthermore, when tensions arose between leaders, there was a natural tendency to support one’s own linguistic group. Much stress was laid on common purpose but this could be outweighed by regional affiliation and individual ambition.
It was during the siege of Antioch when the Latin Crusaders joined forces with the Byzantines. Alexios I had provided intermediaries for them but the stresses of the prolonged siege and the negotiations that followed the fall of the city made it necessary to find people who could communicate in the various languages involved.
The ultimate destination of the Crusaders was Jerusalem and along the way they recruited Christian intermediaries to negotiate with local Muslim rulers. They were also assisted by these impromptu interpreters during the siege of Jerusalem.
The Caliphate of Córdoba on the Iberian Peninsula was another scene of multilingual activity. The Umayyad Caliph of Cordoba, Abd ar-Rahman, worked extensively with intermediaries, who were mostly Jews or Christians, in the tangle of hostilities and alliances between Muslins and Christians in the politics of al-Andalus and the Christian kingdoms on the Iberian Peninsula and elsewhere.
The most common languages used in these exchanges were Hebrew, Arabic, Andalusi Romance (the dialect descended from Late Latin) and Latin. But now and then other languages were involved. On one occasion a delegation from Constantinople presented Abd ar-Rahman with a copy of a work on the medicinal properties of plants, On Medicine, by Dioscorides. It was written in Greek, which no one could read, so the Caliph appealed to Byzantium for help. A Greek monk was dispatched to translate the text, with the assistance of a Greek-speaker from Sicily who also spoke Arabic.
After the fall of the Córdoba Caliphate there was a period of some two centuries in which culture and politics were in constant flux as succeeding rulers ascended and fell, until by the mid-thirteenth century only the Muslim kingdom of Granada remained, along with a few Muslim communities in the Christian kingdoms. Throughout the entire period of Muslim, Jewish and Christian coexistence on the Iberian Peninsula, there was an ongoing demand for translators, interpreters and intermediaries, and today we have a legacy of many words of Arabic origin in the Spanish language.
Part 2 of this series will cover what is generally described as the early modern era and take us up into the 20th century.
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