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4 - Languages at War: Military Interpreters in Antiquity and the Modern World

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 April 2023

By
Rachel Mairs
Edited by
Aneta Pavlenko
Aneta Pavlenko
Affiliation:
University of York
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Summary

Recent scholarly interest in the figure of the interpreter has resulted in a wealth of studies of individual interpreting careers and interpretation practices in specific historical contexts.  But, while it is common for present-day knowledge and personal experience of interpreting to inform historical case studies, or for historical examples to receive passing mention in accounts of the contemporary situation, a truly critically informed diachronic perspective is so far lacking.  This chapter takes a comparative diachronic approach to the study of interpreting by comparing and contrasting the lives of military interpreters in diverse historic contexts. Rather than offering separate biographies, my aim is to show how structural factors affect the position and practices of interpreters across time and space.  I will also show how experience in working with fragmentary evidence from one period (e.g., documents from the ancient Mediterranean world) can be used to inform research on interpreting in other historic contexts (e.g., British Army records from the First World War).

Keywords

historic multilingualismtranslation and interpretinginterpretersmilitary interpretingarchivesancient RomeRoman EmpireFirst World WarEgyptBritish Empire
Type
Chapter
Information
Multilingualism and History , pp. 90 - 106
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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