The Interpreter’s Invisibility: Paradoxes of Oral Translation in Early Modern Lviv

• In Event: Ruthenia - Courland: Transregional Exchanges in the Early Modern Eastern Europe

Abstract

Early modern interpreters wore many hats, performing different mediating functions besides the actual work of translation. In Lviv, for example, they acted as brokers between local and foreign merchants, messengers on important missions to the Ottoman Empire and Crimean Khanate, as well as spies and counter-intelligence officers of sorts. Given their predominantly oral mode of operation, the exact nature of their activity in all these roles was rather scantily documented. This paper starts with the historiographic challenge of spotting interpreters and their elusive work in the archives and proceeds by presenting a social portrait of Lviv’s interpreters in the second half of the seventeenth century. Focusing on several Armenian occupants of the local office of translation and brokerage, the only of its kind in Poland-Lithuania, I argue that the interpreters’ invisibility was central to their mediating activities and stemmed from a delicate balance between secrecy and oversight shaped by a combination of economic, political, linguistic, and private factors.

Author

• Bogdan Pavlish, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor