A fascinating history of China’s relations with the West—told through the lives of two eighteenth-century translators The 1793 British embassy to China, which led to Lord George Macartney’s fraught encounter with the Qianlong emperor, has often been viewed as a clash of cultures fueled by the East’s lack of interest in the West. In The Perils of Interpreting, Henrietta Harrison presents a more nuanced picture, ingeniously shifting the historical lens to focus on Macartney’s two interpreters at that meeting—Li Zibiao and George Thomas Staunton. Who were these two men? How did they intervene in the exchanges that they mediated? And what did these exchanges mean for them? From Galway to Chengde, and from political intrigues to personal encounters, Harrison reassesses a pivotal moment in relations between China and Britain. She shows that there were Chinese who were familiar with the West, but growing tensions endangered those who embraced both cultures and would eventually culminate in the Opium Wars. Harrison demonstrates that the Qing court’s ignorance about the British did not simply happen, but was manufactured through the repression of cultural go-betweens like Li and Staunton. She traces Li’s influence as Macartney’s interpreter, the pressures Li faced in China as a result, and his later years in hiding. Staunton interpreted successfully for the British East India Company in Canton, but as Chinese anger grew against British imperial expansion in South Asia, he was compelled to flee to England. Harrison contends that in silencing expert voices, the Qing court missed an opportunity to gain insights that might have prevented a losing conflict with Britain. Uncovering the lives of two overlooked figures, The Perils of Interpreting offers an empathic argument for cross-cultural understanding in a connected world.

The aspiration of an Atlas is to cover the whole world, by compiling cartographical material representing territories from across the five continents. This book intends to contribute to that ideally comprehensive, yet always unfinished, Atlas with pieces gathered from all of the Earth’s regions. However, its focus is not so much of a geographical nature (although maps and geographical reflections are not absent in its pages), but of a historical-analytical one. As such, the Atlas engages in the historical analysis of interpreters (of both language and cultures) in multiple interpreting settings and places, including in zones which are less frequently studied in specialized literature, in different historical periods and at various scales. All the interpreters described in the book share the ability to speak two or more languages and to use them as vehicles; otherwise, their individual socio-professional statuses vary so much that there is no similarity between a Venetian dragoman in Istanbul and a prisoner of war, or between a locally-recruited interpreter and a missionary. Each contributor has approached the specific spatial and temporal dimensions of their subject as perceived through their different methodological lenses. This multifaceted perspective, which is expected to provide fertile soil for future interdisciplinary research, has been possible thanks to a balanced combination of scholars from History and from Translation and Interpreting Studies.

With a focus on Robert Morrison, Protestant Missionaries in China evaluates the role of nineteenth-century British missionaries in the early development of the cross-cultural relationship between China and the English-speaking world. As one of the first generation of British Protestant missionaries, Robert Morrison went to China in 1807 with the goal of evangelizing the country. His mission pushed him into deeper engagement with Chinese language and culture, and the exchange flowed both ways as Morrison—a working-class man whose firsthand experiences made him an “accidental expert”—brought depictions of China back to eager British audiences. Author Jonathan A. Seitz proposes that, despite the limitations imposed by the orientalism impulse of the era, Morrison and his fellow missionaries were instrumental in creating a new map of cross-cultural engagement that would evolve, ultimately, into modern sinology. Engaging and well researched, Protestant Missionaries in China explores the impact of Morrison and his contemporaries on early sinology, mission work, and Chinese Christianity during the three decades before the start of the Opium Wars.

The Practice of Court Interpreting describes how the interpreter works in the court room and other legal settings. The book discusses what is involved in court interpreting: case preparation, ethics and procedure, the creation and avoidance of error, translation and legal documents, tape transcription and translation, testifying as an expert witness, and continuing education outside the classroom. The purpose of the book is to provide the interpreter with a map of the terrain and to suggest methods that will help insure an accurate result. The author, herself a practicing court interpreter, says: “The structure of the book follows the structure of the work as we do it.” The book is intended as a basic course book, as background reading for practicing court interpreters and for court officials who deal with interpreters.

Postmonolingualism, as formulated by Yildiz, can be understood to be a resistance to the demands of institutions that seek to enforce a monolingual standard. Complex identities, social practices, and cultural products are increasingly required to conform to the expectancies of a norm that for many is no longer considered reasonable. Thus, in this postmonolingual age, it is essential that the approaches and initiatives used to counter these demands aim not only to understand these hyper-diverse societies but also to deminoritize underprivileged communities. ‘Translating and Interpreting Justice in a Postmonolingual Age’ is an attempt to expand the limits of postmonolingualism as a framework for exploring the possibilities of translation and interpreting in mediating between the myriad of sociocultural communities that coexist today. Challenging assumptions about the role of translation and interpreting, the contributions gathered in this volume focus on intercultural and intergroup understanding as a process and as a requisite for social justice and ethical progress. From different but complementary approaches, practical experiences and existing legal and policy frameworks are scrutinized to highlight the need for translation and interpreting policies in legal and institutional contexts in multicultural societies. Researchers and policymakers in the fields of translation and interpreting studies, multiculturalism and education, and language and diversity policies will find inspiring perspectives on how legal and institutional translation and interpreting can help pursue the goals of democratic societies.

This handbook offers a broad-ranging overview of the study of translating and interpreting in conflict and crisis settings and takes the field in new directions. Covering a wide selection of multimodal contexts that build on the fundamentals of translation, interpreting, and their in-between hybrid forms of mediation, the handbook is divided into four parts. The opening part covers perspectives on policy and practices, whether contemporary or historical, and cases truly span the globe, from Peru and Brazil, over Belgium and Sierra Leone, to Australia, Japan, and Hong Kong. International developments require profound considerations about the professionalisation of access to language in times of crises, not least in contexts of humanitarian negotiation or conflict zone interpreting–these form the second part. The subsequent part deals with spheres of community in which language needs are positioned within frames of agency, positionality, and trust, and the challenges that these face. The contributions build on cases where interpreters act as catalysts for translation needs in settings of humanitarian aid and beyond. The final part considers language strategies and solutions in crises. This handbook is the essential guide to translation and interpreting in conflict and crisis settings for advanced students and researchers of translation and interpreting studies and will be of wide interest in peace studies, political science, and beyond.

A commitment to free speech is a fundamental precept of all liberal democracies. However, democracies can differ significantly when addressing the constitutionality of laws regulating certain kinds of speech. In the United States, for instance, the commitment to free speech under the First Amendment has been held by the Supreme Court to protect the public expression of the most noxious racist ideology and hence to render unconstitutional even narrow restrictions on hate speech. In contrast, governments have been accorded considerable leeway to restrict racist and other extreme expression in almost every other democracy, including Canada, the United Kingdom, and other European countries. This book considers the legal responses of various liberal democracies towards hate speech and other forms of extreme expression, and examines the following questions: What accounts for the marked differences in attitude towards the constitutionality of hate speech regulation? Does hate speech regulation violate the core free speech principle constitutive of democracy? Has the traditional US position on extreme expression justifiably not found favour elsewhere? Do values such as the commitment to equality or dignity legitimately override the right to free speech in some circumstances? With contributions from experts in a range of disciplines, this book offers an in-depth examination of the tensions that arise between democracy's promises.