The Political and Diplomatic Significance of Interpreters/Translators in Seventeenth-Century Colonial Taiwan

Abstract

The complex interrelation between translation and power has been acknowledged since the mid twentieth century and extensively investigated since the 1990s (Gentzler and Tymoczko 2002: xi–xii). By examining ‘the vagaries and vicissitudes of the exercise of power in a society, and what the exercise of power means in terms of the production of culture, of which the production of translations is a part’ (Lefevere and Bassnett 1990: 5), it is now widely recognized that translations may not only reflect or spread normative ideologies of those in power but also serve as a site for the competition between hegemony and resistance for producing and/or changing cultures (Tymoczko and Gentzler 2002). By contrast with its counterpart in writing, interpreting has been much less studied in terms of its link with power. Many studies focusing on interpreting or interpreters in recent decades still discuss issues such as improving the communicative efficacy of interpreting or the performance of interpreters (Pöchhacker and Shlesinger 2002), rather than thoroughly investigating the ways in which interpreting has exerted its influence on upholding or subverting power or how power has made a profound impact on interpreting practice and development in human history, which perhaps is mainly attributed to the previous ‘consensus’ in interpreting studies circles that the evanescent nature of interpreting makes it difficult to study the past performance of interpreters (Bowen et al. 1995: 245).