Abstract for HEL-LEX 2 (New Approaches in English Historical Lexis 2), 25–27 April 2008, Lammi, Finland.
Samuli Kaislaniemi
University of Helsinki
JURIBASSO
This word, meaning 'an interpreter', occurs constantly in the Diary of Richard Cocks,
of the English Factory in Japan. ... The word is really Malayo-Javanese jurubahâsa,
lit. 'language-master'. (Hobson-Jobson, s.v.)
DRAGOMAN
An interpreter; strictly applied to a man who acts as guide and interpreter in
countries where Arabic, Turkish, or Persian is spoken. (OED, s.v.)
The foundation of the English East India Company in 1600 led to regular contact between England and South and South-East Asia. Conducting trade in maritime Asia was a multilingual affair, and as the East India Company founded trading posts throughout the region, there were two ways in which it tackled the challenge of communicating across language barriers. One was through East India Company merchants learning local languages – and some indeed acquired great proficiency in several Asian languages. But by far the more important way was by hiring interpreters, of which there was a steady supply from all nationalities (including Europeans).
All East India Company employees in maritime Asia were sure to pick up some borrowings relating to commercial and regional features, either from local languages or a lingua franca. These words were sure to include terms for 'interpreter' – such as the two reproduced above.
This paper looks at the different words for 'interpreter' in Early Modern English. The focus is on letters, journals and other documents written by East India Company servants, 1600–1650, but this material is supported by travel writing and other texts from EEBO, and the Corpus of Early English Correspondence (CEEC). The results are compared against dictionaries – LEME, the OED, and Yule's Anglo-Indian dictionary Hobson-Jobson – and the early seventeenth-century semantic field of 'interpreter' mapped out.