Interpreting The Amistad Trials: How Interpreters and Translators Make and Shape History [Hardcover]

Interpreting TheAmistadTrialstraces the signal importance of interpreters and translators in the famous 19th-centuryAmistadcase and discusses how race, ethnicity, slavery, and colonialism shaped this story.

From the recruitment process to the various oral to sign languages that mediated linguistically in the Africans' life inside and outside the courtroom, and from evidentiary documents to fraudulent translations to credible testimonies, Jeanette Zaragoza-De Le?n demonstrates the crucial importance of translation and interpretation in the Amistad plot and outcome. De Le?n examines handwritten letters, pamphlets, newspapers, and judicial files, and adopts a critical race theory and postcolonial lens to analyze these materials. Although these critical interpretations and translations travelled transatlantically via Europe, Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States, De Le?n highlights the common thread which also geographically unites Venezuela, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic as part of theAmistadstory.

One of the most comprehensive studies of recorded events in the history of interpretation and translation in the Americas,Interpreting TheAmistadTrialsis a valuable resource for researchers studying coloniality, enslavement, race and ethnic studies and examining how these issues mattered then and now.

Jeanette Zaragoza De Le?nis Assistant Professor in the Graduate Translation Program and is coordinator of the first academic program in interpreting studies in Puerto Rico at the University of Puerto Rico. With more than 15 years of experience as an interpreter and translator, her historical research centers around interpreters and translators in the 19th-century transatlantic world.

This is a fascinating case-study in how translation and interpreting shape macro and microhistories. The book is a clarion call to understand power, agency, and human rights as radically dependent on lanlS,