ABSTRACT
A certain political interest in this field necessarily evolved with the great European colonizations. Rudimentary translator-training programmes might be seen in the practice of taking natives back to the metropolis to turn them into bilingual intermediaries. Yet the colonial emphasis was more on regulating a suspect profession than actually producing professionals. Significantly, the numerous Spanish laws that stipulated the rights and duties of interpreters in the American colonies said nothing about how anyone actually became an interpreter. The state institutionaliz ation of translator training might be dated from 1 669, when the Colbert decree in France arranged for the training of French-born stu dents as interpreters for Turkish , Arabic and Persian, leading to the founding of the Con stantinople school. In 1754 Empress Maria Theresa founded the Oriental Academy, which provided a number of orientalists and interpre ters to the Hapsburg court over the years (Delisle and Woodsworth 1995: 270-1) . Beyond Europe, some of the initial moves could be seen as a reaction to colonial expan sion, at once affirming oppositional identity and facilitating the transfer of knowledge. The large Egyptian translation school now known as al-A/sun was established in 1 835. In China at the beginning of the nineteenth century a group known as Yangwu, comprising high government officials dealing with Foreign Affairs , created institutions for the training of
translators in areas like shipbuilding and weapons manufacture. In 1 862 Tongwen Guan (Interpreters ' College) was set up in Beijing to train translators and interpreters in European languages. From 1 896 YAN FU (see CHINESE TRADmON), at that time principal of the Northern Chinese Naval Academy, supervised several translation schools operating under central and local government authority. Further information on these and similar institutions may be gained from the historical section of this encyclopedia.
