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

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Interpreting The Amistad Case traces the signal importance of interpreters and translators in the famous 19th-century Amistad case 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 Len demonstrates the crucial importance of translation and interpretation in the Amistad plot and outcome. De Len 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 Len highlights the common thread which also geographically unites Venezuela, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic as part of the Amistad story. One of the most comprehensive studies of recorded events in the history of interpretation and translation in the Americas, Interpreting The Amistad Case is a valuable resource for researchers studying coloniality, enslavement, race and ethnic studies and examining how these issues mattered then and now.

Author Bio

Jeanette Zaragoza De Len is Assistant Professor in the Department of Translation at the University of Puerto Rico, USA. She has worked for over 10 years as both interpreter and translator and is certified as a Court Interpreter and as Medical/Healthcare Interpreter. She also coordinates the first Certificate in Professional Interpreting Studies at the University of Puerto Rico.