When Tokugawa Japan closed itself to the West, every word exchanged with Europe passed through a hereditary guild of Japanese interpreters of Dutch at Nagasaki — by the eighteenth century a bureaucracy of well over a hundred posts passed from father to son. They doubled as Japan's only channel for Western science, translating medical and technical books in the movement known as rangaku. The opening of Japan and the switch to English in the 1850s erased the trade within a generation.
Oranda-tsūji (Nagasaki's Dutch interpreters) no longer exists as a living trade. Here is what erased it, and which profession took on the work.
1100 – 1600
Toledo, print and the vernacular Bible
Toledo's translators turned Arabic learning into Latin and fed Europe's universities; Gerard of Cremona alone accounted for over seventy scientific works. Printing then made translation dangerous as well as influential: vernacular Bibles broke the Latin monopoly on scripture, Luther's German shaped a language, William Tyndale's English New Testament was smuggled in cloth bales and cost him his life in 1536, and the humanist printer Étienne Dolet was burned in Paris in 1546 over three words added to a Plato translation.
What else was happening then
1840
The Treaty of Waitangi's two versions
Missionary Henry Williams and his son Edward translate Britain's treaty with the Māori chiefs into Māori overnight, on 4–5 February. Their rendering of "sovereignty" as "kāwanatanga" (governorship), while guaranteeing chiefs "tino rangatiratanga" (full chieftainship), left the two texts promising different things — a translation gap New Zealand's courts and the Waitangi Tribunal are still working through today.
Where that work lives now
The profession that carries meaning between languages — from the Septuagint and Jerome's Vulgate to Toledo, Nuremberg's booths and the machine-translation age.
🌐 Translator →