Representing Interpreters in Theater and History in Seventeenth-Century New France
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Interpreters were integral to translingual encounters in the early modern period, but their portrayal in literature and history has received limited scholarly attention. This chapter explores the innovative representation of a forest spirit as a theatrical interpreter in a play performed by schoolboys of French descent at the Jesuit College in Québec in 1658. This réception play, staged to welcome the colonial governor of New France, transcended the translingual scenario depicted in Marc Lescarbot’s Le Théâtre de Neptune (1606), the earliest recorded theatrical production in colonial North America. In the 1658 play, the theatrical interpreter dramatized multilingualism and the process of oral translation. It drew upon the knowledge production of Indigenous languages, signaling the presence of interpreters from diverse ethnic backgrounds in New France. The chapter then compares the plays with contemporaneous historical accounts, particularly Lescarbot’s Histoire de la Nouvelle-France and the Jesuit Relations, which described French-Indigenous interpreters. This comparison further illuminates how translingual communications were presented to Francophone audiences in the colony and back in France and helps us understand the various ways in which real-life interpreters mediated French-Indigenous encounters.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".