Things like the Dutch spice trade. How did they set up these trading routes half way across the world from each other with no translators?
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They had translators, learned the local languages and made the locals learn their own language (although not in case of the Dutch specifically, they’ve generally kept their own language to themselves in the Indies).
To establish a basic vocabulary, just pointing at stuff and saying words is very simple and works well enough. Or you can recruit/capture someone who already has some understanding of the language to skip that stage.
How long do you think the “no translator” thing lasted? The real way that stuff worked historically was mostly someone from one culture marrying/buying/taking a woman from the other culture then you teach the kid both languages and then in 7 years you have a generally good translator. People weren’t retraining adults in language schools. You just intermarry and you get people who can speak both languages for free in less than a decade.
They had translators. Many traders spoke several languages. And in colonies it wasn’t uncommon to just force the locals to learn your own language (how else could they learn from the bible?).
And the distances were covered with letters. It was slower than today, but it worked.
The idea that a single merchant traveled these routes from start to finish is a misconception. They were usually chains of traders, moving goods from one city to the next, buying and selling goods between neighboring areas. Trade roads were set up to keep goods moving through more difficult terrain and were developed to allow goods to make it from one end of the route to the other, but the actual movement of goods was done in many shorter steps by many people. It would not be necessary for a Roman to learn Mandarin or for the Chinese to learn Latin.
According to to the Encyclopedia Britannica and in reference to the silk route specifically,
“Few persons traveled the entire route, and goods were handled in a staggered progression by middlemen.”
But also, it was still possible to speak multiple languages or to have translators back then. Having the routes subdivided means those selling and buying goods are mostly trading with the surrounding areas, making the cultural and linguistic barriers easier to overcome, and speaking the language of your geographical neighbor is more common.
A couple of things:
1. Monolingual societies are relatively rare, and even so are more common now than they used to be. For a lot of history, certainly in Europe, if you could only speak one language you were probably an impoverished serf in some isolated village somewhere. Nobles, educated people, people who lived anywhere near borders, and traders were typically multi lingual. IOW between each end of a trading route you have a lot of people who can bridge the language gap.
2. A lot of the time trade was done by traders rather than the government. The Silk Road is a great example of this – the Roman and Chinese empires had a long and thriving trade route, but AFAIK they never had any actual contact, not even diplomats or emissaries. Each side just knew there was a large empire in a distant land at the other end of the trade route that had a large appetite for the luxury goods each produced. The link between the two was a series of trading routes, including links consisting of groups from neither empire.
It’s not very hard to learn a few dozen words in a new language, if you have some motivation. Journals from early European traders (1400’s – 1500’s) have them learning enough for trade in just a week or so. Pointing and pigin can go a long way.
I haven’t read any of the Dutch journals, but the English and French were often able to set up trade ports by the second or third visit to a place.
Aside from the other points, there were “bridge languages” available to help things start out. For example, the Dutch would have encountered Arabic speakers in Indonesia, thanks to Muslim influence in the area. There would have been Dutch traders who knew Arabic from trading with the near east, so using Arabic would have been a possible way to get started.
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