How the fuck did translators work in ancient times? I can't

I used to think about this a lot too until I realized you can probably learn enough to trade shit within a half hour. That shit doesn't require fluency and years of study.

>>2735409
You teach them like how you teach a child
If it's the same language group, like French and Spanish you already have sentence structure. But more liekly than not you create a hybrid language which would be started by merchants and then later to groups if people of greater contact was made

Since people living in border regions tend to speak several languages, in the Old World you can theoretically chain enough such natives to speak with everybody. New World is the more interesting case, yet people still managed to learn each other languages in a year or so, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Malinche .

>>2735409
It was probably something you learnt over an entire lifetime and passed down to your successors, with a few exceptions like Romans learning Greek from a young age.
You would've gone from saying only "amphora, grain, gold, ten drachma," to to "ten drachma for that amphora? Your mother's couch smells worse than a snails entrails you Tyrian scumbag."

>>2735409
That's why you'll never achieve or amount to anything, you lazy faggot

>>2735461
>just build a boat and sail around the Mediterranean bro
It's all fun and games until your god wants you to sacrifice your daughter for some g winds.

>>2735409
You point at a tree and say "tree" enough times, they'll get that "tree" means tree. Repeat until you can hold a basic convo.

>>2735409
>move to france for job
>learn french in a year

I'm not even that intelligent, this shit's just easy

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>>2735474
>>2735476
So why hasn't ten years of watching anime made me fluent in Japanese yet?
Bakas.

>>2735481
Because it's going too fast and you're watching it with subtitles.

>>2735481
Because you can't learn a language passively, you have to practice grammar to do so. I've been reading books and watching movies in English without a dictionary for 8 years now, but I had to actually learn grammar and practice a lot to start producing more or less correct sentences. This is why total immersion works so well, you have no choice but to try to communicate in the language you're learning.

>>2735481

because literally every line spoken in anime is weird meme speech that nobody would dream of using in everyday life

>>2735457
Golden post!