The Routledge Handbook of Conference Interpreting

Michaela Albl-Mikasa, Elisabet Tiselius, Michaela Albl-Mikasa, Elisabet Tiselius

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000480481
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Providing comprehensive coverage of both current research and practice in conference interpreting, The Routledge Handbook of Conference Interpreting covers core areas and cutting-edge developments, which have sprung up due to the spread of modern technologies and global English.

Consisting of 40 chapters divided into seven parts—Fundamentals, Settings, Regions, Professional issues, Training and education, Research perspectives and Recent developments—the Handbook focuses on the key areas of conference interpreting. This volume is unique in its approach to the field of conference interpreting as it covers not only research and teaching practice but also practical issues of the profession on all continents.

Bringing together over 70 researchers in the field from all over the world and with an introduction by the editors, this is essential reading for all researchers, ?trainers, students and professionals of conference interpreting.

Part IFundamentals

DOI: 10.4324/9780429297878-2

1Historical developments in conference interpretingAn overview

Jesús Baigorri-Jalón, María Manuela Fernández-Sánchez and Gertrudis Payàs

DOI: 10.4324/9780429297878-3

The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.

Oscar Wilde 1891: 162

Introduction

Conference interpreting has been defined broadly as “the rendering of speeches delivered in one language into another at formal and informal conferences and in conference-like settings” (Diriker 2015: 78), where two or more languages (including signed) are used and live translation, either consecutive or simultaneous (see Bartłomiejczyk & Stachowiak-Szymczak, Chapter 2, in this volume), is provided. Those settings can be traced back to a remote past, although the profession as we know it today is mainly a product of the twentieth century through a process of increasing regulation and recognition of qualifications by interpreters themselves and by their social milieu.

Having said that, if we assume that ‘conference settings’ include interlinguistic and intercultural communication among individuals or groups representing different positions and interests at negotiation ‘tables’, professionalized interpreting, with highly sophisticated codes of ethics, has existed for centuries in different societies. This reality has been generally ignored due to the Western (mostly Eurocentric) approach that has broadly characterized the definition of the contours of the profession in the last century or so, and also to the lack of historical research on the interpreting profession, at least until recent times. The history of interpreting is built every day and any interpreting activity may be approached from a particular historical perspective, which is built socially but predicated individually. Readers of this Handbook surely belong to geographical zones or political entities with various historical narratives framed in chronologies which do not fit exactly into the conventional Western periodization. We assume that analysing the historical dimension of issues involved in the heritage of our predecessors is a complex and still unfinished task.

As an introductory caveat, we believe it is important to distinguish between the history of the practice of conference interpreting, which we may consider as belonging to the history of multilingual relations of many types, and the history of its path towards a fully-fledged profession, although both perspectives may intersect in the historical account.

Sociological research applied to Translation Studies focuses on the agents and their activities through the social practices in the fields where they are generated (Inghilleri 2005). The intrinsic relationship that interpreting has with key human experiences such as war, commerce and diplomacy results in the plurality of missions, physical settings and national contexts that high-profile interpreters have fulfilled throughout history. As is well known, the presence of interpreting diplomats and diplomat interpreters is well documented in interpreting history (Fernández-Sánchez 2019; Harris 2002; Lung 2011; Roland 1999; Torikai 2009). For several centuries in the southernmost frontier of the Spanish Empire, the Hispanic-Mapuche conferences known as parlamentos were held regularly, using the services of interpreters, whose presence attests to the political importance given to linguistic sovereignty of both parties (Payàs 2020). The history of dragomans in the Ottoman Empire attests to the long tradition of diplomatic interpreters in the negotiations with the Sublime Porte, an exchange which prompted the early creation of schools of interpreters, such as the ones established at different dates in Venice (Rothman 2011), Paris (Balliu 2008), Vienna (Wolf 2015) or Madrid (Cáceres Würsig 2012), as well as of other training programmes, such as those in the German Empire Ministry for Foreign Affairs (Wilss 1999) or in the US Department of State (Sawyer 2016).

This opening chapter intends to offer a historical overview of the most highly professionalized domain among the interpreting professions, even if discussion on that recognition is still open for certain scholars (Dam & Korning Zethsen 2013). The sociological perspective involved in our aim to describe the professionalization of conference interpreting comes from its beginnings at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference and then at the first international organizations in the 1920s and 1930s, such as the League of Nations, where an international staff interpreters’ corps was established. The use of interpreting at international conferences, in consecutive mode at that time, paved the way for the consolidation of the profession as an essential part of multilingual international relations in the twentieth century. Pioneer conference interpreters met the difficult challenges of adjusting themselves to the cognitive, ethical and technical complexity of the interpreting activity and resolving the intricacies of international and multicultural gatherings in the interwar period and after the Second World War. The Nuremberg War Crimes Trial in 1945 was an extraordinary event in many ways, including for the practice of interpreting. The use of the simultaneous interpreting mode in the Nuremberg Trial (Gaiba 1998), tested since the late 1920s especially at the International Labour Organization (ILO) and the Communist International (Comintern), resulted in a new professional identity in the context of the international organizations and institutions established after the Second World War.

Their practice in the international organization sector granted interpreters a high professional standing, as happened under the League of Nations. Recent research on the issue of status has observed the evolution of a normative role and idealized professional recognition (“splendid interpreters”, Roland 1999; “virtuosos”, Sela-Sheffy & Shlesinger 2008; “the stars of the translation profession”, Dam & Korning Zethsen 2012, 2013) to a more realistic professional identity according to the variety of settings and user expectations in a changing world. The emergence of other types of professional interpreting at the end of the twentieth century, such as community or sign language interpreting, as well as the increasing use of interpreting in conflict zones and new technological challenges, have also contributed to broaden the scope of interpreting settings and to develop new research interests and approaches among conference interpreters (Angelelli 2004; Fitchett 2012; Kahane 2009).

Historical landmarks

The 1920s witnessed a growing demand for interpreters for international conferences, whose number increased as a result of geopolitical and technological changes. The rise of English in diplomacy began in the aftermath of the First World War. During the negotiation of the Treaty of Versailles (1919), the United States and the United Kingdom leaders insisted on using their own language and not French, which notwithstanding its status as de facto ‘lingua franca’ of diplomacy for the previous two centuries they did not command.

In the British Commonwealth, the number of international organizations and conferences had increased dramatically during the period 1920–1946 (Hankey 1946), as a means to put an end to war through peaceful solution of disputes among States. Multilingual conferences gained weight again after the Second World War, encompassing not just political but also scientific and cultural matters, mainly in Western Europe, but also in the USSR.

Given the circumstances, the fledging interpreting profession found support from the staff interpreter corps established at the League of Nations, as part of an international civil service, and from a small group of freelance part-time interpreters, the likes of, for example, Antoine Velleman or Gustav Camerlynck, backed by solid academic underpinnings and high linguistic standards, who negotiated their working conditions on an individual basis, inspired on their part by their colleagues at the League and the ILO. That small group faced an increasing demand in a self-regulatory market and they were responsible for some of the improvements in pay and working conditions in the Geneva organizations, whose tentacles spread to other Western European cities. The conditions they negotiated included paid preparation time, travel expenses and per diem. With hindsight, they led an in-grouping process which resulted in significant changes towards the consolidation of the profession. As an illustration of that era, interpreters recruited for the first ILO conference in Washington in 1919 were paid first-class tickets by sea to travel from Britain to Washington via New York. Travel time was considered as working time, and in fact it did facilitate the interpreters’ preparation of the conference, sharing knowledge with colleagues during several days and learning from their contact with delegates attending the same event. Sanz (1930) refers to the travelling opportunities for Geneva-based interpreters in the 1920s to places such as Paris, London, Amsterdam, Rome and even Madrid as bonuses which satisfied their presumed wanderlust.

The League of Nations had an officially bilingual regime (English and French) and used mostly consecutive interpreting during the 1920s and 1930s, while the ILO, the other post-First World War Geneva institution, responded in its conferences to demands for other languages, mostly from workers’ trade unions, and resorted to experiments in simultaneous interpreting as a means to provide wider multilingualism and a stronger democratization of international conversation. It was at the ILO where simultaneous interpreting was tested in 1925 and 1926 and where the first course on this modality was organized in 1928, so as to recruit interpreters for that year’s conference (Baigorri-Jalón 2014).

Only a few months after the signing of the Treaty of Versailles and the establishment of the Geneva institutions, the 1st Comintern Congress was held in Moscow (March 1919), which included in its machinery a corps of professional translators and interpreters. Faced with similar problems to those encountered by the Geneva institutions, it also established a Translation Bureau (July 1919) (Chernov 2016: 137–138). Language difficulties in the conduct of the 2nd Comintern Congress deliberations (1920) prompted the creation in 1921 of a Commission to introduce Esperanto and soon after to approach the matter by studying the option of telephone technology to carry out simultaneous interpreting (Chernov 2016: 140). The ‘Soviet’ interpreting apparatus was conceived by V.Z. Epshtein, further improved by Isaac Goron, and it was used in the 6th Comintern Congress, almost in parallel with the 1928 ILO Conference (Chernov 2016: 141–145). Much as it happened in the West, Soviet interpreters’ working conditions improved between the 1928 Comintern Congress, where a Party maximum wage was applied, and the 6th KIM (Communist International of the Youth) Congress in 1935, when “a very generous rate of 55 rubles per day” (the average wage of a Russian worker in...