ABSTRACT
Simultaneous interpreting first saw the light of day in the early 1920s when Edward Filene and A. Gordon-Finlay, using early telephone technology, developed the first so-called telephonic interpreting equipment. It was not until the fall of 1945, however, that simultaneous interpreting made its televised international debut during the Nuremberg Trials. Until then, interpretation at multilingual conferences was provided mainly in consecutive mode, requiring interpreters to take notes during the delivery of a speech in order to reconstitute it in a different language once the speaker had finished (see Chapter 1 for further discussion of the history of simultaneous interpreting). Some of the first conference interpreters eagerly embraced simultaneous interpreting, while many of them categorically rejected it. Over a half a century later, however, it has all but replaced consecutive interpreting in international meetings, and this is particularly true for meetings with more than two conference languages.
