The virtual monopoly enjoyed by French as the language of diplomacy ended in the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, immediately after the First World War. The arguments used by United States President Woodrow Wilson and British Premier David Lloyd George in favour of English as the second official language of the Conference were eventually successful. French and English were also adopted as the official languages in the institutions derived from the Paris Conference: the League of Nations, the Permanent Court of International Justice and the International Labour Office (ILO). Those decisions created a demand for conference services -- written and oral. That is how modern conference interpretation began.

The demand for interpretation services was met by staff interpreters (the League of Nations was the first universally-oriented organization to have them) and freelance interpreters, whose incipient market began in the 1920s. A staff interpreter's selection process was made a requisite in the League's early days. But since conference interpreters did not exist previously, the selection was based on the assumption that knowing the languages and having a broad culture générale were sufficient criteria for the job. The ability to interpret from one language to another was considered more as a natural gift than a skill that could be acquired. The interpreting process was viewed by those who observed it as a phenomenon of miraculous alchemy. The truth is that the League interpreters learned their trade through on-the-job training.

Interpretation in those early days was mainly consecutive. Interpreters listened first to the original speech, complete or in fragments, and then delivered it in the other language from the same podium as the speaker. This fact made interpreters highly visible figures, and led to a higher profile and higher professional fees in the freelance market than their counterparts -- the translators of written texts.

The period between the two world wars was the age of glory of consecutive interpretation; but simultaneous interpretation was tested as early as in the 1920s. In simultaneous, the person interprets while the speaker is delivering the speech and finishes only a moment later than the speaker. A Boston entrepreneur, Edward Filene, in 1925 proposed a simultaneous interpretation system at the League of Nations. That proposal evolved as technological innovations were added, and it was fully tested in the 1928 ILO Conference, where representatives who did not necessarily know English or French.

The simultaneous mode required different skills from those used by consecutive interpreters. The organizers of the 1928 ILO experiment, sponsored by Filene, took care of both the technical equipment and the interpreters' training and selection process. Unlike in the consecutive interpretation market where female interpreters were an exception, four of the nine successful trainees in the simul-taneous interpretation course were women. Although there was still a long way to go, this was a sign of the current feminization of the profession. Interestingly, none of the actual consecutive interpreters of the League, staff members and freelancers alike, wanted to take part in the course. That was a clear signal of their hostile attitude towards a method that would place them entirely in the background.

Simultaneous interpreters performed satisfactorily in the 1928 test during the full length meetings of the ILO Conference. These involved up to seven different languages at a time. Such interpretation was thereafter adopted by the ILO for its annual conferences. But the international environment in the 1930s was far from ideal for technical innovation or for political experimentation in the field of multilateralism, and the coming of age of simultaneous interpretation took place in the Nuremberg trials.

The Nuremberg Tribunal was made up of jurists from the United States, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the United Kingdom and France who spoke three different languages. The defendants and most of the witnesses spoke German. With consecutive interpretation, the proceedings would have lasted too long. If the victors wanted the trial to have an immediate effect on public opinion, something had to be done to solve the language problem. Colonel Dostert, a French-American with some interpretation experience, was invited to adapt in Nuremberg the system previously used at the ILO, whose patent had been acquired by an American company, IBM.

Apart from the necessary technical adjustments, the main problem was finding interpreters ready to work in the trials. The veterans from the League were busy in the newly created United Nations Organization and those from the ILO continued in it. Besides, their linguistic combinations would not have matched the whole range needed in Nuremberg. Thus, interpreters were recruited among a variety of candidates, particularly expatriates uprooted by revolutions, wars and forced migrations of the previous 30 years.

The selection was made under extreme time pressure by people who had not practised simultaneous interpretation. Being able to listen in one language and speak simultaneously in another was often the only criterion applied. There was very little time -- sometimes no time at all -- to train selected candidates who were often catapulted directly into the booths. For many, the Nuremberg trial was an on-the-job training centre for simultaneous interpretation, but few of the interpreters continued in the profession after the trial. Although Nuremberg proved that simultaneous interpretation was feasible, time-saving and cost-effective, not everybody was happy with the results.

At first, UN meetings were serviced only with consecutive interpretation. A one-hour statement in Russian -- nothing unusual in those days -- required a three-hour meeting only for interpretation into English and French, and another meeting for the reaction. Inspired by the Nuremberg example, the UN General Assembly decided to give simultaneous interpretation a try during the fall session of 1946. Col. Dostert was transferred for this purpose from Nuremberg, accompanied by three young interpreters from his team. The consecutive interpreters, who monopolized the Service in 1946, were against the experiment, arguing that simultaneous interpretation would produce a parrot-like ineffective translation, requiring alien devices and depriving delegates of the time to think that consecutive interpretation allowed. The real arguments were probably the automatic reaction against technological innovation, the fear of losing their monopoly and eventually perhaps their jobs, and their feeling that working in a booth instead of from the podium meant a loss of status. The pro-simultaneous arguments were simply that the system would allow: a more authentic debate, with immediate reactions; the active use of all five official languages; and, above all, huge savings in time and money.

The test successfully took place in 1946 in the Fifth Committee. A full-dress version was repeated in the 1947 General Assembly, which then decided that simultaneous interpretation should be progressively adopted in all the meetings -- with a few exceptions, such as the Security Council where both modes coexisted for many years, and the Advisory Committee on Administrative and Budgetary Questions where only consecutive interpretation continued to be used for a long time. The consecutive interpreters' initial hostility toward the simultaneous group was soon overcome when both teams were administratively unified in 1947. Most of the consecutive interpreters worked satifactorily thereafter in the booths.

A major innovation in interpretation is now being tested: the remote interpretation mode. Its main feature is that the interpreter is physically in a different place from where the speech is delivered, and hears and sees the speaker through remote-distance devices. Early tests began in the 1970s; since then, communications technology has evolved in a revolutionary manner, and sound and vision technology is already available.

What seems to be the issue in the present circumstances is striking a balance between cost-effectiveness and quality of interpretation. Some of the disadvantages pointed out by critics of remote interpretation, such as the quality of the sound or the fact that interpreters cannot see the delegates' non-verbal reactions, are by no means exclusive to that modality: they happen all the time in UN meeting rooms and nobody makes a big fuss about it. Other drawbacks, such as the sense of alienation, recall similar arguments by the consecutive interpreters when simultaneous was introduced.

Indeed, the adoption of remote interpretation would still require adjustments on the technological side. But they would also have to be made to the mind-set and skills of interpreters, that is their attitudes and their training, in order to adapt them to the new technologies and the changing working conditions, which incidentally are also affecting the in situ simultaneous mode.

Although minds are generally disinclined to change, one might think that of all people, interpreters, who throughout history have been marked by their flexibility to operate in more than one language and culture, would be able to adapt most readily to the new environment generated by technological advances.