Outside the realm of international meetings, conference interpreting remains a profession shrouded in mystery. Conference interpreters, bound to strict professional secrecy by their code of ethics, are usually invisible and rarely make the news – even less often perhaps than their counterparts working in the field, in courtrooms or in hospitals. On the occasion of 100 years of conference interpreting, therefore, this volume pays tribute to a profession that is deeply intertwined with – and often considered a catalyst of – the world of multilateral diplomacy. It does not aspire to provide an exhaustive account of an entire century of interpreting history. Instead, it was conceived as a collection of scholarly articles and opinion pieces illustrating what different stakeholders make of this profession one hundred years on: how they see its past, its present and its future. The contributions to this volume were collected at a two-day event held in Autumn 2019 that was co-organized by the University of Geneva and the International Labour Organization with the support of the International Association of Conference Interpreters. Beyond a star-studded line-up of speakers and a highly diverse list of attendees, this event also boasted an unconventional format geared towards participant interaction, with the bulk of the meeting dedicated to discussions and exchanges in the guise of interactive panel discussions and a town hall. Perhaps unsurprisingly, therefore, this volume’s format is similarly unconventional, with the official opening and closing addresses to the conference providing a frame for a series of scholarly articles along with a set of questions addressed, in any of the event’s three working languages (English, French and Spanish), by different stakeholders in opinion pieces and direct replies. Our 100-year journey begins at the ILO, whose Director General, Guy Ryder, reminds us of how, from its inception in 1919, conference interpreting has allowed this international organisation to fulfil its mission, by allowing discussions between different stakeholders to be held on an equal footing regardless of their foreign language skills. In Ryder’s words, “…when the interpretation stops, the discussion stops”. The Director General reminds us that, while Paris was the birthplace of conference interpreting, Geneva, and more specifically, the ILO, was the birthplace of simultaneous conference interpreting. Close cooperation with the professional association (AIIC) on one hand and universities on the other, argues Ryder, will ensure that the professionals in the booths can act as a “comfort blanket” for delegates who know that “however incoherent or illogical they may be speaking in their own language, somebody in the booth is going to make a bit more sense of it somehow”. What the beginning of this journey looked like at the ILO is visually documented in Jesús Baigorri-Jalón’s lead article, in which the ‘chronicler of the profession’ takes a closer look at the birth of simultaneous interpreting. Using photographic evidence from the Organization’s historical archives, he vividly describes how this new, or at least repurposed technology came about, how it was implemented, and how the first interpreters having to use it were selected and trained. Baigorri-Jalón makes the point that, although the first-ever simultaneous interpreting course was organized by the ILO in early 1928, “the real interpreting system was not the electrical setting but the interpreters’ brains and vocal cords”. This point is probably not lost on a profession profoundly affected by the technological changes brought about by the pandemic that engulfed the world only a few months after the centenary celebrations. Against the political-historical backdrop sketched in the lead article, in the first two chapters a total of eight scholarly papers address a selection of topical issues relating to the practice of conference interpreting as well as the training of conference interpreters. Franz Pöchhacker and Monika Stögerer look back over a half a century of research on anticipation in conference interpreting – in other words, the interpreter’s seemingly magical ability to predict what speakers are about to say. Replicating methodology approaches already used some 25 years earlier, they revisit the hypothesis that anticipation might be linked to interpreting directionality in a small-scale experiment on interpreting students, finding corroborating evidence for an “into B” advantage that might, however, be mitigated by a proficiency disadvantage. Maya de Wit, Onno Crasborn and Jemina Napier take look at interpreters’ need to predict what speakers will say from a slightly broader perspective and compare how sign language conference interpreters’ preparation strategies are affected by the type of sign language they work with (i.e., national sign language or international sign). Their qualitative analysis of a naturalistic event substantiates the idea that interpreters use the same materials to prepare for conferences regardless of sign-language typology. These materials, however, seem to be used rather differently, suggesting that how rather than what interpreters prepare is indeed conditioned by target language and by extension, target audience. Andrei Kalinin and Maria Mikhailovskaia look beyond the traditional multilingual conference rooms of international organisations and analyse the impact of different settings on the simultaneous interpretation of political press conferences. A comparison of corpora of simultaneous interpretations provided (in situ) at diplomatic settings with those provided (remotely) at media settings suggests that setting type might indeed condition interpreters’ preference for form-based vs. meaning-based approaches. In the last contribution to this chapter, Carlo Eugeni and Rocío Bernabé address the somewhat provocative question of whether the future of simultaneous interpreting might be written. To do so, the authors provide a contrastive process analysis of simultaneous interpreting and real-time subtitling. In their discussion, they touch upon sociolinguistic and psycho cognitive elements of both tasks before providing a comparative skill analysis, coming to the conclusion that respeaking might not only be cognitively comparable to interpreting, but also allow interpreters to broaden their skillset and increase the added value of their service. Skills are also at the centre of Lucía Ruiz Rosendo and Marie Diur’s contribution, which opens the chapter on conference interpreter training with an analysis of the skills conference interpreters need in today’s (institutional) professional environment. Their overview of skill acquisition, the development of expertise and current approaches to conference interpreter training leads them to a critical discussion of the employability of conference interpreters in international organisations, in which they especially highlight the ever-increasing speed at which speeches are read and the importance of adjusting interpreter training accordingly.
