Historical developments in conference interpreting An overview Jesús Baigorri- Jalón, María Manuela Fernández- Sánchez and Gertrudis Payàs Introduction Oscar Wilde 1891: 162 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 trans lation, 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 per spective, 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 profes sion, 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 ser vices 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).
