In simultaneous interpreting, the interpreter sits in an interpreting booth, listening to

the speaker through a headset and interprets into a microphone while listening.
Delegates in the conference room listen to the target-language version through a
headset.

Simultaneous interpreting is also done by signed language interpreters (or

interpreters for the deaf) from a spoken into a signed language and vice versa. Signed
language interpreters do not sit in the booth; they stand in the conference room where
they can see the speaker and be seen by other participants.

Whispered interpreting is a form of simultaneous interpreting in which the

interpreter does not sit in a booth in the conference room, but next to the delegate
who needs the interpreting, and whispers the target language version of the speech
in the delegate's ears.

None of these modes of interpreting is restricted to the conference setting.

Simultaneous interpreting, for instance, has been used in large conferences, forums
and whispered interpreting may be used in a business meeting.

The conference interpreters, in a way, becomes the delegates they are interpreting.
They speak in the first person when the delegate does so, not translating along the
lines of 'He says that he thinks this is a useful idea...'The conference interpreting
must empathize with the delegate, put themselves in someone else's shoes.

The interpreter must be able to do this work in two modes: consecutive

interpretation, and simultaneous interpretation. In the first of these, the interpreter
listens to the totality of speaker's comments, or at least a significant passage, and
then reconstitutes the speech with the help of notes taken while listening; the
interpreter is thus speaking consecutively to the original speaker. Some speakers
prefer to talk for just a few sentences and then invite interpreters. The interpreter can
perhaps work without notes and rely solely on their memory to reproduce the whole
speech.

However, a conference interpreter should be able to cope with speeches of any

length; they should develop the techniques of interpreting. In practice, if interpreters
can do a five-minute speech satisfactorily, they should be able to deal with any length
of speech.
It is also clear that conference interpreters work in 'real time'. In simultaneous, by
definition, they cannot take longer than the original speaker, except for odd seconds.
Even in consecutive they are expected to react immediately after the speaker has
finished, and their interpretation must be fast and efficient. This means that
interpreters must have the capacity not only to analyze and resynthesize ideas, but
also to do so very quickly.

In most cases nowadays simultaneous interpreting is done with the appropriate

equipment: delegates speak into microphones, which relay the sound directly to
interpreters seated in sound-proofed booths listening to the proceeding through ear-
phones; the interpreters in turn speak into a microphone which relay their
interpretation dedicated channel to headphones worn by delegates who wish to listen
to interpreting. However, in some cases, such equipment is not available, and
simultaneous interpreting is whispered. One of the participants speaks and
simultaneously an interpreter whispers into the ear of the one or maximum two
people who require interpreting services.

Clearly, simultaneous interpreting takes up less time than consecutive. Moreover,

with simultaneous it is much more feasible to provide multilingual interpreting, with
as six languages (UN) or even eleven (European Union). Given this advantage and
widening membership of international organizations, more and more interpreting is
being done in simultaneous.

Conference interpreting was born during World War I. Until then, important
international meetings were held in French, the international language at the time.
During World War I, some high-ranking American and British negotiators did not
speak French, which made it necessary to resort to interpreters. Especially after the
Nuremberg trials (1945-46) and Tokyo trials (1946-68), conference interpreting
became more widespread.is now used widely, not only at international conferences
but also on radio and TV programs.

The first experiment in simultaneous conference interpreting dates to 1928, the VIth
Comintern Congress. There were no telephones. The speaker's message reached the
interpreters' ears directly. The first booth and headphones appeared in 1933 at the
XIIIth Plenary Meeting of the Comintern Executive A group of Russian
simultaneous interpreters from Moscow formed part of the conference interpreter's
team servicing the Nuremberg Trials and another one participated in the Tokyo
Trials of the Japanese war criminals.

The interpreters who worked at those first conferences came out of the Nuremberg
Trial Interpretation Service where they had made their Ebute as simultaneous
interpreters. They had been young graduates of the Military Institute of Foreign
Languages (established in 1942 on the basis of the Military Department of the
Moscow Pedagogical Institute of Foreign Languages), where they were trained as
military translators interpreters (Mishkurov 1997), Moscow Institute of Foreign
Languages, Moscow University, and the Institute of Philosophy and Literature
(IFLI),as well as several staff members of the Foreign Ministry and the Society for
Cultural Exchanges with Foreign Countries took a part in training interpreters
(Gofman 1963:20). Some of the most capable among them formed the first post-war
group of free-lance conference interpreters in Russia.

An International Economic Conference serviced with simultaneous interpreting was

conducted in 1952 in Moscow, employing over fifty simultaneous interpreters with
six conference languages: Russian, English, French, German, Spanish and Chinese.
The lead language-changing mode is a purely national system based on one native
tongue common to all members of the team of simultaneous interpreters, which in
fact serves as a "lead language"

Since 1962 the United Nations Language Training Course in Moscow, at the
Maurice Thorez Institute of Foreign Languages, set itself as a school where 5 to 7
simultaneous conference interpreters are trained annually for the Russian Booth of
the UN Secretariat in New York, Geneva and Vienna.

A decade later, in 1971, a postgraduate Advanced Translating and Interpreting

Schools at the same college introduced a two-year course of simultaneous
conference interpretation in A to B and B to A language combination, if so desired
by the student.

Simultaneous translation studies began after the invention of the multichannel tape
recorder and were done at roughly the same time by several researchers at the end
of the sixties and the beginning of the seventies ( Henri C.Barik in the United States
and Canada 1971; D.Gerverin the United Kingdom 1974; I. A. Zimnyaya in Russia
and others.
Shiryayev writes that simultaneous interpretation as a specialized activity consists
of Steps or Actions, each of which has several stages. The most important stages are:
stage of orientation, stage of the search for, the translation decision and execution
stage. When the speaking rate in the source language is slow, enough, stage one of
step two follows stage three of step one there is no simultaneity of listening and
speaking, in fact.

The simultaneous interpretation is a complex type. It is bilingual, sense- oriented.

Historically, research in conference interpreting can be broken down into four

periods; early writings, the experimental period, the practitioner's period and the
renewal period (Gile 1994)

The early writings period covers the 1950s and early 1960s. During this period,
some interpreters and interpreting teachers in Geneva (Herbert1952, Rozan 1965
Ilg 1959) and Brussels (van Hoof 1962) started thinking and writing about their
profession. These were intuitive and personal publications with practical didactic
and professional aims, but they did identify most of the fundamental issues that are
still debated today.

The experimental period includes the1960 and early 1970s. A few psychologists
and psycholinguists such as Treisman, Oleron and Nanpon, Goldman-Eisler,
Gerver, and Barik became interested in interpreting. They undertook a number of
experimental studies on specific psychological and psycholinguistic aspects of
simultaneous interpreting and studied the effect on performance of variability such
as source language, speed of delivery, ear-voice span (i.e. the interval between the
moment a piece of information is perceived and the moment it is reformulated in
the target language),noise, pauses in speech delivery, etc.

During the practitioner's period, which started in late 1960s and continued into the
1970s and early 1980s, interpreters, and especially interpreters' teachers, began to
develop an interesting theory. There was much activity in Paris, West Germany,
East Germany, Switzerland and other European countries, as well as in Russia,
Czechoslovakia and Japan. Most of the research was speculative or theoretical
rather than empirical, and most Western authors, except a group at ESIT in Paris,
worked in relative isolation.
From a cognitive psychological point of view, simultaneous interpretation is a
complex human information processing activity composed of a series of independent
skills. The interpreter receives a meaning unit. He begins translating and conveying
meaning unit 1. At the same time, meaning unit 2 arrives while the interpreter is still
involved with the vocalization of meaning unit 1. Thus, the interpreter must be able
to hold unit 2 in some type of echoic memory or short-term memory before
interpretation. (Gerver 1971), Furthermore, while conveying unit 1, the interpreter
is also verifying and monitoring the correct delivery of that meaning unit. The
interpreter must learn to monitor, store, retrieve, and translate source language input
while simultaneously transforming a message into target language output at the same
time.

There are, in fact, so many activities involved during simultaneous interpretation.

Pedagogical approach should tease these activities apart, differentiate the component
skills, and where possible, provide training experiences in each one.