Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

The Nuremberg Trials of Nazi war criminals in 1945 was one of the most important courts of law in modern history and also an unprecedented event in the history of translation. The panel of judges and the prosecuting teams came from the four Allied powers—the United States, Great Britain, France, and the Soviet Union—speaking three different languages, and the defendants spoke a fourth language, German. Nothing like this had ever happened before. In courts located in a national jurisdiction, interpreters read consecutively, repeating in the language of the court what the foreign defendant has just said, and then repeating what the court says to the defendant (when the client is not being addressed directly, it may be done at low volume in a “whisper translation,” or chuchotage). Two-way oral translation of this normal kind obviously slows down the proceedings. But four-way translation? In twelve directions? Consecutive interpreting would have so lengthened the International Military Tribunal’s case that everyone might have lost the thread. For the Nuremberg Trials, something new was needed.

Technology for speeding up multilingual interaction already existed. The Filene-Finlay Speech Translator had been tried out a few times in the 1920s by the International Labour Organization in Geneva. Users of the system had a telephone in front of them, and when a delegate could not understand what was being said she picked up the handset, dialed in to the exchange, and heard the speech in a different language (only two—French and English—were involved at that time). The translators sat at the back listening to the speech and speaking their translation of it into a soundproof awning called a Hushaphone, connected directly to the telephone exchange. The original Speech Translator was also used in 1934 for Adolf Hitler’s address to a Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg for live broadcast on French radio.[151]

The Speech Translator was designed and promoted not for rapid two-way interaction in multiple languages but for speeches read aloud from prepared written text—what Germans call gesprochene Sprechsprache, “spoken speech language,” the standard genre of politicians and public figures the world over. The Filene-Finlay device was acquired by IBM in the 1930s, and the company offered a complete set of partly secondhand but much enhanced and extended equipment for free to the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg. This act of generosity was to prove an epochal event in the way in which we now conceive the possibility of international communication.

Members of the court, including the defendants, were equipped with headphones and microphones, from which wires trailed over the courtroom floor to the exchange. Wires ran from the exchange to four separate translation teams in different compartments. That made for a lot of complicated wiring, but the real magic was what happened in the interpreters’ booths.

Members of the court had switch dials to select which language channel they wished to listen to. The output was produced by four teams of three interpreters each. The English team had a German interpreter, a Russian interpreter, and a French interpreter sitting side by side, listening on headphones, and repeating in English what was said in the other languages; the setup was the same in the three other booths. Altogether, thirty-six interpreters were recruited from among the three hundred language professionals hired by the court and the prosecution and defense teams to work at this brand-new and not obviously manageable task of instantaneous oral translation. Each of the twelve-strong teams worked eighty-five-minute shifts on two days out of three and was expected to rest in between. From the very start of the new profession, simultaneous interpreting was recognized as being one of the most exhausting things you can do with a human brain.