At the dawn of simultaneous interpreting in the USSR

This chapter provides new evidence on the invention of simultaneous interpreting (SI) in the 1920s using records from Russian archives discovered by this author. SI was first implemented in the USSR in 1928, which coincided with the first full-scale use of SI at the International Labor Organization (ILO) in Geneva. Language problems of the era due to the declining use of French and waste of time associated with consecutive interpreting (CI) required a new solution, which was SI, proposed by E. Filene in the West and Dr. Epshtein in the USSR. Epshtein’s three-interpreter method was perfected by engineer Goron and implemented at the 6th Comintern Congress in 1928. Finally, interpreters/ translators’ profiles and working conditions in the 1930s are described briefly.