At the Dawn of Simultaneous Interpretation in Russia

This is a brief outline of the early history of simultaneous interpretation in Russia from its first use at the 6th Comintern Congress (1928). The highlights of the early postwar period included the active participation of Soviet interpreters in the Nuremberg Trial and the Tokyo Trial of major Japanese war criminals. The real baptism of fire for a large group of Russian conference interpreters was the International Economic Conference held in Moscow in 1952. Since the 19th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, simultaneous translation has been more and more widely used on such occasions. The technique and hardware of simultaneous interpretation, at first somewhat crude and primitive, were gradually upgraded approaching international standards.