When the Nuremberg sentences were read out on 1 October 1946, simultaneous interpretation had just passed its trial by fire. A newborn organisation was watching closely: the United Nations, founded the year before, faced exactly the problem the International Military Tribunal had faced — only permanent, and on a far larger scale. Dozens of countries had to understand one another, every single day, without the sessions dragging on forever.
The man who bridged the two worlds was Léon Dostert, the same French-born American colonel who had built the headset system at Nuremberg. He is remembered as the father of simultaneous interpretation at the UN, where he carried the technique soon after the trial. Not everyone welcomed it. Many veteran interpreters, trained in the consecutive method of the old League of Nations, distrusted the newcomer: they found it mechanical, rushed, less faithful. The argument was settled on 15 November 1947, when the General Assembly resolved to adopt simultaneous interpretation as a permanent service, to be used alone or alongside consecutive as each debate required.
Five languages, then six
The UN was born in 1946 with five official languages — Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish — though only English and French served as everyday working languages. The others gained ground over time: Spanish became a working language in 1948, Russian in 1968, Chinese in 1973. On that same 18 December 1973, resolution 3190 added Arabic as the sixth official and working language of the Assembly. Six ever since, and every official document is issued in all six — an exercise in linguistic parity with no equal in any other institution on earth.
Watching that machine run is a quiet spectacle. Around the chamber sit six glass booths, one per language, each staffed by two interpreters who swap out roughly every half hour, because the concentration of listening and speaking at once drains the brain in minutes. When someone takes the floor in a language a given booth cannot cover, the relay kicks in: the speech is first interpreted into a pivot language —often English— and the other booths pick it up from there. Arabic and Chinese lean on relay so heavily that their interpreters work in both directions, into their mother tongue and out of it, which is why those booths usually hold three people rather than two.
Speed, nuance and the idiom trap
The interpreter's real enemy is not ignorance but haste. Delegates read prepared statements at breakneck speed to squeeze more into their slot, yet faithful interpretation holds up best at around one hundred to one hundred and twenty words a minute; push beyond that and something slips. To speed you add register: in diplomacy, a badly rendered shade of meaning can turn into an incident. UN interpreters are, by trade, invisible and neutral; their voice must not add a single degree of temperature to what is said.
The hardest things of all are idioms, proverbs and jokes. The classic case was Nikita Khrushchev's in 1956, when he told Western ambassadors a phrase rendered as "we will bury you". The West read it as a military threat; in fact it was a Marxist expression meaning something closer to "we will outlive you" — communism will attend capitalism's funeral. Khrushchev himself had to clarify it years later. The phrase was genuine, but its reception as a threat remains the textbook example of how language transplanted without its context can bend history.
Behind the booths works a silent army of document translators, backed by tools such as UNTERM, the UN's public terminology database, which fixes across all six languages the exact word for each concept. And since 2010 the house has kept its Language Days: French on 20 March, Chinese on 20 April, English and Spanish on 23 April —the anniversary of the deaths of Shakespeare and Cervantes— Russian on 6 June for Pushkin, and Arabic on 18 December, the date of that 1973 resolution.
From the glass booths to today
The Nuremberg interpreters proved it could be done; the UN's turned that feat into daily routine and, in the process, defined a craft: absolute fidelity to meaning, neutrality, command of register, an awareness that a word can outweigh an army. It is the same demand that runs, in written form, through that first Nuremberg experiment and through the work of a sworn translator who today certifies with their signature that a document says in one language exactly what it said in another. The medium and the setting change; the responsibility of being the bridge on which two worlds meet does not.