At the League of Nations and during the San Francisco Conference ( 1945 ) before the formal founding of the United Nations , the interpreters played a vital and visible role in meetings . In consecutive interpretation , conference interpreters spoke from the same dais as the original speakers , and the speaker stops periodically so that the interpreter can interpret what has just been said while the participants in the meeting viewed and listened to the consecutive interpreter . The conference interpreters were often exposed to selected or large audiences and the media . In the late 1940s and the early 1950s , United Nations officials introduced simultaneous interpretation as a preferred method for the majority of UN meetings because it saved time and improved the quality of the output . Simultaneous interpreting – a mode that confined the interpreters in glass-encased booths aided with earpieces and microphones – arose in the 1920s and 1930s when American businessman Edward Filene and British engineer A. Gordon-Finlay developed simultaneous interpretation equipment with IBM , and was also used in the post-World War II Nazi war crime trials held in Nuremberg , Germany
San Francisco Conference
United Nations Conference on International Organization
United Nations Interpretation Service