Interpreters as key agents in reframing interwar power relations: the Paris Peace Conference as narrative turning point

Abstract

Much attention in Interpreting studies has been devoted to the Nuremberg trials, a landmark event for our profession since they are considered the birth of simultaneous interpretation. In turn, the role played by interpreters at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 has raised considerably less interest among academics, although the visible functions of scribes, translators and advisors uniquely performed by interpreters at this historical moment made them relevant agents in the geopolitical configuration of subsequent international relations. The Paris Peace Conference was an important milestone for two closely intertwined disciplines: International Relations and Conference Interpreting studies. For the former, it set the departing point for drafting treaties that promoted the creation of international institutions that would later become decisive in world politics. For the latter, it meant the institutionalisation of this profession in the political arena, as this was one of the first occasions in which the role of interpreters was made visible to the very powerful stakeholders involved in decision-making processes.

This proposal will look into the role of diplomatic interpreters as tools for exerting symbolic power (Bourdieu, 1991, p. 170) in the negotiation of the Treaty of Versailles, and the repercussions thereof in reframing the totalizing grand narrative (Lyotard, 1979) that prevailed in politics throughout the interwar period, on the basis of the following assumption: the choice of English and French as the Paris Peace Conference main working languages (and the subsequent exclusion of German) had direct impact on the ensuing conformation of alliances and animosities among the parties involved in the negotiations and, therefore, in world politics. An interdisciplinary approach drawing on sources from International Relations, Interpreting Studies, and, most specifically, the dynamics between language and power addressed by Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough, 1989; Van Dijk, 1998; Chilton & Schäffner, 2006) will be used to analyse a corpus of minutes of conferences organised by the League of Nations between the years 1918 and 1943 that run like a red thread in describing the role of interpreters as co-constructors of political metanarratives.