Communication across the Iron Curtain in Svalbard: Interpreters and multilinguals

This article discusses cross-language communication in one of the few contact zones of the Cold War: the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard (Spitsbergen), where the Soviet Union maintained a permanent presence. Communication between the office of the governor of Svalbard and the administration of the Soviet mining villages occasionally involved ad hoc interpreters, who were either Norwegian bilinguals or Soviet citizens with some knowledge of English or German. From 1950 onwards, the consulate in Barentsburg employed an interpreter, whose services Norwegians often relied on. However, it was not until 1978 that a permanent interpreter was appointed to the governor’s office in Longyearbyen. Available memoirs and photographic materials enable us to evaluate the professional training of Norwegian and Soviet interpreters, who played a key role in fostering mutual understanding in the archipelago.