Project of International Meeting

Project of International Meeting of Babels and Networks for Alternative Translation and Communication Systems

 Proposed Dates : Saturday-Monday 6-8 May 2006
 Proposed Venue : Paris (France)

1- Context

Babels is a network of volunteer interpreters and translators with more than 9000 members worldwide, created during the first European Social Forum in Florence, in 2002. Babels is a virtual international network, which materializes only during “projects” usually defined within the framework of Social Forums. Since Florence, Babels participated in :
 European Social Forums : Paris, 2003 : 1000 interpreters / London, 2004 : 500 interpreters / Athens, 2006 : in preparation
 Americas Social Forums : Quito, 2005 : 100 interpreters / Caracas, 2006 : in preparation
 Mediterranean Social Forum : Barcelona, 2005 : 200 interpreters
 World Social Forums : Mumbai, 2004 : 300 interpreters / Porto Alegre, 2005 : 600 interpreters.

Babels became one of the actors of these Forums and made it possible to raise the number of languages from 4 since the first WSF in 2001 to an average of 15. The increase in the number of languages with interpretation, although not yet totally satisfactory, is in direct correlation with an increase in the participation level of people and groups using these languages.

Babels mobilizes volunteers in increasingly diverse areas and allows hundreds of people to participate directly in the Social Forums, some of them for the first time. Volunteers are of course selected based on their linguistic abilities following a method which aims at mixing professionals with a number of non-professionals, and activists with non-activists.

These methods of organizing raise a number of issues and problems, and meeting and exchanging experiences and methods are rare outside of a Forum process.

Alternative technical equipment projects, initiated by the Nomad network during the WSF in Mumbai 2004, try to match technical solutions with political decisions. These projects are based on making available technical systems for transmitting sound in conference rooms, archiving these conferences live, streaming them to the Internet, in an attempt to build a readily-available, indexed “memory” of the debates and conferences in the Social Forums.

In order to make this happen, dozens of volunteer technicians started mobilizing in 3 continents. They tried to implement large scale technical solutions, for an average of 30 000 persons in as many as 50 different rooms. They tried to implement new sound transmission systems, all the while developing a sound-processing open-source software which indexes and archives sound, and allows interpreters to manage their input and languages, and the recording of their work.

2- Goals

Faced with a huge number of volunteers coming from different geographical areas and with differing experiences, faced with the rising importance of languages, the need to promote access to alternative knowledge, faced with the simultaneous or written translation needs of the Social Forum processes, it seems important, after almost 4 years, to pause for breath and to make it possible to have a real exchange of experiences.

This is why we thought of organizing an international meeting organized by, and for, those who were directly involved in these processes, and open to any organization participating in the building of Social Forums around the world.

Social Forums are generally prepared by organizing committees based in the country where forums take place : in India, in Brazil, in France, in the United Kingdom, in Ecuador, in Spain, in Venezuela and soon in Kenya, Mali and Morocco. But the increasingly open, participatory and international nature of the social forum processes raise a number of issues : the lack of means, of experience, of free discussions. It is also to address these issues that we propose to organize an international meeting.

3- Outcomes

One of the achievements of this international meeting could be the production of some sort of “Overview of the Organization of Translation for the Social Forums”. After discussing the different aspects of this question in several morning workshops and presenting the results of this preparatory work in afternoon meetings to all the other participants, we could be able to produce a clearer set of documents on how we carried out the various experiments in “Translation” during the previous social forums, analysing positive and negative elements, etc. This meeting would allow us not only to document our various past experiences, but to lay the groundwork for future, efficient and innovative projects concerning “Translation for the Social Forums”.