By the way, to all of you who will be present: it is important to check if there is a committee/person who has the specific responsibility for interpretation issues, and who is a member of the national organising committee. This is an essential point, irrespective of who does the interpreting. And interpretation, like all other aspects of communication is what makes or breaks a forum... 

Greg & I are both going to be in Mali in a few days time working with the Via Campesina. Greg plans to stay on to see about reactivating our trainees there and possibly setting up more training. We are both available to come to Dakar and do training there. 

If there are any points/questions during the meeting, you can possibly get a pretty much real-time response from me...

In solidarity

Judith
---- Envoyé avec BlackBerry® d'Orange ----

-----Original Message-----
From: hitchman@...
Date: Sat, 1 May 2010 06:52:35 
To: Jason Nardi<jason.nardi@...>; <communication-commission-discussion@...>; Gregoire Seither<gregoire@...>; Yan Brailowsky<yan.babels@...>
Cc: Mamadou Diouf<midiouf@...>; Nfally<nfally@...>; Nicolas Haeringer<nicolas.haeringer@...>
Subject: Re: [Communication commission discussion] For the IC meeting:agenda
	proposal for the 1st day

Here is a short text that I have written very quickly, given the short time frame. Greg, Yan please feel free to add anything else you feel is missing...
---
Challenges and opportunities for Babels in the Dakar WSF 2011

Babels is a horizontal global network of interpreters created at the Florence ESF in 2003  to help overcome the language barriers to building another possible world. As such it has been a member of the IC, and has been involved in many fora. 

The decision to remain what is essentially a collective rather than a structured body has been a choice of the members. It means that there is no Board, no "official" representation, and, most importantly, no self-funding. There are solid existing protocols and guidelines that help any coordinators to work with a national WSF/ESF organising Committee in setting up interpretation

 This is a key challenge in many ways. It means that we have no funding to fly to Mexico or other meetings. If we are contacted well in advance, we can generally set up and coordinate a local team of interpreters, or at least identify those who are committed and live within a reasonable distance. 

We are not "service providers". We are activists. A great many of us are professional conference interpreters, some are community interpreters, others have less experience. One of the challenges of Babels has always been to train competent local people enough to achieve true linguistic diversity and facilitate grass-roots participation for people in their own languages, and move away from the "colonial" languages. The approach taken in the last WSF to use a budget of 1 million US$ to pay professional 100 "service providers" to interpret goes totally against the POA charter: it perpetuates a world of capitalist elitism. For the same sum Babels could have organised five times as many interpreters (500), ensured that there were indigenous peoples' languages etc... 

The Babels  approach is particularly suited to Africa, where most educated young people speak at least two, and other three or four languages. We successfully trained a team for the Bamako WSF, and there were 480 people trained at Nairobi. This would have meant Kiswahili would have been widely available, had the equipment worked (but that is another, if related issue)...

What do we need to be able to make it work for Dakar?

The first condition is TRUST. If people are not prepared to trust us, how can we contribute?

The second condition is INCLUSION in the process. As we have no funds - we contribute our skills, but have no funds - we can not fly to meetings. We need to be included in the WSF Dakar planning process as of NOW to help train, interface, draw up budgets, recruit interpreters etc. We need to be part of the planning process as of now. There are several very experienced Babels members in Dakar. Gregoire & I are both willing to help, as will be many others...

What can we do? Hopefully we can help to ensure that the WSF would be, as you have so appropriately stated in the COMCOM documents, accessible to local West African grass-roots in all their local languages. It should even be possible if there is interpretation properly organised in local languages (Woloof, Mandingue, Diolo, Bambara... ) to stream it directly onto local community radios, which are what everone listens to... This is a huge challenge, but one that we are fairly sure that Babels can help to meet. 

Judith


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-----Original Message-----
From: Jason Nardi <jason.nardi@...>
Date: Sat, 1 May 2010 07:36:14 
To: <communication-commission-discussion@...>
Cc: Judith Hitchman<hitchman@...>; Mamadou Diouf<midiouf@...>; Nfally Badiane<nfally@...>; Nicolas Haeringer<nicolas.haeringer@...>
Subject: Re: [Communication commission discussion] For the IC meeting:agenda 
	proposal for the 1st day

Dear Grégoire and Judith,

we're always struggling with the language issues and the interpretation in
particular.  After 10 years of World, Regional and local social forums,
where are we at?  What progress and what challenges do we face?  How can we
make it a central issue - a political one as well, since the Forum stands
for inclusion and participation at all levels - so it is not considered just
a logistical / organisational matter?

It is unfortunate that neither of you can be at the IC meeting in Mexico,
but I and hopefully others will pose those questions and ask for a real
debate to take place.  It probably would be useful if you could write a few
paragraphs with Babels experience up to date.

cheers,
Jason

2010/4/29 Grégoire Seither <gregoire@...>

> le 29/04/10 13:49, hitchman@...  <hitchman@...
> > a
> écrit :
> > My question is the following: interpretation is a key issue for
> successful
> > communication. This is why Bables is (at least theoretically) attached to
> the
> > Communication Commission. (....)
> > How can we all work together to make this part of the communication a
> success?
> > Neither Gergoire nor I shall be in Mexico, but Nico Haeringer, who is
> close to
> > Babels will be there, even if he has a different specific fund-raising
> > mission...
>
> Hello all
>
> I will THEORETICALLY be in Mexico, if the IC meeting is held sometime
> around
> the US Social Forum... Since the only way for me to get into the border is
> to cross illegally, with the help of our friends from United Farm Workers.
>
> So I will be flying in via Mexico-City and can attend a meeting there,
> before going on to El Paso.
>
> But I am not sure that the CI is still very convinced of the "key issue"
> aspect of linguistic diversity in social forums. The Belem Forum has shown
> that they do not care about it....
>
> Greg
>
>
> --
> Gregor Seither
> Interprète de conférence / Conference interpreter (ASLI)
> Traducteur certifié / Certified translator
> Français, Deutsch, English, Español
> Tel. +33 (0) 673 760 174
> http://www.interpretetraducteur.wordpress.com
>
>
>
>
>
> --
> Archive:
> http://openfsm.net/projects/communication-commission/lists/communication-commission-discussion/archive/2010/04/1272544966450
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