The World Social Forum (WSF) (choose your language on the site), which ends today in Porto Alegre, Brazil, has less money to spend on computing than the World Economic Forum (WEF) held in Davos, Switzerland. But at both events, many different languages were spoken, meaning that simultaneous translations were an absolute necessity. If the WEF can afford professional translators and costly computers, in Porto Alegre, translators are volunteers, and the software to distribute the translations is open-source. The NIFT (Nomad Interpretation Free Tool) was already used for the 4th WSF held last year in Mumbai, India. The free software, which runs on a simple PC, collects and digitizes the translations from the interpreters before broadcasting them to a variety of devices. In fact, the technically-advanced NIFT allows for real-time streaming over the Internet of speeches in several different languages. Read more.
First, here is a short description from Babels, the international network of volunteer interpreters and translators, as told in this article from the January 2005 issue of Red Pepper (scroll towards the middle of the article).
Babels, the network of volunteer interpreters and translators, is another good example of prefigurative politics. From its birth in a squatted medieval tower in Florence to its difficult coming of age in London, Babels offers a non-market alternative to professional translation services -- relying on solidarity and a massive collective effort of voluntary labour to make the Forum a space in which language diversity (and, through that, political and cultural diversity) can flourish. As such, it is a political actor within the space of the Forum and not simply a 'service provider.'
Babels was also involved in the creation of NOMAD, an international network of people, committed to putting the essential technologies into the public domain.
The aim of Nomad is to extend the GNU perspective to other technological issues, including the re-appropriation of the knowledge and the control of the technologies by the users in their digital, electronical and analogical forms. The Nomad’s sphere of activities at present ranges from communication to renewable energy.
This issue of re-appropriation of knowledge is closely linked to the political perspective of developing local production in an economy based on solidarity. The Nomad network is not a technical service provider but a political network run on a voluntary basis.
Now, let's return to Red Pepper for a brief description of NIFT.
In economics, we borrowed from the Bourbons; in foreign policy, we drew on themes fashioned by the nomad warriors of the Eurasian steppes. In spiritual matters, we emulated the braying intolerance of our archenemies, the Shi’ite fundamentalists.
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)
The Nomad Interpretation Free Tool (NIFT) combines a piece of free- software to record and transmit different translated versions of speeches, with various forms of audio transmission (such as FM radios or magnetic hearing-aid loops). To fully appreciate NIFT, it is worth thinking of it in terms of the existing professional interpretation equipment. NIFT is technically more advanced than these systems in several respects because it is fully computerised. This has positive side effects in terms of the number of different languages that can be offered simultaneously or, even more innovatively, in allowing for the real-time streaming over the internet of speeches in several different languages.
The diagram below shows the network infrastructure used at Porto Alegre (Credit: NOMAD). You can find a larger version of this image on this page.
And on this photograph taken during the preparation of the summit, you can see that the equipment used is far from being sophisticated (Credit: NOMAD). There are many other photographs available on this page.
As NIFT is an open-source project, you'll find more technical information, including all the files if you want to use the software yourself, on this SourceForge.net page.
If you want to listen to some audio streams from the Forum, this page contains all the necessary instructions.
Finally, I didn't find a single press review about the use of NIFT at the WSF. I just heard a 30-second airing segment on a French radio which stated that even if the translation system was cheap, the organizers didn't have enough money to fully equip the Summit. Apparently, only 4 of the 40 rooms were equipped. If anyone has first-hand information about this particular aspect of the WSF, please post your comments below.
Sources: Roland Piquepaille, January 31, 2005; and various websites
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