Peoples Health Movement Assembly, Savar (Bangladesh)

By Laura Valencia, Iffat Jantara, and Susana Barria

Introduction

In November 2018, the People’s Health Movement (PHM) held their fourth international assembly (PHA-4) in Savar, Bangladesh. PHM expected about 1500 participants for this 5-day program. The program included plenaries (panels with all participants in attendance) and sub-plenaries (up to six parallel sessions). One of the immediate goals of PHM was to make their event a participatory multilingual space. To make this possible, they made key internal decisions, started preparations early, coordinated equipment, trained fresh interpreters, and ultimately coordinated four official and four ad-hoc languages. This case study will cover these aspects and summarize how the event ultimately came together as a plurilingual and participatory success.

Initial decision-making

PHM has many years of experience in ensuring multilingual access in their spaces. While planning PHA-4, the coordination committee immediately identified an interpretation coordinator who took responsibility for the process. A few crucial decisions were raised, with the first being how to decide the pivot language, which languages the organizers would coordinate centrally (‘official languages’), and which languages would be coordinated in an ad-hoc fashion during the event itself. In this case, it was decided that English would be the pivot language of the event, with French, Spanish and Bangla as the three other official languages. For French and Spanish, a pool of solidarity interpreters with the required language combinations were available. However, the decision to include Bangla as an “official language” meant that a Bangla team of 12 interpreters had to be trained for the event.

Planning Questions

1 What languages will be spoken by participants at this event?

a. Among them, which will be the “official” languages of the event?

b. Which will be organized on an ad-hoc basis?

2 What kind of technology will we use?

a. How much equipment is required for the official languages and ad-hoc languages?

b. How much back up equipment is required?

c. What can we borrow and what can we buy?

3 Based on the venue, what kind of infrastructure do we need? (i.e. booths)

4 Based on the questions above, what is the required budget?

Interpreter recruitment

Susana, the interpretation coordinator, started to build a team for the event about four months in advance. Ultimately, about 12 Bangla interpreters would be required and 20+ interpreters for FR-ES-EN.

Meanwhile, in Europe, more than 60 people had expressed an interest in attending the program in Bangladesh as solidarity interpreters. The interpreter coordinator for French, Spanish and English, decided who would be selected based on language combinations, availability, and experience as an interpreter (professionally and with movements). He also verified the interpreters he didn’t know personally, to make sure that everyone attending would have a flexible attitude.

✓ Began recruiting Bangla interpreters

✓ Recruited and finalized ES-EN-FR team

✓ Mobilized a strong coordination and support group

Practice and skill-building

Two months before the event, while the ES-EN-FR team was nearly finalized, the Bangla team still had a long way to go. After the initial trainings conducted by Susana in Dhaka and Savar, the responsibility shifted to Iffat to recruit, train, and coordinate the Bangla interpreters. The strategy was to cast a wide net of enthusiastic volunteers and through the trainings narrow down the final team based on skills. At the outset, based on the first groups of people trained, it was quite obvious it would be a challenge to recruit and train enough people. Therefore, Iffat began to coordinate a series of trainings for the Bangla interpreters in the months preceding the workshop along with building a collective glossary as a teambuilding and vocabulary activation exercise.

Practicing whisper interpreting in pairs

You can read about Iffat’s experience in initial recruitment and training of interpreters here.

As the event approached, the Bangla volunteers’ WhatsApp group grew active with glossary submissions. All members blocked their schedules for a final interpretation training immediately preceding the event, where the final team would be selected. Over Skype, Zia, Laura, and Iffat developed a method for evaluating interpreters in preparation.

✓ Developed a roster of Bangla interpreters

✓ Held guided practice sessions

Equipment and Infrastructure

Meanwhile, Susana was coordinating with volunteers working on equipment to see what technology could be bought and what had to be borrowed. Since there were five rooms total that would need to have language access for three languages in each, that meant 15 booths total for the official languages. Ad-hoc languages were also planned (3 or 4), and back up sets were also required. So, in total, about 24 sets of equipment were required for the event.

The coordination also decided that the best listening-devices would be mobile phones with FM radios. Participants who had FM radios on their own phones could use their own phones by tuning in. Anyone without a working FM radio on their phone could borrow a phone during the PHA by paying a small deposit during the registration process.

✓ Organized sufficient equipment

✓ Organized booths

✓ Had enough equipment and flexibility to deal with unpredictable challenges

Pre-event evaluation and training

In the days leading up to the event, a special pre-event training was conducted for the Bangla interpreters to familiarize themselves with the equipment and the booths. There were two objectives of the pre-event training: selecting the final team of interpreters and training them on the equipment they would be using. Regarding evaluating and selecting the final team, Claire writes, “It is a little difficult not to disappoint people of good will, who want to help and participate, while guaranteeing a proper level of quality for mono-lingual event participants. In other words, you have to find the right balance between ‘how can the event benefit the volunteers’ and ‘how can the volunteers benefit the event’.”

✓ Select final interpretation team

✓ Provide maximum practice in the venue setting with the equipment itself on topics related to the conference

✓ Cross-fertilization between experienced and novice interpreters

Coordination during the event

By the time the event started, the team already had a good group dynamic. The night before the event, all the interpreters (Bangla and international) came together for a meeting where equipment and logistical details were shared. A booth plan was also shared, so all interpreters could engage in session-specific vocabulary activation.

The event had sessions taking place in two buildings. The technical support team consisting of Michael, Laura, Iffat, Max and Rebecca floated between the halls. Battery changes, microphone replacements, and transmitter swaps were not uncommon. Different technical issues arose, made more acute by the fact that all of the sets we were using were effectively “back up equipment” as the new equipment was stuck in customs. This had the technical support team literally running from building to building to swap out equipment in order to keep sessions running on schedule. With the interpretation team, we also tried to put a ‘listener’ in each session who would provide feedback on volume (signing to hold microphone further away, for example).

One of the questions raised by the Bangla interpreters on the first day was whether Hindi interpretation could be provided since some of were comfortable in Hindi. This raised the point that Arabic and other ad-hoc languages could also be provided in a more systematic way. After discussing with the technical team, the ability to set up equipment for ad-hoc language was clarified and streamlined and we began to coordinate ad-hoc languages as well (in a less ad-hoc way!).

Nepali speakers approached the interpretation desk, were quickly trained on the equipment, and ended up working most of the event. Arabic interpreters were arranged from within the French/Spanish team. Swahili and Portuguese were also interpreted in some events, meaning the ad-hoc languages totalled to five.

A final innovation that emerged towards the end of the event was using shadowing to ensure cross-accent comprehension. Some of the international interpreters had not had much exposure to South-Asian ‘Englishes’ and therefore struggled to understand and interpret at their best proficiency. One of the coordinators ended up shadowing English to English, which the French and Spanish interpreters used through a relay system. Since we have many accents in our multilingual spaces, this might be a good solution for when there is a challenging difference between speaker and interpreter even in the same language.

✓ Ensured positive group dynamic between all interpreters

✓ Daily meetings for Q&A and booth planning

✓ Trained coordinators in technical aspects to provide technical support

✓ Took a more active role in coordinating ad-hoc languages and ensuring more language access

✓ Improved interpretation quality by providing English-English shadowing