For Organizers

If you're organizing an event that you would like us to provide interpretation services for, please let us know as early as possible, but at least 6 weeks in advance:

• Event title, date(s) and location(s), and a short description
• Why volunteers vs professional interpreters? (We want to support social and cultural causes, but if there's budget for professional interpreters, please hire them! They have bills to pay as well!)
• Any existing technical infrastructure that exists in the venue(s) or that you have access to, e.g. booths/cabins, mixers/FOH, producing tools, headphones, microphones, signal distribution equipment etc.
• What budget, if any, do you have to cover travel expenses, equipment rental, etc.
• Can you offer food & drink for the team?
• For multi-day events, can you offer accommodation?

Do not make plans with us before you have a firm commitment. We might not be able or willing to support.

We will let you know within a week or two whether we want to support your event. If so, we will start recruiting volunteers. Your chances of getting people to “sign up” to translate at your event go up:

• the earlier you reach out
• if the event is in one of our “hubs”, like Berlin
• if the event is on a weekend
• if you can reimburse travel expenses and/or offer accommodation
• etc.

Keep in mind we are volunteers doing this in our spare time.

Ideally, you can provide us with the following setup:

• A soundproofed booth per language for each stage
  • Positioned so the stage can be seen from the booth
    • Ideally the booth is elevated above viewers
    • Alternatively a screen in the booth with the current slides can suffice
  • With a desk, desk lamp, and 3 padded chairs
  • At least 2 free power sockets near the desk
  • Water and ideally cough drops (sage) or similar for the interpreters
  • Points of contact or numbers for tech issues and stage managers
  • [C3] Ideally a phone to communicate with stage managers
  • 2 interpretation consoles for each booth, with the following features:
    • Headphones (or worst-case a 3.5mm Headphone connector) to listen to stage/speaker audio
      • Floor volume can be controlled from the console/by the interpreter
      • Ideally the microphone audio can also be directly fed back into the headphones, with controllable volume
      • Ideally an additional headphone output for a 3rd interpreter
    • Microphone to get the interpreted signal to the mixer/FOH
      • Each microphone should be switchable (on/off)
      • A cough button to temporarily interrupt the signal is optional but appreciated
      • Ideally, both microphones can be active simultaneously
• A way to manage, mix, and route audio, usually a mixer/FOH - provided and managed by you or people you hire
• A way to distribute the interpreted signal - provided and managed by you or people you hire
  • If there is a public stream, it should have a ducked version of the floor audio mixed in
  • Distribution to the live audience is possible via our website, if the audio can be fed into our mumble server. Contact our techs for this.

If your event is (partially) virtual, and translators will be working remotely, you will need to provide these things:

• A low-latency audio and video stream of the presentations.
  • This can be the same signal that eventually is streamed to viewers, but it must be taken from the video direction system as early in the processing pipeline as possible.
  • It should be in a format that can be viewed with common software, for example an RTMP or HTTP stream with codecs supported by VLC, or a WebRTC-based solution viewable through a common web browser like Chromium or Firefox.
  • The video quality should be good enough to be able to make out reasonably sized slides and demos.
  • The signal could be the program output, or it could be a multi-view of the program and preview signals, plus additional ones.
  • The sound must include all speakers, and may contain talkback from the director or similar. If the talkback audio is part of the translators stream, the interference must be limited to the most urgent communications only.
• A Mumble bot that can take the translation audio from the c3lingo Mumble server, and insert it into the program stream. The translators will be speaking into a mumble channel specific to the event (if you have multiple rooms, one per room). It is your responsibility to obtain the audio from there.
  • We will coordinate to set up the channels, and allow your bots access to the appropriate rooms.
• A dedicated person as point-of-contact who:
  • can monitor and fix issues with both the special stream and the Mumble integration,
  • be the communication bridge between the translators team as well as the event organizers and the video director.

Typically, we can do two languages at once; usually DE/EN, and a second language like FR, ES, etc. This means that you should plan to take two mono audio sources for the two translations.

• EventInfra supports non-profit/community-run events by providing network infrastructures
• C3VOC is a working group consisting of Chaos Computer Club enthusiasts running lecture recording and streaming infrastructure on and for different chaos events or conferences