[WSIS CS-Plenary] Collaboration software debate

[Vittorio Bertola]

Tracey Naughton ha scritto:
> Milton
> 
> For clarification purposes, the main reason the CSB decided not to use 
> the collaboration tool for on-line meetings, is linguistic. Whilst there 
> were other issues, if this barrier did not exist I believe that most of 
> the CSB would willingly use the tool. Perhaps you could deploy some of 
> your time in developing a translation solution.

I am all in favour of multilinguism - in fact, I think I'm the only one 
who at last ICANN meetings made the point that they should not translate 
leaflets and website, they should actually make policy-making processes 
multilingual, translate working materials and meetings, etc.

At the same time, it seems to me that renouncing to have meetings 
because there is (yet) no real time translation tool is as ideological 
as renouncing to have meetings because there is (yet) no free software 
tool for conferencing. "Ideological" is not a bad word or a bad reason 
per se, but I just want to make the point that you apparently would 
treat the free software concerns differently from the francophone 
concerns. I think that either we find an "ideology-friendly" solution 
that suits all different souls of civil society, or we go for a 
"reality-friendly" solution that does as well as possible in the present 
situation, without preventing things from happening.

May I ask how do you solve the linguistic problem at physical meetings? 
Do you have real time translation, scribing, or what?

Also, perhaps someone could explore the state of the art in real time 
automatical speech-to-text + real time translation, though I think there 
is no hope that that would actually work well.

Thanks,
-- 
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