In just over two weeks, around 2,000 participants from World Scouting’s 175 Member Organizations will gather in Cairo, Egypt for the 43rd World Scout Conference, the first time this core Scouting event will meet in person for seven years.
The Conference offers a unique opportunity for members to reconnect, exchange, and strengthen the unity of the Movement, showcasing a rich diversity of ideas and cultures – as well as languages.
This event marks an important step in World Scouting’s efforts towards greater language inclusivity, building on lessons learned from past events and leveraging skills built over the past triennium.
Over the last three years, a dedicated team of volunteer translators and interpreters has been established and trained to support World Scouting events. This period also saw the systematisation of interpretation for online meetings, the implementation of standard processes to translate documents, and the increased and controlled use of machine translation and artificial intelligence.
As a result of this work, World Scouting is now preparing to hold its most linguistically inclusive event to date. Leading up to the Conference, its volunteer languages team has been diligently translating key documents and interpreting the online pre-engagement webinars. This has supported the preparations of individuals and delegations in the organisation’s two official languages (English and French) and two working languages (Spanish and Arabic).
And their work does not stop there. During the Conference, a team of volunteers will continue making crucial materials available in all four languages and that all plenary discussions are interpreted.
A significant innovation at this Conference is the ability for both in-person and online participants to follow over half of the breakout sessions in all four languages. This will be facilitated by the event’s new hybrid format and the live streaming of many sessions, harnessing technological advances in live subtitling, live translation and artificial intelligence.
