ICANN68 - Remote Simultaneous Interpretation
An Overview of ICANN68
Held over four consecutive days, from the 22nd June to 25th June, ICANN68 gave ICANN supporting organisations and advisory committees, as well as the broader ICANN community, the opportunity to have face-to-face discussions on various issues about ICANN's activity and the management of the domain name system (DNS).
It was their second virtual meeting and their first policy forum, with remote participants from across the world. ICANN needed a secure and robust Remote Interpretation platform to ensure that nothing would go wrong during the four days. Congress Rental provided its customised platform to manage the interpretation for the event.
The Challenges
ICANN planned the event across two main meeting rooms, with each requiring interpretation channels. ICANN would need to stream six different languages to a combined audience of up to 400 participants split between two main meeting rooms. Each language would need to be streamed through separate, strictly moderated language channels to prevent any issues from occurring. For example, if an interpreter’s audio was affected by local bandwidth, moderators could switch to the partner interpreter to resolve the issue immediately. Finally, ICANN required that all languages, in all sessions, be recorded.
The Solution
​Congress Rental was chosen for its simple integration with ICANN’s preferred online conferencing platform, Zoom. To support the event, Congress Rental provided the platform, interpreter training, monitoring of interpretation, and recording of the event. The Congress Rental RSI platform accommodated six concurrent language channels with teams of four interpreters per language, providing seamless simultaneous interpretation throughout the event.
Before each session, Congress Rental technicians tested the audio quality and reviewed computer settings for each interpreter. For the entire event, a dedicated team maintained constant communication with interpreters through a private chat function to support them. A separate team monitored the recordings. After each session, audio recordings were exported and delivered, while Congress Rental prepared the platform for the next session. In Singapore, an entire hardware and technician team was replicated and on standby to provide a backup and redundancy for any unforeseen emergencies.​
Congress Rental also implemented innovative deep-linking to bring participants onto the platform. Participants could either scan a QR code or click a link to be delivered straight to the event channels on the Congress Remote app with all event tokens pre-loaded, significantly improving the participants’ user experience. The event was a complete success, and both the client and participants were incredibly satisfied with the remote interpretation service.
170+
hours of interpreter training
9
separate language channels
300+
unique users during the event
6000+
hours of total user engagement
"I want to thank you all for your excellent support, not only during the ICANN meeting but also throughout the preparation phase. We have all appreciated your patience, your expertise and your assistance! It has been a very fruitful experience for all of us. We look forward to working with you in future meetings!"