CCAMLR-39 Goes Virtual With Remote Interpretation
An Overview of CCAMLR-39
The Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR) convenes annually a group of meetings consisting of two key sessions: The Scientific Committee meeting; and the annual meetings of the Commission. Both meetings are typically held in four official languages using in-person Simultaneous Interpretation.
In October 2020, CCAMLR moved their meetings online with the help of Congress Rental's Remote Simultaneous Interpretation and live English captioning solutions. The virtual sessions would connect over 200 viewers and 100 active speakers from around the world.
Client Challenges
CCAMLR-39 was the first time the organisation had held such a complex set of meetings virtually. They faced three critical challenges:
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Managing 100 active speakers during the online sessions, 40 of which were heads of delegation (HoD). If any of the HoDs disconnected, the session chairman would have to suspend the session until they reconnected.
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Delivering high-quality Remote Simultaneous Interpretation and live English captioning to over 300 online participants through a secure connection.
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Sourcing an online platform that met their specific needs and a provider with the capacity and knowledge to train all staff, speakers, and interpreters in preparation for the meetings.
The Solution
CCAMLR collaborated with Congress Rental to create a custom solution that met their needs consisting of four parts:
Platform
CCAMLR held the meetings virtually on the Congress Rental Remote Interpretation Platform to securely deliver high-quality, encrypted video and audio streams to online participants in 40 different countries across the world.
Captioning and Recording
Congress Rental assessed multiple live captioning solutions and implemented high-quality, low-latency captioning. Congress Rental also recorded all meeting sessions with redundant hardware.
Monitoring
Before each session, Congress Rental technical producers tested the audio quality of each speaker and interpreter. The technicians were also responsible for troubleshooting and recovering any HoDs connection issues.
Training
Congress Rental trained all speakers, staff, and interpreters on the platform to ensure that the meetings ran smoothly. In total, Congress Rental gave over 65 hours of speaker training and more than 80 hours of interpreter training over eight weeks.
145+
hours of interpreter and speaker training
60+
hours of language support given
300+
unique users during the event
6100+
hours of total user engagement
"I'd like to thank you and the Congress team for a super job in very challenging circumstances with very long working hours. The meeting was a success only because of the excellent preparation, rehearsals, training etc that you all helped develop and deliver."
David Agnew (Executive Secretariat CCAMLR) October 2020