Tony’s description reveals a feature of the setup I hadn’t been aware of - a pair of interpreters working as a team. That calls for a more complex setup than the one originally dealt with in the FemProComuns commons conference - an additional room perhaps: “the booth”, in addition to the source-language room and the destination-language room? There’s more to this social space than originally meets the eye?
The interpreters don’t need to hear one room in one ear and an other audio channel in an other ear. They need be able to switch easily between different audio channels to listen to the right language and to switch their microphone to the right room to be able to do the interpretation but as it’s simultaneous they need to be able to do it quickly so with not so many click. Here is how looks like for example an interpreter controller for Zipdx !
And here a proposal for BBB founded in Github, but I don’t know if someone will develop it.
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Hi,
In Gihub today, someone posted some research they are doing for the interpretation feature on BBB : https://board.net/p/bbb-hackathon-team1
He is saying that they would like to develop it with Fairkom. Did anybody know them ?
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Hi @camille! About Fairkom (fairkom.net): they offer open source cloud services like NextCloud and Rocket.chat with a Single Sign On service, just like we do at CommonsCloud.coop, and they also offer Jit.si and BBB, here’s there service levels: https://erp.fairkom.net/fairkom-videokonferenzen (a tiny bit more expensive than meet.coop).
I don’t think that their users are cooperative members though. But I see a lot of shared values. Maybe we should reach out to them to invite them to explore collaboration?
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cool.
“The majority of the UXFund will support work addressing the needs of at-risk persons and/or vulnerable populations (e.g. ethnic minorities, LGBTQI communities, people with disabilities, and women), but there are limited funds available for deeper tool re-architecture, if clear usability-enhancing outputs are presented.”
Could we relate this to any of these minorities? Maybe we can think of human rights activists at risk? Allowing for secure and effective multilingual online meetings should be in scope.
Deadline: “All applications should be submitted before October 30, 2020.”
Anyone interested to take this up and draft a little proposal?
Hi,
It looks like there has been some progress on simlutaneous interpretation feature in Fairkom. I saw this message on Github today :
Great news - based on our MVP concept fairkom has implemented a very rudimentary solution for simultaneous translation. And is still working on it. The source code is available here: https://git.fairkom.net/clients/wechange/bbb-livetranslation/-/tree/feature/translation-2.2.6
@ffdixon - As many organizations have asked for this feature, could you give a rough estimate how much it would cost to incorporate the modifications of the HTML5 client into the main repository? I know it will require a lot of work, especially considering accessibility issues, recording, etc. But I am very confident we will get all the funding that is needed.
I don’t know if someone from mee.coop has been in contact with them to see how we can collaborate.
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I’ve just sent you an email with the same information @camille 
I got a contact at wechange. As I understand it they try to figure out how to get these changes into the main release of BigBlueButton, which probably is not so easy.
Hi everyone,
Some development has been done on BBB for the interpretation feature. If you want to try the beta version, you can sign up here : https://translation.meet-modular.com. I will try it this week or next week with our interpreters.
Happy new year everyone !
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happy new year, Camille!
That’s interesting news indeed! I tried it but couldn’t figure out any changes in the user interface, but maybe I missed something. Let us know!
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I think they took off the feaure yesterday afternoon. But it’s back again this morning. I hope I will have time to test it before they stop this try out. I have a meeting with my interpreters to test it next Monday!
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Hi everyone,
I tried the new interpretation feature with 2 interpreters and here are my feedback that I shared on github : The system works quite well. It takes us a bit of time to understand it but then it was really smooth. Our only issue was the quality of the sound. In the floor we didn’t have any problem. The sound was good but when we were on the language channel, the sound was not good enough to understand well the interpreter. One of my interpreter told me that it can come from some technical adjustment to get a better sound on the line. An other issue was the delay of hearing the interpreter when it starts talking.
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Hi everyone,
Just saw that now there is a code to add translation feature in BBB. I don’t know if it’s something possible for meet.coop. See below the last info I found.
The code for a modified BBB HTML5 client supporting live translation has now been published here Files · feature/translation-2.2.31 · chat / fairblue · GitLab
A time consuming challenge was to guarantee good audio quality of the translation tracks, when translators use windows laptops, where we had problems with echo cancellation, the floor output was always disturbing the translators’ voice. This has been finally solved by disabling echo cancellation on the translator’s SIP channel make translation audio depend on main audio connection / echo test (#64) · Issues · chat / fairblue · GitLab
Some UX fine tuning and documentation works is ongoing and we do not have install scripts yet, but there are guides how to replace the HTML5 client, here is one of them Audio sharing · Wiki · hosting / fairteaching · GitLab
Creating a PR so that this function gets into the BBB core would be another larger task and would require some attention from the BBB maintainers. Please do not ask when this will happen. Releasing a stable BBB 2.3 version has priority in the next months. Meet the developers of the translation tool at this chat channel fairchat
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The practical matter of translating and interpreting within a BBB session is the kind of thing that the emerging Community programme will want to engage with, in its toolstack thread. So I’m cross-posting this between the topics for future reference. Given that this topic is well established here, I’d say the discussion can safely rermain here under ‘Product’?
Hopefully soon we can have funds to work on incorporating these technical solutions, like Camille shows above in the thread. Until then we will need to continue with social workarounds, like Monica c.s. have documented. Now some of us are involved in the Cities for Change Forum that takes place partially at meet.coop servers. Some of the sessions are multilingual, so we have had a prep session with session organisers and translators.
Following our testing session yesterday, Silvia from Guerilla Media Collective (translators) has put together some practical instructions for simultaneous interpretation on BBB. In the end the document is a bit long, but in turn it has step-by-step instructions for both moderators and interpreters: Interpretation procedure for BBB meetings - Google Docs
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BTW the session is from the European Municipalist Network: Can Municipalism Change Institutions? - Programme - Cities for Change - Cities for Change You might want to join, at 19h CEST today.
Or this session on Sunday afternoon by XR Radical Democracy - Programme - Cities for Change - Cities for Change
Here is the Guide for simultaneous translations on meet.coop that we compiled together with people from Guerilla Media Collective, Cities for Change, European Municipalist Network and others.
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Hello everyone, this is fascinating and impressive. I’ve been working as both a professional and volunteer interpreter for years and would love to plug into work around developing this feature for BBB. Is there any way to get involved in testing, brainstorming, etc for random people like me??
Thanks.
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Simultaneous translation in BBB - here’s a tweak of BBB from k054, via @jamie at MayFirst, thanks 
It’s based on chat / fairblue · GitLab but if you just follow that shared notes won’t work, so I added a few related steps.
We use ldap authentication but if you don’t intent to do that you can skip the greenlight/.env editing part.
The code is in this markdown doc Nextcloud
Do post here with results if you try this? Good luck 