World Social Forum Part II

We finally got our hands on a schedule of events the next morning, but we soon found out that the real schedule was always changing and the printed one was only a rough guide. When we finally arrived at the venue for the first event we wanted to see, we were suprised to find not, as we expected, an in-depth discussion of the effects of NAFTA, but a live hip-hop performance and breakdancing demonstration. We later discovered that in the 8 hours since our program had been printed, someone had decided that the building would host the childrens WSF, and all the events scheduled in it for the week had been moved -- but no one knew where to.

We spent the rest of that day looking for event after event, all of which turned out to be cancelled or to lack translation. One of the great things about he WSF is that it promotes a diversity of ideas and perspectives by allowing any participating organization to register as many events as they would like. This prevents any one sect or group from controlling the agenda. The downside of this open door policy is that anyone and everyone can and do register events, and no one checks up to see how serious these organizations are, or whether they have even shown up at the forum.

As a consequence there are about a hundred different events scheduled for each sessions (4 sessions per day), of which I would estimate about 60 events actually take place, of which about 10 are translated into english. The trouble is, how to figure out which 10?


I found the lack of translation very alienating. Its hard to participate in any kind of discussion unless you speak the language fluently; my basic spanish did nothing for me in trying to understand an analysis of participatory economics, for example.

I appreciated the efforts of the translators we did meet, but found their system very haphazard. As luck would have it, 2/3 of the volunteer translators had not made it to the conference, never having received their plane tickets.

So, we couldn`t trust the program`s listing of what would be translated, especially since the attending translators had adapted their approach to include "guerilla translating", as one volunteer put it -- basically showing up at events they were interested in and translating those on the fly. I didn`t really grasp how this system was good for anyone, because the participants didn`t know where the translators would be, and the translators didn`t know if there would be equipment for them at the events they chose.

In the end, we resolved ourselves to attending only those events in the larger venues (more likely to occur, and to be translated), and also those events put on by english speakers (we figured those would be in English but translated into Spanish). This is what I found particularly alienating; that we were limited to participating in events primarily concerning / put on by english North Americans. It forced us to put language over interest; to place importance on a linguistic link with the presentors, rather than on an ideological link. All in all, I believe the problems with translation contributed to a divide between North & South, which was contrary to the point of the forum.

And I can only imagine how much this problem would have been magnified if I spoke something less common than English.

Our second day at the conference ended with the following outcomes: the NAFTA/ hip-hóp mix-up that Bryan mentioned; an event about the new Canadian/Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) that was partially translated; an event about independent/alternative media at which the speaker (Gore Vidal) failed to show up; and two more headaches.