Did you know that water covers 72% of the Earth and that only 2.8% is fresh? That each person in the world needs 50 liters per day to live in dignity but consumes an average of 137 liters per day? Who helps the 2.2 billion people who live without access to drinking water? The Chamber of Trades of the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur region (PACA) has been trying to raise awareness of this issue and organized a seminar to help French and Italian companies acquire skills to reduce water consumption in their operations. Cultures Connection attended the event to offer simultaneous interpretation services in Nice from French to Italian and vice versa.
Interpreting companies’ environmental challenges
The PACA region’s Chamber of Trades supports local businesses in the development of their services, ongoing training and learning in management and innovation. It shared these data on the current global water situation this past January 10 at a meeting with chambers of commerce and universities in France and Italy.
These institutions will be in charge of developing a project for 140 companies in the food sector to reduce water consumption in their commercial activities. They will try to improve on the figures, which estimate daily per capita water consumption at 151 liters in France and 213 liters in Italy.
Two languages united by simultaneous interpretation
Cultures Connection, whose head office is in Nice, prepared a team of two professional interpreters to work in pairs and the necessary technical equipment of 2 microphones and 25 headphones so that the participants of the activity did not miss a single detail.
This was an operational meeting to finalize decisions on the administrative management of the project, its study and execution, and its communication, so the conversations varied between technical and commercial ideas that required advanced knowledge of environmental, scientific and business issues on the part of the interpreters.
The professionals took turns every 20 minutes, as established to guarantee the quality of the work and rest. Simultaneous interpretation services are based on the premise of interpreting speech from one language to another while the interlocutor speaks, in order to make communication more fluid. This is only possible with microphones and headphones.
They had to interpret from French into Italian and from Italian into French, according to the nationality of the person who asked a question or was about to explain something about the project. It is worth noting that the participants were from the PACA region in France and the Liguria and Piedmont regions in Italy.
Cultures Connection has successfully provided a new interpretation service for international organizations and is now at the disposal of the Chamber of Crafts and Trades of the PACA region, who will have to meet again with representatives of the chambers of commerce and universities to move the initiative forward. World Water Day will soon be celebrated on March 22 to raise awareness of the global freshwater crisis and there is still much to be done.
