Rotary International is a worldwide organization of business and professional leaders that provides humanitarian service, encourages high ethical standards in all vocations, and helps build goodwill and peace in the world. Approximately 1.2 million Rotarians belong to more than 31,000 Rotary clubs located in 166 countries.

AVW-TELAV has provided simultaneous interpretation services to Rotary International for 10 years, including events in Singapore, Scotland, Spain, Argentina, Australia, Canada and the United States. They recently held two major conferences hosting delegates from districts spanning the globe. The first was the International 2004 Convention in Osaka, Japan. The meeting, for which some 50,000 attended, introduced the current President, his objectives for the coming year; and offered several workshops for attendees.

We provided equipment for six languages of simultaneous interpretation for the General Session in the Osaka Dome over four days. We also provided simultaneous interpretation services for the workshop sessions held at the Osaka International Convention Center. Our technicians deployed FM transmission to broadcast the interpretations to delegates in all sessions.

The other meeting was the Rotary International 2004 COL (Council on Legislation), held in Chicago, IL. The COL meets every three years to vote on proposed changes to the legislation of Rotary International. The 700 delegates, flying in from all over the world are usually current and past Rotary leaders from their respective region.

Seven hundred Infrared receivers were distributed to delegates who had the option of listening to the proceedings in French, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese or English.

For voting on the 500 resolutions presented to the delegates, AVW-TELAV technicians set up an Audience Response System (ARS) with 600 wired keypads. In addition, we developed a special splitter box for our speaker timers, so that we could have a single timer control two sets of podium lights and three sets of large audience lights. The COL planning team previously used our ARS services in 2001 and decided to use it again because of the system's interactivity, speed and accuracy.

The Rotary's challenges in producing conventions of this scale and importance are sizeable, but our experience and technical savvy once again rendered any apprehension needless.