I entirely agree with you on the fundamental point that ICANN’s work must become more accessible to non-English-fluent communities worldwide.   In fact on Wednesday of this week we posted the next draft of the Frameworks and Principles for Accountability and Transparency.  As you know amongst those, for the first time, is a Translation framework.  We've modified it to accommodate a range of comments, but it lays down a firm commitment to multi-lingual access.

But that general commitment means nothing unless we actually change our approach.  To that end we have several short and long-term initiatives underway that will be of interest to the At-Large community and I hope demonstrate that we are doing more than many realize on this front.

1.     Staff, led by the Director for At-Large, are testing an interface to email communications that will allow incoming emails to be automatically machine translated into multiple languages.  I have purchased software called Systrans which will assist ICANN mailing lists to become multi-lingual.  A successful beta-test on the At-Large’s mailing lists in Africa and Latin America are a major reason why we have decided to invest in expanding the use of this approach.  It's not perfect but it will be a major assistance.

2.         The Los Angeles ICANN meeting will feature at least 15 sessions with simultaneous interpretation (not including the At-Large sessions that will have interpreters).  This is more than any previous ICANN meeting.  We are committed to simultaneous translations at meetings - and that also means we will welcome public comments and questions in languages other than English in the public forums for the first time.  In addition, more major documents will be available in non-English editions than any previous meeting, including the draft Strategic Plan, the Frameworks for Accountability and Transparency and documents relating to the introduction of New gTLDs, IDNs, Domain Name Tasting, and WHOIS (to name a few policy development activities of interest to At-Large).  We will also hold consultation sessions on the Frameworks and the Strategic Plan in Russian, French and Spanish simultaneously.  There will be a separate session on Translation at the Los Angeles meeting on Wednesday October 31 at 2pm.   This session will be dedicated to translation within ICANN and will outline ICANN's current work, plans for the future, and lessons learned.  The session will have simultaneous translation in Chinese, English, French, Spanish and Russian.  Sebastien Bachollet – who has been a keen advocate of improved multi-lingual communication and a participant in ICANN for many years – will be acting as the moderator for part of the meeting. Sebastien speaks fluent French, English and Spanish.

3.         Also at the Los Angeles meeting we will have an expert from LionBridge - the largest translation company in the world (Nokia, Microsoft, Google) - who will be acting as ICANN's consultant in drawing up a full translations policy - the enactment of the Framework.  The expert will briefly outline his role and will also be making arrangements to meet with different members of the community to discuss what they feel their needs are.  He intends meeting with yourself and other ALAC representatives. The policy will be drawn up and put through the usual public comment process and the hope is that we will have a final policy in place after the Paris meeting.

4.         I do understand your concerns with respect to English-only public consultations. We are working to do more in this regard.  As you have noted in your communication to us, some consultations are taking place in multiple languages. We wish to emphasize that this is a relatively recent development and you should expect to see an expansion of the number of public consultations accessible in multiple languages.  (Note that the Board Governance Committee’s Working Group has recently issued a set of proposed “GNSO Improvements” that includes specific recommendations on translations.)

5.         We have a cross department team (Corporate Affairs, Policy, Operations) that meets weekly to progress this issue and you are likely already aware, that the Director for At-Large is the Policy Department representative on this team, in addition to Kieren McCarthy, general manager Public Participation. Their work is overseen by myself, Doug Brent and Denise Michel.

6.         This year (Financial Year 2007-08) we increased the Translations budget to US$ 381,000.  This is up from $172,000  - an increase of $209,000 in one year.  Bear in mind that we are doing a lot with a budget of this size.  There is simply no way we could ever compete as an organization with approaches by others.  For example the UN's expenditure is close to $500 million on translation.

7.         In addition to this, the Global Partnerships Team led by Theresa Swinehart, are a vital part of outreach to non-English communities.  The regional relations managers are vital to communicating efforts.  If you look at the ICANN blog you will find that they  post material in Spanish, Arabic, and Russian.

8.         You will note that the recent 'campaign' on the IDNs test phase included videos of Tina Dam introducing IDNs and explaining the test.  Both have has been subtitle using dotsub.  We plan to do more of this. 

In short, I hope you will agree that while we are still in the early stages of creating the permanent processes and infrastructure that ICANN needs to achieve its multi-lingualism goals, we have made important progress in engaging non-English fluent stakeholders. We will get this right.  I'm glad we can work with the At-Large community to continue to work with ICANN to help the whole organisation become more language-accessible.

So, thank you for your observations and thanks also to the At-Large community for their advocacy on multi-lingualism and their involvement in ICANN.   Please feel free to contact me directly should you have any further questions. I would appreciate having further dialogue with you on this.