European Preparatory Assembly (EPA) in Vienna, the 2006 European Social Forum (ESF) will be held from Thursday May 4th to Sunday May 7th. Those of you wishing to participate as volunteer interpreters and translators will be advised to arrive a day earlier on Wednesday May 3rd. The ESF will most probably take place in the Helliniko Olympic Complex (Athens). ?Now that the definite dates of the ESF are known, we would like to ask those of you who will NOT be available on those dates to access their Babels registration form and untick the ESF06 box. This is to ensure that we only plan to select from volunteers who will be available.

We would also like to inform you of the latest development of the ALIS (Alternative Language Interpretation Systems) project. ALIS volunteers provided all the equipment for the Vienna EPA (with interpretation in Greek, English, French, German and Turkish). The results are very promising and on the whole it worked rather well. ALIS will be performing larger scale tests in the coming weeks and will make the necessary improvements and adjustments to be fully ready for the ESF.