Eleven years, and a service that changed shape. BergamoScienza Festival

BergamoScienza takes scientific research out of the universities and into the town square: two weeks of free talks open to everyone, with international guests — Nobel laureates among them — in front of an audience of the curious, students and families. Since 2015 Converso® has been the festival's technical sponsor, providing Italian ↔ English simultaneous interpretation, streaming and connectivity.

The Challenge

The conditions are ones a corporate event never meets.

The audience isn't registered and changes with every talk. You can't hand everyone a receiver, check it comes back and sanitise it before the next session — not at a festival where people walk in, listen and leave.

Only some talks have a foreign guest. Simultaneous interpretation is needed in a minority of sessions, spread unevenly: sometimes just one in a day, sometimes four in a row.

The main venue is a marquee set up in a square. No booth, no network, no permanent system. Everything needed arrives, gets set up, runs for two weeks and gets taken down.

But the most interesting challenge in this case isn't technical. It's lasting: eleven years in which the festival has grown, changed venue, come through a pandemic — and in which interpreting technology has changed from top to bottom.

Edition after edition

2015 — Two talks, one room

The first edition with Converso® is the festival's 13th: two talks, in the same room. Even then the choice was to go lighter: interpreters on site, but with a radio-frequency system instead of the usual infrared. A single antenna is enough to cover a sports arena, with no radiators to spread around the room.

2018 — The smartphone replaces the receiver, and the festival network

The audience starts listening to the interpretation on their own phones, with the Converso® app for iOS and Android. It's the first step towards doing away with the receiver desk.

In the same edition Converso® also takes over the festival's Wi-Fi network, and connects a remote speaker for the first time: the talk on robotics in medicine goes ahead with the guest on videoconference, interpreted in the room as if they were on stage.

2019 — 500 simultaneous listeners

A talk in a 500-seat theatre means, potentially, 500 people listening to the interpretation on their smartphones at the same moment. The network is sized for exactly that, with a professional Wi-Fi infrastructure installed for the occasion. The same edition brings streaming of the talks.

2020 — The festival goes online

With the pandemic, BergamoScienza doesn't stop: the talks are broadcast on the festival website, with the platform built into the existing pages rather than a separate portal. Part of the programme stays in person, at the Teatro Sociale in Città Alta.

2022 — The audience goes inside a factory and an airport

For its twentieth anniversary the festival takes the audience where it usually can't go: an industrial plant and the city's airport. The tours happen live inside the facilities and reach the venue in real time, with production run remotely. In the same edition, speakers connecting from abroad are interpreted just like those on stage.

2023 — No more apps to install

Listening moves to the Converso® Web App: scan a QR code, choose the language, listen. No download, no updates, no space to free up on the phone. For those who arrive without earphones there's a courtesy kit with disposable earphones and adapters.

2025 — A square with no network

The festival moves to Piazza della Libertà, into a marquee. There's no data line in the square, so Converso® brings its own: a Starlink satellite dish mounted on the structure, 5G backup, Wi-Fi dedicated to the control room. The same infrastructure serves the information point and the payment terminals of the festival's commercial spaces, on a network kept separate from the control room's.

2026 — The same channel, for the hard of hearing

The Web App that brought the interpretation to smartphones stays on at every talk, including those without foreign guests. Hearing-aid users connect their device to their phone and get the sound from the stage straight into their ear, without the reverberation and background noise of a full marquee.

A tool born for interpretation becomes an accessibility service, with no dedicated system and nothing to hand out.

The Solution

Today the service is MRSI (Managed RSI): remote interpreters, on-site technical crew, and streaming and network run by Converso®.

Interpreters in Milan, audience in the square

The interpreters work from the ISO booths of the RSI Hub in Milan. What reaches the marquee is the link, not the booth: the RSI Bridge PRO carries the floor audio and stage video to the interpreters and brings the interpretation back, with in-ear monitoring for speakers who need it.

A booth inside a temporary structure would be bulky, expensive and acoustically worse than the Hub's: the interpreters work in permanent-conference-centre conditions while the event takes place outdoors. And the schedule becomes flexible: the Hub only switches on for days with a foreign guest, for the hours needed.

The backstage moment remote nearly took away

When the booth is in the room, there's a moment that appears in no specification: the interpreter catching the speaker backstage, introducing themselves, asking how to pronounce that researcher's name, telling them not to rush the quotations. And the speaker asking, in turn, whether the audience will get that reference. It lasts five minutes and is worth half the talk.

With the interpreters in another city, that moment disappears. Unless you rebuild it.

In the marquee there's a station set aside for the briefing: a videoconference link between the speaker and the booth in Milan — over the years a computer, then a tablet, depending on the venue. Before each talk the speaker is taken there and talks to the people who will be interpreting them shortly. They meet, say hello, and say the things people say backstage: the usual advice, how to pronounce proper names, the term that was still in doubt when preparing the material, the question that studying didn't answer.

With guests of a certain standing, this step isn't an extra: it's the condition for them agreeing to be interpreted.

Streaming in two languages, across several channels

The talks go out live with the original audio and the interpretation, to different destinations: the festival's YouTube channel, social media, the website, and restreaming to the media outlets that rebroadcast the talks. Converso® produces the streams and delivers them ready to go, coordinating with the festival's editorial team on graphics and publishing details. Viewers at home choose their language just like those sitting in the square.

Beyond the marquee

Some talks take place elsewhere: an auditorium in the city, a research centre on the outskirts, an opening evening off-site. The technical crew moves with a complete mobile control room, and the link to the Hub in Milan stays the same. For listeners, only the room changes.

The Results

From 2015 to today, a relationship that has come through a complete change of the underlying technology, a pandemic and several changes of venue: from two talks in one room to a two-week festival with satellite venues, multichannel streaming and its own network infrastructure.

Every foreign speaker talks to their interpreters before going on stage, even with the booth in another city. There are no receivers to hand out to an audience that changes with every talk, and simultaneous interpretation is available in the live stream too, not just in the room. The same channel as the interpretation provides assisted listening, at every talk, for hearing-aid users. And in a square with no infrastructure, the festival has independent connectivity, extended to its own services as well.

The same approach works for cultural and science festivals, free public events, events that want to offer assisted listening to people with hearing aids, conferences in temporary structures, programmes spread across several city venues, events with multilingual streaming to external media channels, settings with no existing network infrastructure, and recurring events that evolve year after year.