Mediterranean Games 2026: Five Languages in Taranto with 48 Hours' Notice

The request came in from Taranto on Wednesday 19 August, in the evening, for a meeting set for Friday 21. Two days, in the middle of August: the one week of the year when Italy's AV rental houses are shut, warehouses are still and technicians are on holiday.

The Challenge

The context left no room for approximation: an institutional gathering on the opening evening of the XX Mediterranean Games, with around 150 participants and delegations from five language areas — Italian, English, French, Spanish and Arabic. An audience that would move on to the stadium for the opening ceremony immediately afterwards: no margin on the timings, no chance to make up for lost time.

On top of that came the distance. Taranto is almost a thousand kilometres from our Milan Hub. With 48 hours' notice, a traditional setup — shipping the equipment, moving the team, rigging the day before — was simply not feasible. And the network of suppliers we normally rely on was, in those days, closed for the holidays. The honest answer would have been to decline.

The Solution

We didn't decline, thanks to a coincidence: one of Converso's founders was on holiday in the countryside near Ostuni, a thirty-minute drive from the venue. He had a laptop, an iPad and a Starlink terminal with him — not out of zeal, but because among the olive groves the landline doesn't reach and the mobile signal depends on where you stand in the garden. That week, the most reliable connection in the province sat in the middle of an olive grove, half an hour from a room that needed it. What looked like a limitation on paper — no team on site, no warehouse nearby — turned out to be the advantage: our architecture is designed to work with whatever is there.

Site survey that same evening

A few hours after the call we were in the room, measuring what we actually needed to know: how the mixer was wired, where the speakers would be, which monitors were available for subtitles, how the venue's network behaved with 150 devices connected. A good reminder of what we really sell: not audio channels, but the chance for people arriving from twenty-five countries to understand one another.

Connectivity we brought ourselves

The Wi-Fi of a hotel packed in high season is no reliable foundation for a live service. The Starlink terminal provided a link independent of the venue's network, dedicated solely to the audio feed to the AI engine and to remote supervision.

The room's system, filled in where it fell short

The room audio was already there and it was good: microphones, distribution, mixer. What was missing was the last mile, the part nobody carries in a suitcase — a sound card, cables, adapters and a backup wireless mic. We rented them that morning from a DJ hire service: while the conference suppliers were closed for the holidays, those who work on parties and weddings were in the thick of their season and had everything in stock. No shipment from Milan, no logistics cost charged to the client.

RSAI with Context Training

The translation engine was trained ahead of the event with the evening's materials: delegation names, protocol terminology, official designations. This is the step that separates generic machine translation from a service that holds up in an institutional context, where a mangled name is noticed instantly.

BYOD distribution and subtitles in the room

Participants scanned a QR code and listened to their own language on their own smartphone: no receivers to hand out, no deposits to collect, no queue at the exit for an audience that had to move on straight away. In parallel, the teleprompter carried live subtitles onto the room monitor.

Human governance from remote

Throughout the meeting a Converso technician monitored the output remotely, with the ability to adjust the configuration in real time. The AI does the work; a person answers for the quality.

The Results

From the first email to the delivered event, 48 hours passed. Five active languages, around 150 participants served on their own devices, zero equipment shipped from Milan and zero travel costs on the invoice. Timings respected to the minute, with the audience free to move on to the opening ceremony.

An event with little notice is not, in itself, a lost event. The constraint is almost never the technology: it's shipping times, rigging, moving a crew. If you have a near date and a distant venue, the answer isn't a foregone conclusion. It's worth the call.