IPRS Meeting - Prague 22nd July 2007

The IPRS meeting in Prague Intersteno Congress has been attended by representatives of parliamentary reporting services. During the session not only important topics have been discussed such as the organization of the work in the UK and in the Dutch Parliaments and the state of the art of the court reporting in USA; the colleagues have found a fit atmosphere for gathering information on the general changements which are going ahead in many countries.

Mainly, the development of technologies has brought many more possibilities for the reporting services. In some cases, the professional skills in using the PC keyboard have enabled Parliaments to face the lack of shorthand reporters, while digital audio recording is becoming the standard basis of the whole reporting proceeding in all the counties. Speech recognition is investigated in most parliament as a good technique for producing text, although for certain languages there is not a good performance or there is not at all the recognition engine ready to use.

Somewhere the Paliaments have decided to externalize the job in order to cope with the peek demand of reporting (especially in the mid week days), somewhereelse savings have been obtained through a  different organization of the staff. All reporting services are aware that this is a passage time to new and more effective ways of producing transcripts.

The IPRS meeting in the Prague Congress â- attendants say - has confirmed the importance of this Intersteno Section, which represents a worldwide place of discussion and exchanging of experience and knowledge, where parliamentary professionals can find an answer to their frequent and less frequent asked questions.

Fausto Ramondelli

Ms Schwarz-van Poppel

The Dutch Parlamentary reporting office.

Ms. Portia Dadley           

Technology and reporting in the UK Parliament

Audio file of the speech of Mr. Mark Golden

Click to hear