International Federation for Choral Music

As the the next World Symposium on Choral Music will be in Doha, Qatar, and as IFCM expands its activities in new choral communities, the IFCM Board members recently approved a new strategic plan related to the ICB and its languages. The goal is to have more choral news and ICB content available for members, readers, and web visitors in the following languages: Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Russian, and more if translator teams are available.

Successful partnerships have already been made to build a team of translators in Arabic, Chinese, and Russian. Our collaboration with the Russian team has led to more than just ICB content translations; we will create a new page on the IFCM website, entirely in Russian, with easy access for Russian-speaking visitors. The ICB articles (as well as IFCMeNEWS) have already been published in Chinese on the IFCM WeChat account for the past 10 months. The WSCM 2023 Team in Doha is actively creating a network of translators from Arabic countries.

In order to have more languages available for our membership, some adjustments in languages were required. Here is the decision of the IFCM Board:

• The printed and electronic ICB with the usual layout will be in English only.
• English, French, and Spanish will remain the official languages of IFCM while German will become a secondary language along with Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, and Russian.
• The ICB articles will continue to be fully translated in Spanish and French and uploaded individually on the ICB website. Readers will find the link to these translations under each article in the e-ICB in English.
• A summary or an abstract of each ICB article (provided by the authors) will be translated in the secondary languages and available on the ICB website with a link to the full article in English.

This new language strategic plan will begin with the October 2020 issue of the ICB. All the links will be clearly listed in the quarterly email to the ICB subscribers and IFCM members.

http://icb.ifcm.net/