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The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is prepared for tens of thousands of its members to attend its 173rd General Conference Saturday and Sunday.
The event will be held in the Conference Center in downtown Salt Lake City.
General Sessions will be held at 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. both Saturday and Sunday, and televised live on KSL.
For the first time, conference-goers will have to go through a security metal detector before entering the building.
The conference will be translated into 56 languages. Religion Specialist Carole Mikita had a tour of the new translation facilities inside the Conference Center.
The United Nations and European Union use many translators on a regular basis, but in terms of numbers of languages spoken and their global reach, this group of Latter-day Saints is unique.
In Russian, Tahitian, or Samoan, the message of General Conference now travels around the world at the same time church leaders are speaking here in Salt Lake City.
And the translators are from nearly every country and all walks of life.
Remi Mataoa/ Tahitian translator: "ON OUR RECORDS, WE HAVE CLOSE TO 800 INTERPRETORS BUT ONLY 400 PLUS CAN FIT IN HERE ON ONE WEEKEND TO PARTICIPATE IN THIS."
To many interpretors, the work is both nervewracking, because they can picture the faces of family and friends in their homelands, listening to them.
Anastasia Randall/ Russian translator: "I KNEW THAT A LOT OF MY FRIENDS IN MOSCOW WERE LISTENING AT THAT MOMENT OVER THE SATELLITE AND I WOULD GET E-MAILS FROM THEM AND THEY SAID 'I HEARD YOUR VOICE AND I WAS SO EXCITED TO HEAR YOUR VOICE.'"
This weekend will be only the second conference in this new facility. When conference interpretation began in 1961, there were four languages. Now there are 56.
Missing from the section where the Eastern European translators work are the languages of Estonia and Slovenia. There are translators, but they stay in those countries and use the Internet to broadcast General Conference.
No matter how it's done-- by internet, by phone, by satellite-- there is the control room where messages flow to and from.
Paul Kern/ Dir. of Translation Services: "BUT THE NICE THING IS WE HAVE A LIVE EVENT IN WHICH MEMBERS THROUGHOUT THE WORLD ARE ABLE TO PARTICIPATE IN, CONCURRENTLY."
This translation of General Conference will reach 99% of church members in the world. One of the supervisors says that only the tip of Brazil and a small part of central Asia are not yet reachable by satellite.
