MCIS offers heartwarming tribute to interpreters who welcomed Syrian refugees to Canada at AGM

TORONTO - Jan. 16, 2017 - PRLog -- As a tribute to Arabic, Armenian and Kurdish interpreters who assisted the Canadian government to pull off the impossible feat of welcoming over 25,000 Syrian refugees to Canada over 10 weeks, MCIS Language Solutions ("MCIS") organized a one of a kind Annual General Meeting themed 'Interpreters for Syria (IFS)' on January 11, 2017.

The event saw the largest turnout in the history of the organization with over 200 interpreters, translators, and stakeholders coming together to acknowledge the efforts of our language professionals. In a first, we also live-streamed the event to audiences around the world.

The MCIS team presented awards to 8 interpreters who supervised 400 Arabic interpreters at various ports of entry in Toronto and Montreal. The Global Community Partner of the Year award went to Lifeline Syria which is now supporting MCIS' efforts to become community sponsor of a Syrian family. The Strategic Partner of the Year award went to Innoweave which over the past year helped MCIS identify its intended social impact as providing access for people with language barriers to critical information and services.

People walked into a jam-packed room to hear guest speakers including Ezat Mossallanejad, Counselor and Policy Analyst with the Canadian Centre for Victims of Torture, Sam Jisri, Founder and Executive Director of Syrian Active Volunteers, and Shelly Wu and Andersen Chu from the Tzu Chi Foundation. All of them spoke about their work assisting Syrian refugees settle.  Singer Chro Zand, an interpreter with MCIS, and  Shahriyar Jamshidi on the Kamancheh, entertained the audience with moving Syrian tunes.

Both Retiring Chair, Cambria Ravenhill and Executive Director, Latha Sukumar spoke about MCIS' capacity to handle a project of this magnitude because of its training pipeline for interpreters which helped with a quick ramp up, its bilingual capacity and protocols it had in place to handle such a high profile engagement. The IFS project also served as the impetus for MCIS to renew its vision and mission and to rethink itself as a global organization and a multilingual hub for the world, given its access to Toronto's rich and diverse multilingual human resources.  In this vein, MCIS' soon to be launched Translator Training Program will train over 500 individuals to become translators for free and offer their geography agnostic services within Canada and globally with the use of state of the art online Translation Management tools.

MCIS Language Solutions is a non-profit social enterprise that provides interpretation, translation, and transcription services in over 300 languages. We are open 24/7/365. Visit www.mcislanguages.com to know more about our services. Watch the AGM at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efhWVrgKg4I