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Interpretation Case Study: Creating a Remote Interpretation Feed

Ubiqus has a long history of providing interpretation services for all types of events and meetings. In 2020, it also became an expert at providing remote interpretation services.

One of the challenges of remote meetings is ensuring speakers and interpreters can be heard by the people who are listening in their preferred languages. The challenge becomes even more daunting when the preferred meeting platform doesn’t have an option to implement interpreter feeds.

Ubiqus faced such a challenge when providing remote simultaneous interpretation for one longtime client, but the events team developed a unique approach to overcome it.

The Situation

A large distributor of healthcare products and medical supplies regularly holds meetings and, like so many other firms, had to move to a virtual setting to maintain communication. Where other companies moved to Zoom, this company bucked the trend and chose to host all its virtual meetings on MS Teams.

In October 2020, the company held a one-hour meeting that was presented in English. However, it wanted the meeting to be available in English plus 11 other languages. This presented two challenges. First, MS Teams isn’t set up to handle interpretation. Second, even if the meeting had been moved to Zoom, the platform can only handle nine language feeds at a time.

The Solution: Multiple Platforms

Ubiqus met the challenge by connecting the meeting on MS Teams to two separate Zoom feeds dedicated to the remote simultaneous interpretation team recruited to deliver interpreted remarks. Six interpreters logged into one feed, and five logged into the other.

The event technician recorded all 11 language feeds, as well as the original English feed. It also made a backup recording of all 12 language feeds, which doubled the number of devices needed to capture the proceedings. Each recording was inserted into the original video to replace the English audio, and the final videos were made available on the client’s website with a different URL for each language.

The Result: Future Collaborations

In December 2020, this same client wanted to host a meeting for their Canadian office. Unlike the meeting in October, which offered replays in multiple languages, the client wanted this meeting to be held in both English and Canadian French in real time. This wasn’t possible in MS Teams unless Ubiqus provided a workaround… which it did.

As with the prior meeting, the Ubiqus team made the MS Teams meeting viewable from Zoom, and the interpreter translated from English to Canadian French. French speakers could see the proceedings from MS Teams, but had no way to follow them in their chosen language. Instead, they watched from a Zoom link, where they could see the video from MS Teams but hear the French interpretation coming from Zoom.

The client was so happy with the results that Ubiqus was asked to do the same for subsequent meetings that needed links for Portuguese, Mandarin or Cantonese. The setup was used one last time in December for a meeting that had to be broadcast in eight languages simultaneously.

Remote meetings are always a challenge – the need for interpretation make the challenge even greater. With expertise in both remote meetings and interpretation, Ubiqus was able to navigate a particularly challenging circumstance and create a solution that adhered to client requirements while also making the meetings accessible in multiple languages.

Need assistance with remote interpretation? Contact the interpretation team at Ubiqus today.

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