Congress Australia: Scaling their interpreting business with RSI

The Congress Rental Network (CRN) is a worldwide network of industry-leading AV companies, all equipped with the latest Bosch Congress equipment for hire, that caters for any event where audiovisual equipment and support personnel are required.

In June 2019, before the pandemic, CRN were visionaries and started looking for a remote simultaneous interpretation technology provider to scale their simultaneous interpretation offering with. After the technical assessment of several providers, CRN entered into a partnership with Interprefy. 

Overview

Congress Australia is one of the members of the CRN network that leverages Interprefy's RSI technology. They are the largest simultaneous interpretation provider in Australia and the Asia Pacific. Their core business is equipment rental for on-site events but they also offer remote interpretation with Interprefy.

The Challenge

Finding the right alternative to better serve different user needs

As the leading provider of interpretation services in their region, Congress Australia is approached by many clients with different needs and event characteristics. Being able to offer different solutions to cater to the various needs of their clients is a priority for them.  

"We have clients with different space availability, budgets, event locations and interpreters' availability, and we need to offer them the solution that works best for them" Michael Vrklevski, Marketing Lead at Congress Australia explains.

When we work with clients who have events in multiple locations, the traditional approach is not very scalable and requires a lot of cross-hiring. That's where RSI is really an asset -Michael adds.

"We also have some clients who want to cut down on logistics and the cost of all the hardware, and that's also where our RSI solution powered by Interprefy is a perfect option" - says Michael. 

The Approach

Leveraging RSI at on-site and hybrid events

Just like understanding each client's needs and limitations is key to helping them provide an outstanding user experience during their event, having a variety of options to offer and partnering with the right providers is also key to meeting these needs. 

The advantage of Interprefy's technology is that it allows users to access remote simultaneous interpretation, live (translated) captions and sign language, all in one solution. 

Interprefy's RSI solution is an extra tool, rather than a replacement and it definitely opens up the range of offerings we can give our clients, Michael says.

Photo Credit: Congress Australia. At The LCICon event(photo above), interpreters worked from behind the stage in an interpretation hub (photo below). A technical team stationed out the back looked after the interpreters and ensured that the feeds remained stable and of the highest quality at all times.

The Outcome

Interprefy provides CRN and their network with the remote interpretation technology as well as with the training and materials they need to fully run events with RSI from Interprefy independently. 

At the 104th Lions Clubs International Convention, in Montreal, Congress Australia provided FM receivers to 6,000 delegates with clear audio interpretation in Chinese, Finnish, French, German, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Nepali, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish from interpreters working on the Interprefy RSI platform on the back end and remotely. 

The LCICon event had a mix of interpreters on-site as well as working remotely so Interprefy was the perfect solution for us to organise them all into clean, uniform language feeds which could then be distributed. - Michael explains.

Congress Australia has leveraged Interprefy's technology in over 200 events. Another example where Congress Australia used the Interprefy RSI solution was at the recent World Federation of Occupational Therapists Congress. Congress Australia delivered English and French interpretation to an audience of over 2,000 people attending sessions in 9 different areas, listening to the languages on the CRN RSI app, powered by Interprefy. Find out more about this here.