Blog Articles

A quarterly earnings call gets moved up by two days. A crisis communications briefing needs to go out to five markets within the hour. A regional sales kickoff, planned months in advance, needs interpreters booked, briefed and ready before the first slide goes up. These are all multilingual events, but they call for different approaches to interpretation, and choosing the wrong one costs time, money or both.

Most conversations about AI language performance still centre on English. A model scores well on a standard benchmark, gets praised as state-of-the-art, and is rolled out for global use. But a growing body of evidence, most recently the European Commission's new EU MMLU dataset, shows that strong English performance says very little about how a model handles French, Hungarian or Maltese. For anyone relying on AI live translation at international events, that gap is not an academic footnote. It is the difference between a delegate understanding a keynote and missing it entirely. 

Picture a training video recorded once in English that a global workforce needs in ten languages by Friday. A decade ago, that request meant hiring voice actors, booking studio time, and waiting weeks for each language. Today, it can mean uploading a file and downloading a dubbed version in hours. This shift is powered by AI dubbing.

Most sustainability conversations in the events industry start with venues, catering and offsetting. Travel is usually acknowledged and then set aside, because delegate and speaker travel is rarely up for debate: it is the reason onsite events happen. That instinct holds up. Business travel and accommodation typically account for 70 to 90 percent of an event's total emissions, and attendee travel is usually the single largest source within that figure. Across the industry as a whole, aggregated travel, energy, catering and logistics may account for up to 10 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.

Picture a product launch with attendees joining from twelve countries, each expecting to follow along in their own language without a hitch. A few years ago, delivering that experience meant booking interpreters, installing booths, and hoping the technology held up on the day. Now it often means choosing the right app.

A meeting can look successful in the moment and still fail the people in it. Everyone nods, the agenda gets through, and the call ends on time. Then the follow-up emails arrive, and it becomes clear that half the room understood something different from what was said. In multilingual settings, this gap is rarely caused by a single dramatic failure. It tends to come from a handful of small, hidden weaknesses in the speech translation platform and the way it is set up.

 A product launch, a leadership announcement, a crisis response — whatever brings journalists and cameras into the room, a press conference is one of the most high-stakes communication moments your organisation will manage. Every word matters. Every misquote matters. And increasingly, every language matters too. 

Quoting audio translation can feel like comparing apples to oranges. One provider prices by the minute, another by the language pair, a third bundles everything into a flat event fee. For an events manager trying to budget a multilingual conference or hybrid town hall, the lack of a standard pricing model makes it hard to know whether a quote is reasonable before you've gathered several.

Imagine you’re at a multilingual event where interpretation was available and everything seemed inclusive, but you still missed a sentence and could not go back or follow everything was said. Sounds familiar? Perhaps the speaker moved too quickly, the audio dipped for a moment, or you were taking notes when an important point was made. At live events, even strong interpretation and good production do not always prevent information from being missed.