Blog Articles

Every organisation says its people are its greatest asset. Far fewer can say that all of those people hear the same message, in a language they fully understand, at the same time, and feel equally able to respond.

For most of its history, professional interpretation came with a safety net built in. The organisations that could afford interpreters usually also had people who knew how to work with them: event teams, language-services managers, conference organisers who knew to send the slides in advance and book the right specialists. Mistakes still happened, but there was expertise around the booth.

In most meetings, a mistranslated phrase costs a moment of confusion. In an investor call, a regulatory hearing or a pharmaceutical advisory board, it can end up as a correction to the market, a complaint or a formal finding.

That changes what good interpretation means. AI speech translation has improved quickly, and for many sessions it’s now accurate, fast and far cheaper than booking interpreters. But regulated organisations don’t only ask whether the translation was right. They ask who was responsible for it, how the data was handled and what record exists afterwards.

A large medical congress runs on precision. Thousands of clinicians move between plenaries, parallel tracks, industry symposia and poster halls, and much of what they hear may shape how they treat patients within weeks. When delegates follow that content in a second language, a misunderstood dosage, endpoint or contraindication is more than an awkward moment, because it can travel back into clinical practice.

Picture an international delegation visiting your headquarters for two days. The programme opens with a plenary for 200 people in three languages, moves on to a factory tour, includes a private meeting between the two heads of delegation and ends with a press conference. Your interpretation provider asks a simple question: consecutive or simultaneous? The honest answer is both, but for different parts of the day, and getting that split wrong costs you either time or money.

Picture a quarterly operations review on Google Meet. The regional leads join from Munich, Lahore, São Paulo and Osaka, and the host switches on Meet's speech translation expecting everyone to follow along in their own language. Within a minute it becomes clear that the feature can run only one language pair at a time, and that pair has to include English. The German speaker could be covered and so could the Portuguese speaker, but not both at once, while nobody on the call can hear the meeting in Urdu or Japanese at all.

Remote simultaneous interpretation (RSI) is the process of remotely interpreting speech from one language to another in real time. Using cloud-based technology, RSI connects interpreters, speakers, and participants from anywhere in the world. It reduces costs, increases flexibility, and makes multilingual communication accessible for events and meetings of any size - from small business meetings to large international conferences.

ISO 27001 certification is the clearest way to verify that a remote interpretation platform actually protects sensitive, spoken conversations rather than simply claiming to. For any organisation buying interpretation services for confidential or regulated content, it should sit near the top of the vendor evaluation checklist, not as an afterthought. 

Zoom quietly changed the conversation around multilingual meetings this year. It launched Voice Translator in beta, its first attempt at converting a speaker's voice into another language automatically, without a human interpreter in the loop. For organisations that have spent years relying on dedicated interpretation platforms such as Interprefy Agent to run global meetings, the obvious question is whether Zoom's own feature now replaces what they already have in place.