The worldwide lockdown caused by COVID-19 accelerated the need for remote interpreting services. From corporate meetings and medical consultations to townhalls and state addresses, organizations need the means to deliver live audiovisual communication to their audience across languages. Venues such as international conference centers may need dozens of interpreters translating live events into dozens of languages at the same time. It is no longer feasible to place that many interpreters in one space. Organizations turn to AV over IP technologies to create remote interpreting hubs.
Paul Milligan writing for Inavate:
Much like the rest of the AV world, the growing rise of AV over IP systems is having an impact here. “Things are moving to IP and integration is becoming a more and more important topic, in the larger environments we hear more and more requests for integrated solutions,” says Lars van den Heuvel, director global product management, Bosch Security Systems. The worldwide lockdown caused by Covid-19 has forced the translation market (like all markets) to seek ways to work remotely, but was this demand there previously? “Before there was a very slow growth, it might have been fear that the technologies would not be up to the challenge, or the fear of adopting new technologies. But in a world where you just physically can't travel, you have to adapt a lot quicker to the tools that are available now,” says Annabelle Zabetian, co-founder of the Kudo multilingual conferencing and translation platform.
Newest technologies are not just for the giant clients. Last week one of our clients spoke about their experience trying to provide live interpreting in more than two languages on a conference call. After trying Skype and Zoom, they realized that regular online conference tools do not support situations when attendees need dedicated language channels so that more than one speaker can talk. The need to develop remote interpreting technologies for entities of any size to utilize in these days of teleworking has already been recognized by innovators.
Bosch’s van den Heuvel illustrates; “When we developed our Dicentis conference system, we switched to a fully IP-based system so all of our components for delegate units and the interpreter desk are connected directly on an IP network, which gives quite a good foundation for the number of languages that we can provide, but also if we look to smaller meetings we see an advantage there that is much easier to integrate with those types of data conferencing applications (such as Zoom, Teams etc).”
What does it mean for interpreters?
it's pretty clear that in the past 10-12 years translation has greatly evolved due to AI,” says Zabetian. “But it doesn't really mean that there has been less work for language service providers and professional translators, they are still thriving, and the market is expanding.”
Read further on Inavate.
