With global restrictions on physical events and travel, every event has had to pivot towards a digital format. As the world gets used to the ‘new normal’, the need for better solutions is apparent. While some believe that there is no substitute for physical events, the reality is that business and the world must go on.
However, this presents a potential new solution that might have unexpected benefits for the reason. One of the biggest deterrents or hurdles to scaling events has been the cost and ability to attract a global audience to a local event due to language. Recently, GlobalSign.in launched GEVME Live, a live digital events platform and has partnered with Interprefy, the world’s leading remote simultaneous interpreting platform.
With Interprefy’s simultaneous interpretation service, events organizers and owners will be able to easily host events, webinars, conferences or meetings in multiple languages.
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We spoke to Richard Roocroft, Director of Global Sales at Interprefy, to find out more about the partnership and how it would impact the region. Could this make a local Thai event more inclusive by getting regional business leaders involved and engaged through their translaton platform?
Find out what Richard had to share.
Could you describe how Interprefy works and the technology behind your platform?
Interprefy is the leading provider of remote simultaneous interpretation solutions. We provide all the essential services to support event organizers in making their online, on-site or hybrid events truly multilingual. Through our remote interpretation platform, interpreters can work from anywhere in the world and deliver simultaneous interpretation to our desktop or mobile events platform. Or alternatively to events held on almost any major web conferencing platform, such as GEVME Live. Because interpreters need not be on site, we can source the best interpreters with knowledge of the subject for each event. Our professional services teams support event organizers in planning, execution and quality control – before, during and after the event.
How are you integrating with GEVME Live in order to enhance the digital event experience? How has the experience been so far with your customers?
Breaking down language barriers is an essential part of audience engagement, so speakers can share their ideas and views in their native language and the audience receives a culturally and semantically accurate translation of what’s been said in real-time. Since launching Interprefy in 2015, we’ve made it our mission to overcome language barriers anywhere, anytime. That’s why we’ve built the Interprefy Gateway solution, which gives organizers the freedom to add remote spoken real-time translation to their events held on their preferred virtual events platform.
Through a language selector widget, event participants in a GEVME Live session can simply select their preferred audio language and will receive crystal-clear spoken interpretation in real-time with near-zero latency. Customers have been extremely delighted by the quality of interpretation as well as the quality of support of our professional services teams. From an audience perspective, participants highly value that they can easily access the event audio in their native language.
One of the issues we have noticed in the region is that inclusion is a problem when it comes to local events due to language barriers and issues. Do you foresee larger local events now being accessible to the wider region and even global audience?
The shift to online events, accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, will change the events landscape and the way we collaborate also in the long run. As a positive side effect, this has allowed for organizations of all shapes and sizes to make their events more inclusive, by easily, flexibly and cost-efficiently adding multiple languages to their event through remote simultaneous interpretation. And the trend of offering more inclusivity is definitely here to stay.
Has the pandemic changed your business model at all, or has it been business as usual? What changes if any, have there been?
When the pandemic first hit, it basically wiped out all of our planned events. But after a few weeks, we saw a massive increase in inquiries for online events and our business has come back much stronger than ever before. For us, the shift from on-site to online has not changed anything except from where the event is taking place.
From the very start of our business in 2015, we’ve been dedicated to offer the highest flexibility possible to host events anywhere, anytime.
How do you see the trends around the translation industry moving? Is there any concern when it comes to AI and machine learning translation tools?
When it comes to professional business meetings, you simply can’t beat the human mind in capturing and replicating context and accuracy. We’re a long way away from AI and machine learning replacing people, but we do embrace many developments in machine learngin and AI that assists our community in executing their tasks more easily or effectively.
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What are your plans for Southeast Asia?
We’ve started establishing a team in Southeast Asia in early 2019. With vast distances across countries and a highly diverse language and culture landscape, the region has huge potential for our services. Today, we have people in the Philippines, Hong Kong, Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia and Taiwan, as well as strong partners across the region that support event organizers in making their events multilingual.