There are now several solutions available in the market to make simultaneous interpretation available at MS Teams meetings. How are they different from Green Terp, a 100% add-on solution?

Before diving into the details, it’s important to note that simultaneous interpretation is only part of the audience experience at an event. It is essential to communication but when planning for an event, organizers would have to take into account many other aspects, for example, how the simultaneous interpretation function interacts with other functions of the primary meeting (online), cyber security, budget, manpower, etc.

1.       What it’s actually like?

Ona Teams meeting, there are critical functions, such as Chat, Attendee list, and other tab functions, that speakers and audiences have already taken the time to learn and get used to (over the past two years). However, the current RSI platform solutions in the market, even though some of them claim to be a native app, would ‘paralyse’ all the above-mentioned functions.

In short, when you have simultaneous interpretation on, those Teams meeting functions would be disconnected by platform solutions. You certainly would not expect users to spend time and efforts to learn new hacks to re-create a full experience of a meeting!

2.       Audience needs to be able to hear the Floor.

This may not seem necessary at first. There is almost always video playing at an event. While having the simultaneous interpretation function on, audience would expect to (or need to)be able to hear the original sound at a certain volume.

3.       Risks of Security Breaching

To engage an RSI (remote simultaneous interpretation) platform to deliver remote interpreting for your event on a primary platform, for example, MS Teams, the common practice (constrained approach) is to inject the live video of your event, either onsite or online, to the appointed RSI platform, i.e., mostly restreaming or screen-sharing, manually.

·      Video injection is essentially sharing your content with a third party. It increases risks of security and privacy breaching. And who is liable when that occurs?

·      Latency is an elephant in the house. Video injection creates at least 2-3 seconds of delay for the original video stream to travel to the eyes and ears of an interpreter, who is working from an RSI platform. This issue would be further magnified when relay is involved.

·      This may seem like an issue only to the interpreters, but also to the all the stakeholders that are relying on interpretation for effective communication – Sound compression and audio toxication. When the video is being injected, the sounds must be compressed, sometimes with external artefacts added in. It means interpreters are listening to second-hand audio when they are delivering your corporate messaging to the audience. The interpreters’ hearing health is also heavily exposed in this case to the toxic sounds created in this process.

·      It would of course create costs of human operators and management. The costs can go even higher when you are organizing a hybrid event. With the inevitable delay on the virtual side, you might have to engage onsite interpreters to deliver to the onsite audience, while another set of interpreters remotely for the virtual audience.

·      Last but not least, with video injection, the event is being exposed to a single point of failure, which is operated manually.

Whatever difficulties we are experiencing with remote work, science can fix it, but certainly not with video injection.

What Green Terp Does

Green Terp has avoided all these ‘traps’ as we place user experience (audience, speakers, interpreters, as well as event organizers who are managing the event behind the scenes), as top priority when we are designing, developing and upgrading.

For any virtual or hybrid event requiring RSI, we strive to recreate the whole onsite experience, which people have been so used to and it requires zero learning curve.

·       Users won’t need to compromise.

a.       Audience and speakers have access to simultaneous interpretation while have absolutely no trouble navigating any other functions on the primary meeting platform, be it MS Teams, Zoom, Webex, Google Meet, etc.

b.       Audience gets to listen to the floor sound at their preferred level, while having simultaneous interpretation.

c.       Interpreters get to hear the original sound from the speakers, rather than a compressed transmitted source from a third party.

·       Highest level of data security

With Green Terp’s solution, there is physical segregation from the primary event platform (Teams, Zooms, Webex, Google Meet, etc.).

No video injection, hence, no manpower or equipment required, and no related costs. Most important of all, it isn’t necessary in the first place.

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