How to organise your online meeting with the help of an interpreter?

In the new professional world, as a consequence of Covid-19, meetings are now frequently held via telephone and video conferences due to the limitations of travel and teleworking. Our work habits must therefore get used to this small revolution.

More often than not, the participants of a meeting do not speak the same language. In addition; expressing yourself in a foreign language using these new work tools is not always as easy as doing it "face to face".

For a telephone meeting or a video conference, assisted by an online interpreter, to be truly effective, and meet expectations, you need to follow some essential rules:

• First, the organiser of the conference call or video conference must define the source and destination language.
• A precise agenda needs to be drawn up to determine the interpreter's speciality. It should be noted that the interpreter used is an external interpreter and not a company employee. They will simply be familiar with the appropriate sector.
• Punctuality is obviously important and participants will receive e-mail notification of the date and the time the meeting starts. With regards to videoconferences, the connection link will need to be given to each participant.
• As far as telephone interpreting is concerned, we have our own virtual conference rooms – this is essential for the quality of the service. For video remote interpreting, we have chosen two leading service providers, ZOOM and MICROSOFT TEAMS.
• An online meeting can sometimes be difficult to follow and running an interpreter-assisted online meeting requires a moderator to ensure that participants follows the rules set out below.

At the present time, online simultaneous interpretation can’t be adapted to the needs of small meetings for technical and economic reasons. It is possible for large international conferences, but the infrastructure and human resources involved lead to significant costs.

It is therefore important that everything is well organised to give the interpreter time to translate the content of the meeting, which is not easy. The sentences also need to be kept relatively short.

Therefore, the time allotted to each speaker needs to be respected, to ensure the meeting is productive. For example, if speakers constantly interrupt each other, the interpretation will not be effective.

It is also important that the main points of the meeting, the decisions taken, and the ideas proposed are summarised at the end of the meeting. This will make it easier for everyone to keep them in mind.

If requested and if the participants agree, the meeting can be recorded and transcribed by us – in the strictest confidentiality.

By following these basic principles and using our telephone and video interpreting services, your online meetings will be easier to understand and be more productive.

TRADUPHONE is the OPTILINGUA INTERNATIONAL group's subsidiary specialising in online interpreting services.

You can find out more on our website https://traduphone.com/.