Akamai: Scaling multilingual events with RSI and project support

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Overview

Akamai hosts numerous global events, ranging from conventions and webinars to All Hands meetings, held in various formats, including in-person, virtual, and hybrid, catering to both their internal teams and their valued customers.

In their dedication to providing exceptional customer service, fostering engagement, and ensuring accessibility, Akamai offers tailored simultaneous interpretation services to meet the diverse needs of their attendees.

The Challenge

Finding project support beyond technology provision

In the unprecedented year 2020, Akamai, along with the rest of the world, had to transition from in-person events with traditional on-site interpretation to exclusively online events. This transition posed several challenges, including:

finding an online meeting platform that could support remote simultaneous interpretation;
finding a remote simultaneous interpretation platform where interpreters could comfortably work from;
ensuring interpreters were correctly trained to work remotely;
ensuring all the technology was compatible and worked properly.

The Approach

A multilingual events technology partner to support from start to finish

Different projects have varying needs and adding interpretation to any event requires additional work. After trying Interprefy during the pandemic, Akamai now uses Interprefy for in-person and hybrid events.

As Ricardo Yang mentions "If we hire an AV company or hire interpreters directly, the project has lots of stakeholders. The AV companies might not have experience managing interpreters, and even though I can provide as much information about the event as possible and prep them, I still have no control over the equipment or the delivery of the audio, so Interprefy comes in and takes care of both."

Having project managers to prepare the event and engineers is super helpful for us. Ricardo Yang, Senior Localization Manager at Akamai Technologies

"I just have to provide the information to the project manager, and they train the interpreters to use the remote simultaneous interpretation platform and take care of the technology integration." Ricardo points out. "The engineers will also help us fix any issues that might happen live and that makes everything a lot easier for us. " Ricardo adds.

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The Outcome

Akamai has held several multilingual events with Interprefy, allowing their audience to follow in their preferred language.

Now that we have Interprefy we don't need to have interpreters on-site, which gives us much more freedom when designing our events, as well as reducing our costs. All we need to do is ask the AV company to pass along the audio and video to Interprefy and the interpreters can work remotely." Ricardo comments

"Interprefy is also very easy to set up also for the customers. For in-person events all they have to do is download the app or use the browser link and use the token provided" Ricardo concludes.