How language interpretation can boost your webinar reach

Webinars have been around for decades and, just like almost anything that’s been around this long, they have evolved. Over the past years, webinars have seen a huge uptick and continue to gain popularity.

Allowing companies to engage with peers and customers across the globe, webinars are powerful tools to attract and engage with larger audiences, no matter where they are located.

But as you're carefully crafting your message to retain relevance, language barriers can stand in the way of successfully communicating your webinar content across countries and cultures.

So how can you successfully scale up your webinars?

Webinar interpretation has become increasingly popular because it allows companies to reach larger audiences and build engagement quickly, easily, and at a relatively low cost. 

Remote Simultaneous Interpretation (RSI) technology offers a range of benefits that help scale up webinars to global audiences:

1. Tailoring your content to your audience

When designing your webinar’s content, keeping in mind who you are addressing and tailoring your content accordingly remains imperative. Because of the global-reach nature of webinars, tailoring your content to an international audience can be tricky, especially when language and cultural differences come into play.

You can start by establishing the knowledge level of your audience on the topic and work from there and, whenever possible, provide examples that can be understood internationally.

Additionally, you can have language interpreters conveying your spoken message in different languages in a way that relates closer to the attendees.

Localizing your webinar content provides more than just better understanding. There is a great quote by Nelson Mandela that goes: “If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his own language, that goes to his heart.”

Tailoring your content to your international audience shows you care and can help build brand loyalty.

2. Facilitating user engagement

Ideas and thoughts are always best expressed in one's native language. Not all of us have a dozen languages in our back pockets and we might feel intimidated speaking up in a language we're not fully proficient in.

Making your content available in more languages and allowing attendees to interact in their mother tongue can help break down that barrier, to make sure your audience can understand better, ask inspired questions and provide valuable feedback. 

3. Making your content easily accessible

Inclusivity has become imperative and many webinar platforms today provide great accessibility tools for people with impaired sight or hearing. In addition, many of your attendees may log in from a location with great distractions. They might sit on public transport or dial in from a noisy restaurant. 

Human-interpreted and machine-transcribed live captions can support accessibility in those instances.

4. Allowing you to reuse your webinars content

One of the many benefits of webinars is that you can use that live content to feed your content marketing pipeline. Making the recording of the webinar available on-demand increases the longevity of your webinar. You can turn your webinar content into blog articles, white papers, or mini-clips.

In a nutshell

In summary, webinar interpretation can help you to:

• Make your webinar content available in multiple languages.
• Allow your peers to ask questions and engage in their own language during your Q&A session.
• Make the interpretation available as live captions for individuals with impaired hearing or who are attending your webinar from a noisy location, such as a café.
• Make your multilingual webinar content available on-demand with edited recordings of your webinar. 
• Provide an integrated experience by combining RSI with your chosen webinar platform.

Connecting even closer with your audience has never been easier, and RSI can facilitate that at an international scale.

So how can you get started?

Interprefy can help you in sourcing subject-savvy conference interpreters in your required languages as well as providing the technology and support you need to facilitate webinar interpretation on any platform.

Example of Interprefy widget within the Cadence Platform 

While many RSI platforms provide a turnkey multilingual web conferencing platform, such as Interprefy Connect Pro, Interprefy goes one step further by partnering up with leading virtual events and web conferencing platforms to bring language interpretation to the platform you trust and love.

Learn more: Which webinar platforms does Interprefy work with?