Blog Articles

There’s no denying it — work has changed, permanently. These days, it’s common for a single project team to span three or four time zones. One team member might log in from London, another from Warsaw, and another from Cape Town or Singapore. The era of fixed offices and face-to-face collaboration is fading fast. In its place, we now have something more flexible, more borderless — and far more complex.

Planning an event that runs smoothly is already a big job. Throw in multiple languages, hybrid attendance, and tight timelines, and it gets a lot trickier.

We get it. You want everyone at your event — whether they’re in the room or joining online — to feel included and able to follow along. But traditional interpretation setups aren’t designed for today’s formats. Many times they’re costly, complicated, and don’t always fit with your tools or timeline.

The good news is, there’s a better way. More and more organisers are turning to flexible solutions that support multilingual communication without piling on extra stress or equipment. And they’re seeing results: simpler setups, smoother experiences, and events that work better for everyone.

This guide walks through how to make that shift — so you can plan events that reach more people, work across languages, and still feel easy to run.

"Hybrid event" may well be the word of the year within the event industry. Having become the talk of town, the concept of hybrid events has been sending seismic waves across the events industry, sparking event planners' creativity and imagination beyond the constraints of physical venues.

The COVID-19 pandemic forced event planners to shift to virtual events in March 2020. While this was an unexpected challenge, many event organisers found great success with virtual events and embraced the benefits that the virtual world brought to their events.

A hybrid event combines in-person and online elements. In other words, an in-person event that has speakers, attendees or interpreters connecting and participating remotely, is a hybrid event.

For nearly two years now event and meeting organisers worldwide have been trying out new and creative ways to take their gatherings online and embraced change and adaptation like never before.

Sourcing an accurate and clear language interpretation solution is essential to delivering high-quality multilingual hybrid events. But finding the right solution can be a challenge, especially as interpretation needs to be provided for both on-site and virtual attendees. This logistical hurdle is multiplied by the number of languages that require interpretation.

Many hybrid event organisers have turned to Remote Simultaneous Interpretation (RSI) technology to solve this problem. But is RSI a good fit for your hybrid event? Let’s compare RSI with traditional interpretation before exploring how RSI fits into the hybrid event landscape.

Hybrid events blend the best qualities of virtual event platforms with traditional venue-based events — literally offering the best of both worlds. They’re increasingly popular, and work well when you’re programming topics and activities that can be communicated to both physical and online audiences.

One of the greatest benefits of hybrid events is how much easier it is for organisers to ensure their event is inclusive and accessible. Here’s why you can no longer afford to ignore event inclusivity, and how you can lower barriers to access with your next hybrid event.

Interprefiers Take the Floor is now available on your preferred podcast directory.

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Maha El-Metwally is a highly experienced interpreter who has been working as a conference interpreter for Arabic and English for over 15 years. She is also an RSI trainer.