Blog Articles

A large medical congress runs on precision. Thousands of clinicians move between plenaries, parallel tracks, industry symposia and poster halls, and much of what they hear may shape how they treat patients within weeks. When delegates follow that content in a second language, a misunderstood dosage, endpoint or contraindication is more than an awkward moment, because it can travel back into clinical practice.

Picture an international delegation visiting your headquarters for two days. The programme opens with a plenary for 200 people in three languages, moves on to a factory tour, includes a private meeting between the two heads of delegation and ends with a press conference. Your interpretation provider asks a simple question: consecutive or simultaneous? The honest answer is both, but for different parts of the day, and getting that split wrong costs you either time or money.

Remote simultaneous interpretation (RSI) is the process of remotely interpreting speech from one language to another in real time. Using cloud-based technology, RSI connects interpreters, speakers, and participants from anywhere in the world. It reduces costs, increases flexibility, and makes multilingual communication accessible for events and meetings of any size - from small business meetings to large international conferences.

A quarterly earnings call gets moved up by two days. A crisis communications briefing needs to go out to five markets within the hour. A regional sales kickoff, planned months in advance, needs interpreters booked, briefed and ready before the first slide goes up. These are all multilingual events, but they call for different approaches to interpretation, and choosing the wrong one costs time, money or both.

Most sustainability conversations in the events industry start with venues, catering and offsetting. Travel is usually acknowledged and then set aside, because delegate and speaker travel is rarely up for debate: it is the reason onsite events happen. That instinct holds up. Business travel and accommodation typically account for 70 to 90 percent of an event's total emissions, and attendee travel is usually the single largest source within that figure. Across the industry as a whole, aggregated travel, energy, catering and logistics may account for up to 10 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.

For enterprises, organisations and institutions, the real challenge of multilingual communication is not providing translation, but delivering language access in a way that is dependable, scalable and aligned with enterprise‑level expectations.

When Earth Day first took place in 1970, millions gathered in the U.S. to speak out against pollution and environmental damage. It was a turning point — a moment that proved that ordinary people, united by purpose, could influence real policy change.

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.

In 2014, a bold idea was born in Zurich that would forever change the interpretation and translation industry. Kim Ludvigsen, the visionary founder of Interprefy, was attending a conference when he noticed the outdated booths and equipment used for interpretation—technology that hadn’t seen much change since the 1960s. Inspired by the widespread use of smartphones and the internet, he posed a pivotal question that would spark a revolution: why couldn’t interpreters work remotely and attendees use their own devices to access event interpretations? This question marked the beginning of Remote Simultaneous Interpretation (RSI).