How to offer multilingual interpretation at an event
This page does not sell, it explains. If you are trying to decide how to make your event understood in several languages, these are the real options, with what each costs and where each fails.
The four ways to solve it, and what each costs
- Human simultaneous interpretation with a booth: the best quality and the most expensive. Budget two interpreters per language, because they need relief every twenty to thirty minutes, plus booth, bodypacks and receivers.
- Consecutive interpretation: the speaker stops and somebody translates. No equipment cost, but it doubles the length of every intervention.
- Live automatic captions and translation: each attendee picks a language on their own phone. Cost is per event hour, not per language or per person.
- Doing nothing: the default option, and the one taken without deciding it. People who do not speak the language attend, but do not participate.
How to decide which you need
Is legal or diplomatic nuance at stake?
If a badly chosen word has contractual consequences, you need a human interpreter. There is no argument here.
How many languages, really?
With one or two, human interpretation is viable. From the third on, cost grows linearly and the budget breaks.
Is anyone hard of hearing?
Interpretation does not solve hearing access. Captions do, in the language being spoken.
Will it be recorded?
If the video gets published you will need captions anyway. Producing them live costs the same as producing them afterwards, and they also serve during the event.
What the automatic option needs on site
A clean audio feed
The same one already going to recording. It determines the quality of the result far more than the choice of system does.
A screen, or a video signal
For the room captions. It can be composited over programme or projected separately.
A code and a QR
So each attendee opens the translation on their phone. Print it, do not only project it.
Somebody to press the button
And, if the event deserves it, somebody to correct proper nouns while it happens.
Mistakes that keep repeating
Projecting the QR only at the start
People arrive late. The code has to be visible while the audience files in, and printed if possible.
Forgetting the Wi-Fi
Five hundred phones connecting at once are five hundred phones connecting at once. At a conference the access point fails before anything else.
Not loading the vocabulary
Proper nouns, acronyms and product names transcribe badly if nobody typed them first. It is ten minutes of preparation.
Measuring access by the invoice
Having a system does not mean it was used. Ask for the report of how many devices followed it, and in which languages.
Where SCAPTION fits
In the automatic option, with one difference
Captions come out inside your video signal over NDI with a real alpha channel, instead of on a full-screen web page on a separate monitor.
No per-attendee or per-language cost
Which is what gets the third language approved.
With data in Europe
And with no transcript of the live path stored anywhere.
With the price published
You can budget without calling.
Accessibility
If you only need to caption what is spoken. Event Pro if you need to translate into other languages, which is the case this guide is about.
Frequently asked questions
What does a human interpreter cost?
It depends on the market and the language, but the rule the industry itself uses is two interpreters per language per day, because they need relief. That doubling usually decides the budget. We have a calculator to compare your specific case.
Is machine translation good enough?
For the spoken discourse of a conference, a training session or a council meeting, yes, and it improves every quarter. For a contract, a court hearing or a diplomatic negotiation, no. Anyone telling you it replaces a human in every case is selling you something.
How many languages can be offered at once?
More than fifty, simultaneously, with each attendee choosing their own. It does not have to be decided in advance or contracted per language.
Do receivers have to be handed out?
No. Each attendee uses their own phone and their own earphones, so there is no equipment to buy, charge, distribute or collect.
What about deaf attendees?
Captions in the spoken language cover much of the case. We do not offer sign language: if your event has a sign language interpreter, their window can be composited alongside the captions in the same video signal.
Other solutions
Run your next event free
One hour of full-featured captioning and translation, no expiry, no card — enough to prove it on your own rig before you pay.