Our own team and equipment
Remote simultaneous interpretation (RSI)
Zoom, KUDO, Interprefy and Interactio. Four platforms, with no dependence on an outside supplier to operate them.
- Pairs
- English → Portuguese · Portuguese → English · Portuguese → Spanish · Spanish → Portuguese
- Platforms
- Zoom · KUDO · Interprefy · Interactio
The platforms
We work on the four that come up most often in agency briefings:
- Zoom — native interpretation, with language channels inside the meeting itself
- KUDO
- Interprefy
- Interactio
If your event runs on something else, it can almost always be accommodated. Worth asking.
What we need from you
Remote interpreting is more sensitive to audio than on-site work, because the interpreter cannot look at the room and infer what was said.
- Clean audio from the speakers. A desk mic, a headset or a lapel mic. Not the laptop’s built-in microphone.
- Speaker discipline. One person at a time, microphones muted when not speaking.
- A technical rehearsal. Twenty minutes, a few days ahead, with the people who will actually be speaking. It is the difference between an uneventful event and one with an apology in the middle of it.
The most common failure, and why it matters
The number one problem in remote events is a speaker using a laptop microphone in a room with hard surfaces.
What happens: the microphone picks up the voice reflected off the walls alongside the direct voice. To people in the meeting it sounds “muffled, but followable” — the listening brain compensates. For an interpreter, who has to resolve every word in real time and render it in another language, that compensation is not available. Intelligibility collapses far earlier for the person interpreting than for the person merely listening.
The result is slower interpretation with more gaps, and nobody can identify the cause, because the audio “sounded fine”. It was fine for listeners, not for interpreters.
A cheap headset on the speaker fixes it. It is the least expensive recommendation we have.