Collaborating effectively with interpreters in a multilingual meeting is crucial to ensure smooth communication and successful multilingual interactions. In this blog post, we share some tips to support interpreters for a better multilingual meeting experience.
Before the meeting:
- Provide interpreters with relevant materials, such as meeting agendas, presentations, talking points, and glossaries in advance. This allows them to familiarize themselves with the subject matter and prepare for the interpretation.
- Make sure that the equipment required for interpretation is set up in the meeting venue and works smoothly. If the meeting is held online or hybrid and interpreters connect remotely, check whether the online meeting platform that you will use have the function of interpretation and whether all the participants, including interpreters, have a stable internet connection.
- Set reasonable expectations and do not forget that interpreters are not robots but humans.
During the meeting:
- Speak clearly at a moderate pace and pause after significant points or sentences to allow interpreters to catch up.
- You can use visual materials such as presentations and images to complement your speech and make it more understandable and clearer.
- Make sure that interpreters can comfortably hear the speakers. Interpreters who are exposed to low-quality sound and loud noises can develop hearing loss over time.
- Give breaks at regular intervals if the meeting takes long. Interpretation can be cognitively demanding, which may decrease the quality of interpretation.
After the meeting:
- Have a brief discussion with the interpreters to address any challenges they encountered during the meeting and gather feedback from them for further collaboration in the future.
- Last but not least, do not forget to thank interpreters and appreciate their critical role in overcoming language barriers.