In a response to new changes after the Covid-19 pandemic, the European Parliament (EU) lately has adopted a new platform for remote interpreting. As confirmed by Anna Grzybowska, the EP’s Director for Conference Organization, the institution had been planning to offer a remote option for conference participants.
Accordingly, three candidate platforms were taken into thorough consideration before the final decision. Aiming at the participants’ accessibility to interpretation and the possibility of meaningful interaction among them, Grzybowska’s team centered around criteria like chat functions, in-meeting networking, and access to language services and interpretation. The EP’s search also prioritized looking for a provider with fast service and the ability to address technical issues on-time, which is especially critical in high-ranking meetings.
From early March 2020 to Easter marked a difficult phase for Version 1 of the new service, which remained static until that Summer. Fortunately, to the end, “the first trial meetings were actually the highest-ranking”, said Grzybowska. EP reported that the majority of green ratings (positive feedback) rather than red (negative feedback) have been given by platform users throughout the meeting-by-meeting evaluation.
However, there existed a problem from the get-go. “We started with a completely not-optimal way of connecting to those meetings, which is tablets”, she added. Meanwhile, other equipment often contained specifications that blocked the platform, preventing delegates from joining virtual meetings.
The rollout for the second version was then decided to be delayed because of lessons learned after the previous service migration. However, Grzybowska said the improvements were worth the wait. As expected, the updated version named Interactio with “standard” settings proved itself to be much more effective. A better view of participants towards Interactio, although not critical from a technical perspective, was very important to the client experience.
The updates were regarded as facilitative support to many EP participants, especially monolingual delegates. It is also noted by Grzybowska that the EP is now trying to fine-tune features like improving how sound gets to interpreters, refining how the platform interfaces with the EP’s conference equipment, and dealing with interfering audio feedback.
It is hard to predict the exact time for the best version of a virtual interpretation platform to be introduced, yet the adoption of remote interpreting by EP has exemplified the necessity and dominance it in the Interpreting industry nowadays.
Source: Slator.com
