The automatic floor audio volume adjustment of Translate@Home (T@H) allows for easy Remote Simultaneous Interpretation (RSI) for events with different floor languages.
When the language in the floor audio and a language room are the same, the interpreter(s) in that language room can simply mute themselves: Clevercast automatically maximizes the floor audio volume for that language. Viewers who have selected this language in the player will hear the floor audio at full volume.
Setting up an event with different floor languages
When setting up the Translate@Home event, make sure to select Original as the default language. This way, the video player will contain the ‘Original’ language (floor audio) as the default language, followed by the translated languages.
For example, for a conference with English and Spanish speakers, your setup could be like this:
- default language: ‘Original’. This contains the floor audio.
- language room: ‘English’. While someone is speaking English, the interpreter mutes herself and viewers hear the floor audio at full volume. When the interpreter starts translating, viewers hear the English translation.
- language room: ‘Spanish’. While someone is speaking Spanish, the interpreter mutes herself and viewers hear the floor audio at full volume. When the interpreter starts translating, viewers hear the Spanish translation.
This way, English viewers can just select the English translation in the player. They will always hear English output: whether it is the original speaker, or the interpreter.
Predefined language selection in the player
If necessary, you can embed the player with a default language of your choice by adding the ‘audio_default’ option to the embed code. When someone opens the player for the first time, s/he will automatically hear the selected language (note: when the player is opened the next time in the same browser, it will remember the viewer’s selection).
For example, the following embed code will cause new viewers to see the player with the English translation automatically selected:
<iframe style="border: 0;" src="https://player.clevercast.com?account_id=XXXXX&event_id=XXXXX&audio_default=en" width="1920" height="1080" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe>Apart from passing the ISO 639-1 code of a language, you can also add ‘audio_default=browser‘ to the embed code. In that case, the player will try to use the browser language. If the browser language is not available, it will revert to the default player language.
Single interpreter for bilingual events
For a live stream with two languages in the floor audio, which are spoken in turn, you can use bilingual language rooms. This way, a single interpreter could do the job.
In our previous example, you would configure the event with a bilingual ‘English – Spanish’ language room. When someone is speaking English, the interpreter clicks on the ‘Spanish‘ button and starts translating into Spanish. When someone is speaking Spanish, the interpreter clicks on the ‘English‘ button and starts translating into English.
Interpreter relay for events with many languages
If there are many different languages being spoken in the floor audio and an interpreter doesn’t understand all of them, s/he can use the interpreter relay feature. At any time, an interpreter can select one of the other language rooms via the ‘Interpreter Relay’ dropdown button. When they does this, the interpreter will hear the translation from this language room instead of the floor audio. Since interpreter relay comes without latency, they can hear the other interpreter in real time and use this translation as the source for his own translation.
For example, when someone starts speaking French during a predominantly English meeting, the Japanese interpreter can select ‘English’ from the Interpreter Relay dropdown. This way, they will hear the translation from the English interpreter (instead of the floor audio) and can continue to translate from English into Japanese.
If the event manager knows in advance which language will be spoken at a given time, they can help by sending instructions to the interpreters via the Language Rooms Management interface. It also allows event managers to hear the incoming translations from each language room at any given time.