InterpretAmerica Co-Presidents Barry S. Olsen and Katharine Allen have been busy. In addition to pulling together the myriad of details for the 4th InterpretAmerica Summit, both have recently made the news with individual projects they are working on which they are excited to share with the field.
ZipDX Brings Together Simultaneous Interpreting and Teleconferencing:
This week, Common Sense Advisory's Global Watchtower blog post by Vijayalaxmi Hedge highlights ZipDX's groundbreaking remote simultaneous interpreting technology for conference settings. InterpretAmerica Co-President Barry Olsen serves as General Manager of Multilingual Operations for ZipDX. He doesn't just speak about technology in the interpreting profession, he is actively engaged in pioneering promising new applications for our field.
ZipDX’s introduction of simultaneous interpreting to teleconferencing is one of those things in life that you had no idea you needed so badly until you were actually introduced to it. It offers a cloud-based meeting platform in which interpreters listen to the speaker and interpret simultaneously for other people logged into the call.
David Frankel, founder and CEO, and Barry Slaughter Olsen, the General Manager of Multilingual Operations, talked to Common Sense Advisory last week about ZipDX Multilingual. Some features of the product caught our attention:
- Multilingual capability: In a ZipDX call, speakers of different languages can choose their desired language channel via their telephone keypad. As the interpretation happens real-time, speakers don’t need to pause but can carry on the conversation like they normally would. The system offers adjustable “audio cues” so that the speaker can hear the interpreter working faintly in the background and those listening to the interpreter can hear the speaker faintly as well. The speaker can also hear others if they want to interrupt, even if they are in another language channel. In addition to supporting back-and-forth multilingual conversations among small groups, the system can also enable large lecture-type virtual meetings leveraging simultaneous interpreter(s). Users can currently conduct a conference in eight languages, but Frankel said the number of languages could be increased significantly, if required.
Click here to continue reading the blog post. Congrats to Barry Olsen for his innovative endeavors to adapt new technologies for effective use in the interpreting field.
____________________________________________________
Take Note!
In a more traditional vein, InterpretAmerica Co-President Katharine Allen has been commissioned to write a book!
The following is an excerpt from Cross Cultural Communications weekly newsletter. You can sign up for Intersect here.
Take Note: Strategies for Successful Note-taking in Interpreting
by Katharine Allen, MA Let's face it: most community interpreters are not effective note-takers. Yet the need to master note-taking is huge, and far too long ignored. Most conference interpreters are well trained in note-taking. Not so community, court and business interpreters. Your time is coming. In November 2013, an extraordinary book by the Co-President of InterpretAmerica and a national leader in our field will [be published]. Note-taking is a vital skill. This book fills a huge gap and will provide practical guidance and field-tested techniques to help working interpreters improve their note-taking skills.
For more information, or to order CCC publications, click here.
No comments:
Post a Comment