Professional Interpretation for Meetings and Webinars

California-based SaaS (software as a service) company Webex was founded in 1995, so it’s had a long time to hone its videoconferencing products—with excellent results. As of 2022, Cisco Webex is the most popular cloud calling provider in the world, supporting more than 39 million cloud calling users around the globe.

As the preferred product of many international businesses, Webex has an impressive set of features designed specifically for remote simultaneous interpretation. As a host, you can easily enable simultaneous interpretation for a meeting, manage new language channels and assign interpreters during meetings, and even pre-assign interpreters in Webex Meetings and Webinars (but not in a Personal Room). Interpreters during the meeting are designated by a special symbol.

Benefits of Cisco Webex Multilingual Meetings

 Overall, Webex offers many features that can help support both consecutive and simultaneous language interpretation.

• Hosts can add as many interpreters as they want to invite.
• Webex Meetings itself supports over 25 world languages.
• Webex enables bidirectional language interpretation.
• Attendees can pre-select the channel for their preferred language.
• It is web-based, so no software downloads are necessary for attendees.

Perhaps the best feature to highlight from this list is that Webex enables bidirectional interpretation, an improvement over unidirectional platforms like Microsoft Teams. That is, in Webex, you can switch the direction of your target language if you’re interpreting in both directions.

Limitations of Cisco Webex for Remote Interpretation

 Despite its numerous benefits, Webex does have some potential drawbacks to keep in mind when you’re deciding what service is best for you:  Simultaneous interpretation is not available for webinars in webcast view.

• WebEx Meetings allow (depending on plan) up to 200 attendees.
• Can’t create breakout rooms or practice sessions alongside interpretation.
• Recordings only capture the original audio, without interpretation.
• Some concerns with slow UI and support for third-party integration.

 Like competitors Google Meet and GoTo Meeting, Webex Meetings just isn’t designed for extremely large events; its largest plan allows up to 200 attendees (a step down from Google Meet and GoTo Meeting’s 250), and its free account only up to 100 attendees. Other limitations, such as the lack of simultaneous interpretation in webcast view and the inability to use breakout rooms alongside remote interpretation, could be a serious issue for conferences and webinars. Over the last few years, Webex has also introduced significant updates and upgrades from its older, legacy versions to its newer ones. If your business has been using Webex for years and years, you may have noticed some growing pains—some users have reported that the transfer is difficult, that Webex’s UI can be confusing and consumes a lot of computer power, and that Webex doesn’t integrate third-party apps as well as a platform like Zoom does.