Corporate event simultaneous interpretation: 5 mistakes

Nine fifteen on the first morning. The keynote has started, the interpreters are in their booth and the headsets are stacked on the registration desk. Three rows back, four colleagues from the Milan office are quietly asking each other what was just said. Nobody told them, before they booked their flights, that the day would run in English.

Simultaneous interpretation at a corporate event starts with the invitation, not with the badge desk. A guest who cannot read the language of the programme decides whether to come from the first link you send, not from a line buried in a follow-up email three days later.

Simultaneous interpretation starts in the invitation, not at the door

The label is the cheapest place to fix this, and the easiest to forget. If the programme runs in two languages, write it on the invitation itself: session in English, simultaneous interpretation into Spanish. Your supplier in Lisbon, your partner in Hamburg and your own sales team all need that line before they book a flight or block a day in their calendar.

• Put the language of each session on the invitation: talk in English, interpretation into Spanish.
• Give the hour with its time zone. 21:00 CET, not a bare 21:00.
• Write the address as it appears on the map, next to the venue name in the local language.
• Describe the dress code in garments. Dark suit, no tie travels further than formal.

One invitation, seven languages

Send The Joy is a digital invitation: a web page for your event, not a PDF. The content can be set by language, so the same page is readable in English for the London office and in Spanish, Catalan or French for the delegations that need it. Guests install nothing. They open the link in the browser on their phone and confirm from the same page.

The habit it replaces is the one everybody has done at least once: a single PDF in a single language, plus a WhatsApp message asking whoever speaks both to translate it for the rest of the room.

Your guests decide whether they will understand the day before they decide whether to come. Send that answer with the invitation.

The logistics that break when they are translated

An hour without a time zone confuses anyone arriving from another country, so write 21:00 CET rather than 21:00. An address written only in the local language is useless in a taxi: give the venue as it appears on the map, with the exact street. And the dress code changes meaning between countries. Formal reads differently in Milan and in São Paulo, so name the clothes instead. Dark suit, no tie. Then nobody improvises at the door.

The RSVP that tells you how many headsets to book

If the confirmation form never asks about language, you are guessing at headsets, booths and interpreters. The RSVP questions in Send The Joy are configurable, so add one: which language will you follow the sessions in? The answers land inside the invitation, in an ordered list, instead of scattered across chat threads the night before.

Before you book interpreters, read your own invitation: it is the first place a guest finds out whether they will understand the day, and the last place you can still change cheaply. You can try a design for free in Send The Joy and publish it for 29.99 EUR once the languages and the wording are right. If the room, the hour or the speaker changes at the last minute, you edit the page and the link stays the same.