Did you know that it’s easy to provide simultaneous interpretation in Zoom meetings?

This makes meetings accessible for people who speak languages other than English, without making the meetings longer.

This is a great feature for schools, community organizations, non-profits, and any other institution that uses video calls and wants to include people who speak different languages.

As a parent, I’ve attended many long school conferences through Zoom. The meetings often go like this: the principal speaks and then the interpretation happens after, often in summary. This makes the meetings longer, less dynamic, and less accessible for parents who are relying on interpretation.

Make the Road NY has provided language interpretation for most of our meetings to ensure they are accessible for our monolingual members and staff. As we’ve transitioned to working remotely, we learned about Zoom’s feature that makes it easy to interpret our meetings simultaneously. This is so much quicker than consecutive interpretation.

In the hopes of supporting teachers, school administrators, families and other communities, I invite you to share this one-pager we created, guiding school administrators and others on how to set up the Zoom Interpretation assistance feature. This feature allows the school’s hired interpreter (or any other interpreter) to translate the meetings in real time while meeting attendees tune in to their preferred language.

We hope this resource helps monolingual immigrant parents at your children’s school to access school meetings, especially during these tumultuous times.

In solidarity,