As you might know already, almost every meetings are conducted via Zoom nowadays. It really took the world by storm and became one of the most successful company post Covid19 era.

I have been using Zoom since the last 3 years ago, giving my service as interpreter with consecutive interpreting method. And currently Zoom also provide a new simultaneous interpretation function and I have been using that several times with my clients.

I won’t be covering how you enabled this function because zoom has a restriction that only host with some plan or business account can access this feature. And I am sure what kind of account can access this feature might be changed in the future, so if you want to get more information about that, you could go to :
https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/360034919791-Language-interpretation-in-meetings-and-webinars

Here are my thoughts/experiences regarding the current Zoom interpretation function (per early July 2020).

• I have several occasions where the Host forgot to enabled this function so I could not be assigned as interpreter. And when the host finally remember that he/she has to enabled it, it was too late because the webinar has already started.
  (Updated on April 2021 : more people has become aware and familiar with the operation and I didn’t see any of this trouble again lately)
• It was designed to be a one way presentation. So whenever the speaker open a discussion or Q&A session, it was a challenging situation because the speaker couldn’t hear the interpreter unless he/she changed the channel, however if they change the channel, they will lose the access to the audience’s voice.
  (Updated on March 2021 : Zoom provided a feature where you could hear the interpreter’s voice with certain percentage of volume and also the mic from the speaker with certain percentage of volume)
• No force – mute. In the offline Simultaneous interpreting booth, it is a very common to have a force mute button to force mute your partner if he/she forgot to mute when you are interpreting. Or in a recent one, the system is automatically rigged that whenever your mic is on, your partner’s mic will be muted and vice versa. Zoom doesn’t have this functionality yet.
• No Bahasa Indonesia’s label. Zoom only provide about 8 languages channel right now. So imagine if I want to interpret a Japanese speaker to Bahasa audience, there is no label for it. Let’s say we use the Korean channel as Indonesian Channel, so the audience that want to hear Indonesian interpretation has to choose… Korean… that is so confusing for the audience. I’m not so sure why they do not provide us the custom label / channel that we could set.
  (Updated on May 2021 : this issue has been resolved since Zoom already provide us the free text label for the language)

I do believe the function will get better in the future since almost all of the meetings will take place in Zoom world and more of this interpretation function will be needed across the whole world.