There’s a chicken and egg problem when it comes to event interpretation/translation. You want to avoid spending money on translation unless people need it. But if you don’t invest in translation, nobody who needs it shows up!
“Translation on Demand” solves this problem. It enables you to consistently offer translation at all of your events without the upfront cost of hiring interpreters (or coordinating volunteers) only to find that their services were not needed. You only pay for translation time if someone shows up and requests it.
Spf.io’s multilingual design means you’re ready to provide translation any time a guest needs it (we support ~60 right now). In tech jargon, we help you internationalize (i18n) your event and the moment someone asks for a language, spf.io provides a localized experience for them.
Here’s how it works. Create a session for your event and activate the languages you already know you need. In the example to the right, we knew people would need Korean, Indonesian and Spanish translation.
Then select the option titled, “Allow audience members to activate additional channels they need.” In our example, this would enable a guest to activate Hindi translation even though you didn’t expect anyone to ask for it.
Congratulations! You just enabled “Translation on Demand”. With this option, your audience will be able to choose from the full list of languages available.
When they select one, that language channel will be immediately activated. They will get automatic translations in that language from then on.
What can you do with “Translation on Demand”?
So what does this all mean?
Imagine you’re an English church that wants to include Spanish speaking families in your neighborhood. You have a few bilingual members, but it’s too much for them to volunteer as simultaneous interpreters every week. Your church doesn’t have a budget for translation, but if more than 10 Spanish speakers came consistently you could convince the leaders to fund it.
After doing some research you learn that more than 10 people in church have hearing loss and would love to get English captions of the service. That’s enough to get a modest budget approved to use spf.io for captioning…which also enables you to provide Spanish translation the moment someone needs it!
Internationalize your community
Spf.io enables you to pay a minimal amount up front to “internationalize” your church so it’s ready to provide Spanish translation the moment even one visitor comes who needs it. You don’t have to setup additional equipment for them since guests get translation on their phones (you can also pass out cheap tablets (affiliate) or show subtitles on a TV). You don’t need extra volunteers since the AI translates the English captions for you.
Translation is available every single Sunday, but you don’t have to pay for any translation minutes if no one uses it.
And this applies not only to Spanish, but to Korean, Swahili, Russian, Indonesian or any one of more than 60 languages. Spf.io empowers your church to serve an international community.
And of course it applies to more than just churches.
With translation on demand, event organizers for lectures, conferences, meetings and more can readily serve multilingual communities without having to spend money on translation services that may never get used.
This unlocks new possibilities. Suddenly, becoming multilingual isn’t so intimidating or financially risky. Any organization that already values accessibility, captions, transcripts, or even meeting minutes is just one click away from including people in many languages in their community.