i-Passage multi-lingual-meeting-facilitation services

Do you need to organize a meeting with people who don’t speak the same language ?

Are you unsure as to what the language needs will be with a mixed group of people from different countries?

Do you want to cover a complex set of service needs – interpreting, translation of documents, localization, and follow-up ?

A dynamic meeting involving international partners or participants will usually have language-service needs. These may be unpredictable, depending on the language skills, the mindset and the desires of the participants. The meeting may also present cultural-translation issues. This is sometimes packaged as “localization.” However, it can be more subtle and unpredictable than any standard resource can anticipate (just watch the film, Lost in Translation, where Bill Murray plays a sardonic actor briefly in Japan to record some advertisements, and has various misadventures with interpreters, not because of language itself but because, mentally, they are never on the same “page” as him).

The multi-lingual meeting facilitator can point you in advance to what needs may arise, provide language interpreting during the meeting for your presentation and participants’ questions and comments, and help you grasp and facilitate the participants’ wishes. In short, apart from objective translation, if the success of a meeting depends on the active involvement of participants, it is essential to empower them by both interpreting and paying attention to their direct and indirect cues.

In short, multi-lingual meeting facilitation has two key features: (i) it involves various different sorts of resources; (ii) the movements between modes of communication are not pre-scripted but rather are dynamic, changing with needs as they arise.

Typical Contexts

Services We Provide

We help you convene a meeting with an international and/or multi-lingual participant base. You explain to us your objective and basic format. We orient you as to the usual needs and resources provided for such meetings. We help you select and use platforms like Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams (each has specific advantages for multilingual needs). If you already have your own preferred (or contracted) service platform, we work with that.

If you or your organization does not have free or existing access to a platform, you can use ours (we function as the meeting “host” and your participants use our platform access).

On the language front, we provide interpreters, translation of support documents and review of presentation documents. On the interactional front we serve as mediators to facilitate communication.

What Sets Us Apart

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

If I don’t have to speak the foreign language myself, and I know how to set up an e-meeting, then why would I need an external facilitator for a multi-lingual meeting?

You could indeed initiate a meeting without help. But the question is, how important is it to optimize the effectiveness of the meeting by managing the multi-lingual language needs of diverse participants? Meeting facilitation in one language is hands-on, dynamic and creative. Multi-lingual instances involve a range of specific additional needs. If the main delivery is in English, international audience members may have sufficient working knowledge to get the gist but not to fully participate. The language mediator uses various modalities and strategies to level the playing field, involve all participants and enhance their sense of agency (being an active rather than a passive participant). The language mediator is there to minimize the time wasted in the meeting or after it due to language-based misunderstandings. Cultural differences also play out in language miscues or gaps of expression. “Localization” is a sub-skill within interpreting and translation which focuses on the adaptation of information from the source-culture to a target culture.

What are some examples of this “dynamic” context – the possible shifts of modes of communication., etc. ?

In a meeting conducted in English for an international audience, it is common for many of the non-native English speakers to have pretty good passive mastery of English (understanding the English speaker). This is typical, for example, of many educated African Francophone speakers. They may prefer to listen to the English original, but then want interpreting help at the time of expressing opinions themselves or of asking clarification questions. Conversely, immigrant parents of school children may strongly prefer another language for social use among themselves, but still opt for English for the numerous technical terms of U.S. “education-speak” because only these are used administratively and practically for their kids in schools.Technical information (e.g., for the operation of equipment) will often be better processed by users in the language of the user manuals (usually English, even for Japanese of German equipment), whereas if the bulk of the users present share another language socially, they will very likely use that to interact informally, so that the Anglophone presenter will need interpretation of that back into English so as not to be out of the social loop. If it is a physical (non virtual) meeting, that last mode might be done by “chuchotage” (the interpreter “whispers” to a single beneficiary instead of the group). There is a workaround to chuchotage for virtual meetings, but use of it depends on the tech set-up of language channels.

Apart from the meeting event, what preparation or follow-up should I consider or expect ?

Informational meetings of all sorts (the educational distribution of large packets of info, marketing, consultation services, etc.) work best when conceived as a timeline covering before / during / after. This is not at all unique to multilingual contexts but it is more critical in the multilingual setting, because both language and culture gaps can erode the audience’s apprehension of the agenda. No matter how obvious it may seem, the content agenda should be clearly flagged. The convener should provide in advance what teachers call “scaffolding” (supportive complementary materials, and sometimes activities, which make learning easy). This facilitates familiarity, which lowers (unconscious) psychological defenses. Admittedly, this approach can actually reduce the “wow” factor. But in most situations, clear communication is more valuable than the thrill of surprise (this gets complex: marketing and educating are very different psychologies..).The degree of “buy-in” from participants at a single meeting can be very difficult to gauge. The best way to promote and to test sustained buy-in is by keeping the material live in the minds of users. This is achieved both by distributing follow-up materials and by creating an arena in which the users’ active participation is encouraged. A basic example: if you provide descriptive material in the event, and then solicit post-event feedback from users regarding unclear content, a dialog ensues. This turns a negative (incomprehension) into a positive (engagement, elucidation of queries, perhaps even refinement of unsuccessful expression in the original material). It is productive to validate the users’ responses as relevant – that is, for the event directors to consider the process as a real dialog. Remember what they say about how diversity in employee ranks improves productivity. Create space and allocate resources for this process. While our role in this is concentrated in the communication area, other technical competencies also come into play.

Cost Basis for This Service

How It Works

Context	Example	Modes/Aspects
International government aid	US Department of State funding AIDS programs in Subsaharan Africa	It is essential that participants have opportunities to describe varying local conditions; presenters cannot simply be on “transmit” mode
Technical training	Corporation training technicians based in multiple countries for use of medical HazMat incinerators	Some non-Anglophone trainees will have learned using English manuals, others in translated manuals; a live meeting will require a cheatsheet juxtaposition of both for quick verification
Professional conference	International legal conference on trends in intellectual property contracts, with focus on applied skills	To practice, interactive simulations allow for creative responses to variable scenarios; the ensuing content (original argument) is by nature unpredictable, and legal terminology cited differentially; consider a live-time dynamic multilingual glossary
Marketing	A media streaming platform tests international audiences for reaction to a new in-production program	Users must be pampered upon entry, and encouraged to engage; If analysts seek a longitudinal relationship (getting feedback over time, on different episodes), users need a follow-up multilingual concierge service
Public meetings regarding the environmental impact of development projects	Offshore wind energy projects with bidding for leases supervised by federal and state authorities; can disproportionally impact local ethnolinguistic communities and Native American tribes	Follow-up threads – concrete means by which participants can express their approval/ disapproval– are a key warrant that authorities are receptive to public opinion.
Crisis management team	A small business learns it is being sued for discrimination regarding language services. Manager, attorney, the “offending” employee, etc., huddle virtually	The lawyer will efficiently focus on relevant considerations. The character of the language interaction issue, however, must be “excavated” by a sociolinguistic expert

Multi-Lingual Meeting Facilitation