Telephone and Video Interpreting have been around for a few decades, enabling consecutive interpreters to work remotely. More recently, several credible Remote Simultaneous Interpreting (RSI) platforms have appeared in the market, allowing also conference interpreters to deliver their service without having to be present at the venue. Avoiding interpreter booths and reducing travel and accommodation expenses has dramatically reduced the total delivery costs of simultaneous interpreting. Another technology which will dramatically change the LSP industry even further is machine interpreting (MI), a combination speech-to-text and Machine Translation (MT). Amazon and large IT companies such as IBM, Microsoft and Google are developing sophisticated MT engines and today, a handful of mobile apps provide simple, but functioning interpretation. The presenter will address and discuss the following issues: - How has RSI and COVID-19 changed the market for conference & simultaneous interpreting? - How will AI and MI change the interpreter profession? - Over the last 20-30 years, the translation industry has changed from dictionaries over CAT systems to post editing of MT. Translators can be based anywhere, regardless of the client location. There has been a resulting explosion in the volume of translations, a steep rise in productivity, but also a decrease in fee per project. Which parallels can be drawn from transition to interpreting? What lessons can be learned? - Which new services will AI and RSI enable? Products underway are recordings, captions, meeting minutes, automated transcripts and as mentioned MI. - Will MI substitute human interpreters and if yes, how fast and in which Industry segments?
