How to make your conference accessible to non-English speakers

Translation is one part of it. Publish materials in advance, brief speakers on pace and idiom, provide captions as well as audio, and make the language options obvious in each language — most of what excludes people is not the absence of an interpreter.

Conference organisers tend to treat this as a procurement question — which interpretation vendor — when most of the exclusion happens in decisions made long before anyone books one.

Before the event

Publish materials in advance. Slides, abstracts and agendas circulated a week ahead let people who are reading in a second language prepare. This is the single cheapest accessibility improvement available and it costs nothing but a deadline for speakers.

Brief your speakers. Most of what makes a talk hard to follow in a second language is fixable and free:

Avoid idiom and sporting metaphors. “Knock it out of the park” does not travel, and interpreters have to spend a clause unpacking it.
Slow down at the transitions, not throughout. Uniform slowness is patronising and does not help.
Say acronyms in full the first time.
Do not read dense slides aloud verbatim while the audience is also reading them — pick one channel.

Make the language options visible in each language. A page that says “Interpretation available” in English only excludes precisely the people it is for.

During the event

Provide captions as well as translated audio. They serve different needs, and the overlap is smaller than assumed: people with hearing loss, people in noisy environments, people who read a language better than they hear it, and people who just want to check a term they missed.

Do not put translation only on the keynote. The hallway track and the breakout rooms are where the actual professional value sits. A conference where the keynote is translated and every workshop is not has made a statement about who the workshops are for.

Staff a help desk that speaks the languages. Someone will be unable to select their channel and will not ask in English.

Q&A is the part that fails

Live Q&A in a multilingual room is where inclusion collapses. The people confident enough to grab a roving mic and speak in a second language are not a representative sample of your audience.

Collect questions in writing throughout, in any language. It removes the confidence barrier, gives you time to translate accurately, and lets you group duplicates. If you want live mics as well, run both.

Afterwards

Ask what the platform does with the recording before you choose it, because this is where paid-for translation frequently evaporates.

Microsoft’s documentation states that Teams recordings capture only the original meeting audio and do not include interpretation audio, with translated transcripts disappearing when the meeting ends. Google Meet does not translate recordings or live streams either.

For a conference with an international audience across time zones, the asynchronous audience is often larger than the live one. If they get an untranslated recording, you translated the smaller half of your event.

Check the platform limits against your actual programme

Zoom gives translated captions, not audio, across 34 languages plus 3 target-only, on Business Plus, Enterprise, or with the add-on.
Teams Interpreter covers 10 languages, requires Microsoft 365 Copilot, and does not work in webinars or town halls — which is most of a conference programme.
Google Meet handles one English-anchored language pair per meeting with a 90-minute cap.

A three-language conference programme with 45-minute sessions and an asynchronous audience is outside all three. Better to discover that in planning than in the week of.