Welsh Government leads the way for seamless bilingual scheduled meetings with a new Microsoft Teams feature.
Over the past two years Microsoft Teams has become a central part of the lives of many of us.
While the Teams interface has been available in Welsh for some time, we’ve been missing the ability to organise and hold our meetings bilingually. And while this hasn’t been possible, we haven’t been able to speak Welsh as much as we might have done in the past. But change is afoot.
You can now hold scheduled meetings bilingually using the language interpretation function in Microsoft Teams thanks to a partnership between the Welsh Government and Microsoft. There’s no extra cost and no need to install any additional software.
How to use
First, you’ll need to create a meeting and add language interpretation
- Create the meeting, invite your participants (don’t forget to invite your chosen interpreter), and send the invitation
- In Teams, select Calendar, and open the meeting
- Select ‘Meeting options’
- Toggle on ‘Enable language interpretation’
- Select your interpreter from the ‘Interpreters’ drop-down menu and set the source and target languages
- Save to apply these settings
Choosing an interpreter during the meeting
- In your meeting, select Participants
- Hover over the person who is your chosen interpreter and select ‘More options… > Make an interpreter’
And that’s it, the meeting’s ready to go, and as your participants join they can choose to listen to the meeting their preferred language. It’s possible to change this at any point during the meeting by clicking the three dots for more options at the top of the screen.
For more information:
Use language interpretation in a Teams meeting (microsoft.com)
Remember to use a qualified simultaneous interpreter – more information here: Find a Translator or Interpreter — English content (cyfieithwyr.cymru)
Ensuring we can use Welsh, and be seamlessly bilingual in all we do, is important. And this new development within Teams is an important step towards this. For the Welsh Government, making sure Welsh speakers can contribute to scheduled meetings in Cymraeg is a core part of living in a bilingual country.
Thinking of scheduling a Teams meeting at work, or for a community or social group? Maybe language interpretation could work to make your meeting bilingual. Cymraeg – it belongs to us all.
For more information about our work with Microsoft: