Microsoft Teams live interpretation feature is now live for desktop, web client:

 

All Microsoft Teams meetings now have access to the live interpretation feature. Individual users and organizations that must communicate in the virtual world across multiple languages will benefit from this new feature. 

Organizations must employ qualified interpreters who can convey the message of the original speaker in a different language (or individuals). The same permissions for attendees to enter the meeting will also apply to these interpreters. 

Once a meeting has been saved or scheduled, the organizers have the option of inviting interpreters to attend or even promoting a participant to serve as an interpreter.

Microsoft Teams live interpretation feature: Availability

According to the company's official blog, Microsoft Teams will support the live interpretation feature for "regularly scheduled meetings, channel meetings, meetings with up to 1000 participants, and webinars."

Meeting planners are permitted to invite up to 16 different language pairs, where a pair is defined as the translation between two languages. Translating from English to Hindi, for instance, will be counted as one pair.

How will the feature work

When attendees join a Teams meeting that has live interpretation turned on, they can choose which language channel they want to listen to throughout the meeting.

Participants will be able to hear the interpreter's translation through these channels at a volume louder than the original speaker. Additionally, attendees will have the option of listening in either that language or the one in which the original speaker originally spoke.

Only meetings that are already scheduled with the language interpretation feature enabled can promote a participant to become an interpreter. Teams will only record the audio of the main speaker when recording.

When captions are enabled during a meeting with language interpretation, only the main speaker will be captioned; the interpreter will not.