Cardiology congress: bilingual captions across three parallel rooms

Background

A three-day international congress with a main hall and two breakout rooms running simultaneously, and speakers from 14 countries. The organizer had previously used human stenographers, which left two problems: a high error rate on specialist terminology, and a two-week turnaround for written material.

The challenge

• Extreme terminology density — drug names, procedure names and scale abbreviations arrive in rapid succession in cardiology
• Varied accents — speakers from Europe, South Asia and Latin America
• Three rooms at once — three independent configurations running in parallel, with terminology held consistent across all of them

What we did

Two weeks out

Working with the scientific committee, we assembled a glossary of over 2,400 entries covering generic and brand drug names, standard procedure translations, and the official Chinese names of participating institutions. Where abstracts were available in advance, we ran recognition tests over them and added the frequent misreads to a correction list.

During

Each room produced its own captions from a shared glossary, so a given concept was rendered identically in all three. The main hall also carried a captioned live stream.

After

Each session's bilingual transcript was delivered within 30 minutes of that session ending, with the complete compilation finished the same day the congress closed.

Outcome

International speakers and delegates gave clear positive feedback on caption accuracy, and the turnaround for written material went from two weeks to a single day.