The 66th Annual Session of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly, 18-23 November 2020, was the first online meeting in the history of the assembly. All meetings over six days, in up to seven languages, were held on KUDO, the Language-as-a-Service platform for multilingual web conferencing.
The teams of Greek interpreters provided simultaneous interpreting to the PA and Committee meetings from AIHub, the Athens Interpreting Hub operated by ELIT Language Services in the centre of Athens since February 2019.
The world has changed many times over since the Nuremberg trials, widely acknowledged as the birthplace of simultaneous interpreting; what has not changed, however, is the mental processes in the brain of conference interpreters and the need for teamwork: conference interpreting relies on conference interpreters being able to communicate visually, orally and haptically to support each other at all times.
Quality Distance Interpreting only increases the need for conference interpreters to work from the same booth, as their brains are overloaded with several processes that are not part of onsite conference interpreting. Conference interpreting hubs are an obvious solution for greener, seamless, high-quality multilingual communication.
ELIT Language Services, an interpreter owned LSP, is the largest provider of conference interpreting services in the region, a pioneer in Distance Interpreting, and KUDO partner in Greece.
