Welsh Government leads the way for seamless bilingual scheduled meetings with a new Microsoft Teams feature

“Pan fydd y cyfarfod yn dechrau, byddwn yn rhoi gwybod i bobl eich bod yn aros.”

Unless you’re one of the approximately 526,000 people who speak Welsh, according to the UK decennial census, the previous sentence probably left you somewhat confused. Translation: “When the meeting starts, we will let people know you are waiting.” It’s the message that you see when you’re waiting in the lobby for a Microsoft Teams meeting.

If you’re a Welsh speaker, the same sentence in English probably makes perfect sense—almost all Welsh speakers can speak both Welsh and English. Now imagine participating in a scheduled Teams meeting where contributors speak both languages, often interchangeably. For the Welsh Government, making sure Welsh speakers can contribute to scheduled meetings in Welsh is a core part of living in a bilingual country. “We’ve got a strategy in Wales to get to 1 million Welsh speakers by 2050 and to double the daily use of Welsh,” says Jeremy Evas, Head of Prosiect 2050, a unit of the Welsh Government. “To achieve that, we need to make sure people have more situations in which they can use their Welsh.”

Face-to-face meetings at the Welsh Government, and all over Wales, often included an interpreter whose job was to translate Welsh language contributions into English. After all, “Welsh is for using,” says Jeremy Miles MS, Minister for Education and Welsh Language. Creating more opportunities for Welsh speakers to use the Welsh language is a powerful statement that the contribution of every citizen is valued. “Being able to conduct meetings bilingually shows that the respect is there, encouraging people to take part, and that everyone is welcome to express themselves freely in Cymraeg [Welsh],” adds Miles.

When most meetings went online in response to COVID-19, the Welsh Government moved decisively into the era of hybrid work, which is still reshaping how the organization collaborates. From that moment on, the goal has been to find a way to deliver bilingual, scheduled meetings and recreate the experience of live interpretation on a digital platform. This led to a collaboration with Microsoft to create a brand-new Teams feature that brings human interpreters into scheduled meetings and helps support working bilingually. “Wales is leading the world with bilingual digital meetings,” says Evas. “Today, Wales is the test case, but the Language Interpretation feature in Microsoft Teams will support multilingual scheduled meetings in languages all over the world.”

Engaging Microsoft’s help with an emerging need for bilingual virtual meetings

Aled Jones, a Welsh-to-English interpreter and co-owner of translation company Cymen, has traveled from his home base in Caernarfon, Wales, to the European Parliament in Brussels and the Royal Courts of Justice in London to provide simultaneous interpretation services. But it was the move to a digital format that was the biggest departure from business as usual. “We do a lot of interpreting work for the Welsh Government for large conferences and meetings,” he explains. Prior to COVID-19, that meant driving to designated locations, observing meetings in person, and using specialty headsets. “While presenters spoke, an interpreter spoke into a sensitive microphone, and anyone who needed to hear the translation listened via a headset we provided,” says Aled.

When in-person meetings were replaced with Teams meetings, there was no simple solution for including interpreters in them. “Hosting a virtual meeting is easy, but things become more challenging when you throw interpreting into the mix,” says Aled. Participants needed a way to switch between the audio feeds of the interpreters and back to the regular meetings. To achieve that, Aled and his colleagues devised a workaround: interpreters would observe a Teams video meeting and provide language interpretation via a teleconference line. “It wasn’t perfect, but it got the job done,” says Aled.

While the teleconference solution helped save the day, the process had its limitations and was far from the seamless experience that Glyn Jones, Chief Digital Officer for the Welsh Government, envisioned for his colleagues. It became clear that a new Teams feature was the answer. “Our Chief Technology Officer at the time, Dave Milner, and other colleagues set out to work with Microsoft to solve the problem,” he says. “Teams is our working platform that we use for daily meetings, chat, and collaboration. Including Language Interpretation in Teams scheduled meetings is incredibly valuable and makes for a better user experience.”

Sarah Lilley, Customer Relationship Manager and IT Business Change Lead at the Welsh Government, received multiple requests for such a feature. “There was an emerging drive for us to work with Microsoft and deliver this functionality,” she says. “We were asked for this most days,” confirms Glyn. Lilley set about gathering votes from stakeholders to demonstrate the need for Language Interpretation in Teams. “Wales is a small country, but it quickly became clear that this feature would be beneficial for a variety of countries and applications.”

Collaborating on an ideal solution and debuting a new feature

With a clear use case and a demonstrable need for Language Interpretation in Teams, Microsoft and the Welsh Government started to move forward with the new feature. It wasn’t the first time Evas and Aled had worked with Microsoft. ”Almost 20 years ago, I worked on the localization of Windows XP and Office 2003,” says Evas. “We’ve had a long relationship with Microsoft around the Welsh language.” Employees at the Welsh Government were involved in early testing of the tool, a process that ensured their experience with bilingual meetings would inform the final product. “We led conversations with Microsoft about user needs,” says Glyn. “The process assured us that Microsoft understood the business need and incorporated user feedback into the finished product.”

As a professional interpreter and Teams user, Aled had specialized insights into what a successful Language Interpretation feature would look like. “The Welsh Government and Microsoft understood that our perspective as interpreters would be valuable in developing the feature,” he says. On the list of must-haves was automatic switching between the “floor” language and the audio feed of an interpreter. “We wanted to make sure that the functionality would match that effortless switching of languages, without listeners having to manually switch between audio feeds,” says Aled. Aled joined testing sessions for the new feature and found his suggestions incorporated into later versions. “Microsoft listened to our comments and thoughts,” he says.

Another need-to-have? “We wanted to make the process of setting up a bilingual scheduled meeting as frictionless as possible,” says Evas. “Today, I can set one up in about four clicks.” And in the case of Language Interpretation, fading into the background is a good thing. “The success of this feature comes down to how innocuous it is,” says Aled. “The purpose of an interpreter is to be in the background assisting the meeting.”

After several versions and rounds of testing, the new Teams feature was ready for its debut. To demonstrate it, Evas and his colleagues held a scheduled Teams meeting with Microsoft’s Chief Marketing Officer and Executive Vice President of Worldwide Consumer Business, Chris Capossela. “We switched the meeting to Welsh halfway through, and it was such a smooth transition,” remembers Evas. “It worked really well.”

Even as hybrid work begins replacing fully remote meetings, Welsh Government employees and Cymen interpreters are looking forward to embracing more flexible ways of working with Teams. “We’re trying to offer as much flexibility as we can for our staff,” says Aled. “With a Teams meeting, the time-consuming aspect of traveling to and from in-person meetings is gone.”

Celebrating a Welsh initiative with global reach

While the Welsh Government drove the creation of the Language Interpretation feature in Teams scheduled meetings to help increase the use of the Welsh language, the feature has worldwide applicability. “This isn’t just for Wales,” says Lilley. “It’s for any country or situation where there’s an element of bilingualism. This will have a global benefit.” Closer to home, the tool is helping ensure that employees of the Welsh Government are delivering on their responsibility to citizens. “Our worst-case scenario is not being able to hold meetings bilingually,” says Glyn. “That would fall short of our commitments and not meet the expectations of the people of Wales and the organizations we want to engage with.” Miles agrees: “This functionality will benefit our partners and the people of Wales who want to live their lives in Welsh,” he says.

After months of collaboration, launching a new Teams feature is reason to celebrate. “It’s quite a privilege that the Welsh language and the Welsh Government are leading on this,” says Aled. As for Evas, his hope for the feature is simple and powerful: “More people using more Welsh,” he says. “That’s the goal.”

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