Remote interpretation at the Alhambra
RSI for the cultur_ALH festival at the Palacio de Carlos V and the Corral del Carbón: interpreters working remotely, audio on the audience’s own phones.
cultur_ALH is an international literature festival held at the Alhambra, across the Palacio de Carlos V and the Corral del Carbón, with speakers and audience from a good many countries. It needed simultaneous interpretation in a World Heritage site where you cannot run cable wherever you like or hang equipment off a wall.
RSI: interpreters somewhere else, audio on your phone
We used remote simultaneous interpretation. The speakers' audio goes up to the platform, the interpreters work from wherever they are, and the audience listens on their own phones — no receivers to hand out, collect, charge and count at the end of each session.
- Live audio streaming from the room to the interpreters, monitored for quality
- Professional interpreters working remotely, on a platform with its own control panel
- Mobile access for the audience, choosing their language in one tap
- End-to-end encryption and session recording for the archive
Connectivity in a heritage building
This was the hard part. We reinforced the connection with satellite links alongside conventional internet, using discreet antennas that respect the setting, with automatic switching between the two and continuous signal monitoring. Latency was kept under 100 ms, which is the point past which interpretation stops feeling simultaneous.
What it changes
- The audience follows in their own language with nothing to collect at the door
- Working remotely widens the pool of interpreters, which matters for less common languages
- No plastic receivers, no batteries, no electronic waste — the festival asked for that specifically
- Adding a language or a parallel session does not mean adding hardware
RSI depends entirely on the connection. In venues like this one, the site survey and the backup link are not an extra: they are the project.