In today's global events landscape, accessibility is essential. Whether you're running a town hall, a product launch, or a cross-border summit, your audience likely spans languages, regions, and communication preferences. For many event organisers, the question isn't whether to provide support like captioning or translation. It's how to do it affordably, accurately, and with enough consistency to build trust.

The gold standard of multilingual accessibility is clear. Professional interpreters working in teams, rotating to manage cognitive load, supported by experienced captioners rendering the interpreted language in real time. When this model is well-prepared and resourced, it delivers strong outcomes for diverse audiences.

But this approach requires commitment. It demands a team of trained professionals, reliable infrastructure, and thorough preparation. For organisations hosting their first international event or balancing competing priorities, this level of support can feel out of reach. Sourcing dialect-specific interpreters, creating detailed glossaries, and coordinating multiple content streams all take time. Even with the best team, results can falter without adequate preparation or communication.

This is where live captioning, used thoughtfully, becomes a practical and often powerful middle ground.

Many organisations begin with live captioning as a first step toward multilingual support. It offers flexibility and scalability without requiring the full infrastructure of simultaneous interpretation. Here are a few ways this approach adds value:

1. A clean caption feed improves machine translation: When captions are clear, well-punctuated, and grounded in context, they provide a solid foundation for automated translation tools. Systems that rely on text input will perform more effectively when that input reflects accurate names, terminology, and phrasing.

2. Captioning can serve as a strategic entry point: For teams new to accessibility or multilingual event production, captioning is often a manageable starting point. It introduces structure, encourages preparation, and builds confidence for future scaling.

3. It adapts to evolving event needs: Clients who begin with captioning frequently return asking for expanded language support. We've provided services in widely spoken languages but also audience favourites in fictional languages (Elvish, Simlish) used in celebration of a community or story. Captioning can support both practical and creative ambitions. Our Klingon is ready to go.

4. Our approach supports context-driven outcomes: Line 21's AI Proofreader is designed to do more than identify words. It reviews materials for speaker names, brand-specific language, and relevant context. It can also anticipate dialect blends, helping our systems perform more reliably in linguistically diverse settings. We integrate with platforms via API and work with a range of translation engines, helping clients select the most appropriate option for their goals.

5. Translation workflows benefit from structured preparation: When captions are prepared with intention, the benefits extend beyond the event. They support translated outputs, create usable transcripts, and serve as reliable references for future access and archiving.

6. Common pitfalls can be avoided with early collaboration: Event teams often run into the same issues: context delivered too late, unclear speaker details, last-minute dialect questions, or inconsistent pacing. These details, when addressed early, can significantly improve both captioning and translation results.

7. Text is still the backbone of AI translation and dubbing: While speech-to-speech AI translation is here, many real-time and post-event translation tools today rely on text as the intermediary. This includes AI dubbing engines, which typically use the output of live captions as the script for synthetic voice generation. This means the quality of the captioning directly affects the quality of the dubbed or translated output. If your provider is including a built-in delay in their service to you, then the chances are, text is being processed during that short window of opportunity.

Live captioning may not always be the final solution, but it is a strong starting point for translation. With the right support, it enables accessibility, creates space for scale, and contributes to more inclusive and better-prepared events.

If you're planning your next event and wondering how to make it accessible across languages without overextending your team or budget, start with a conversation about captioning. The first layer sets the tone for everything that follows.