Together 2025 Speaker Article: Part 8 with Eric Bauwelinck
What does the future hold for simultaneous interpreting? How is AI impacting it? As part of our Speaker Articles series, Eric Bauwelinck explored the evolution of simultaneous interpreting at ELIA Together 2025. In a call to rethink the impact of AI, he invites us to face the future of simultaneous interpreting with confidence and open-mindedness:
The essence of human language
Language reflects the historical, cultural, economic, and social influences that shape its identity and meaning. Language embodies our unique ability to express ourselves with our natural tone of voice and our unique thoughts, awareness, and self-consciousness.
Language represents the most distinctive expression of humans, enabled by trillions of neural associations – the substance that defines great speakers. Our brain is the single most unique quantum computer ever built, capable of forward-thinking, anticipating and even reading the mindset of speakers based on our ability to understand and interpret human speech.
The mindset of a conference interpreter
Simultaneous interpreters possess the complex ability to combine the cognitive psycholinguistic efforts of listening, understanding, speaking, interpreting, and assessing the output while preserving structure, meaning and faithfulness in recreating the original message.
Interpreters are also experts in applying coping tactics and strategies to resolve big and small challenges in a meaningful manner while staying faithful to the original speaker.
Great speakers have the ability to influence the mindset of their audience, which exceeds the mathematical process of data reproduction. Understanding the mindset of speakers is as important as understanding meaning, and interpreters use this talent to deliver their message.
A wake-up call: artificial and agentic intelligence is here to stay, like it or not
Conference interpreters have experienced the transformation from onsite to remote interpreting accelerated by the health crisis, as well the introduction of AI with automated speech translation that took the interpreting industry completely by surprise back in 2023.
Artificial intelligence is not a substitute for human intelligence, just as virtual avatars will never be a substitute for human authenticity, trustworthiness, representativeness, and accountability.
Let us put things in the right perspective. Automated interpreting will find a place and purpose in the meeting industry, providing language access with software-as-a-service with a high degree of availability, accessibility, and affordability, three main drivers of innovative language technology.
While we are at it, let us be realistic: there are plenty of meetings where human interpreters are not available or not even needed if there is a budget for interpreting to begin with. This is fertile seeding ground for automated interpreting, similar to multilingual content on social media.
At the same time, AI can be a strong enabler for human interpreting in scenarios with human interests at stake where linguistic reliability and accountability are key performance indicators.
Here lies an opportunity to change the narrative from substitution into complementarity, differentiation, and innovation to improve the performance of professional interpreters.
Conference interpreting in the era of AI
Human simultaneous interpreting will remain critical in human encounters to facilitate goodwill, understanding and even peace between nations and cultures.
I believe we need to face the future with confidence and open-mindedness to reclaim recognition for this beautiful profession we love so dearly. On the same note, I would like to encourage interpreters in their worldwide mission as cultural ambassadors to continue to deliver the right message to the right audience where we are needed, appreciated and valued.
What are your thoughts on simultaneous interpreting in this AI era? Don’t hesitate to reach out to Eric via LinkedIn to continue the conversation!
Share your thoughts on this topic here on LinkedIn, and follow this series where we will share more speaker articles from Together 2025.
