Relay is what happens when nobody in the room can work a language pair directly. One booth interprets the floor into a pivot language, and the other booths work from that output instead of from the original speaker.
A worked example
An Arabic speaker addresses a room needing English, French and Chinese. Finding Arabic to Chinese interpreters at short notice is hard, and Arabic to French harder still. So the Arabic booth interprets into English, and the French and Chinese booths take English as their source. English is the pivot.
Relay adds cost, it does not save it
This is the part that surprises clients. Relay solves a staffing problem and creates a cost one: the pivot booth is an additional booth with an additional team, not a shortcut around hiring. Quote a relay chain as an extra booth.
Latency compounds down the chain. Every link adds delay, so the audience at the end of a two-stage relay hears the speaker meaningfully later than the room does. Applause, laughter and voting all arrive late. On sessions with live voting or Q and A, this is an operational problem rather than a cosmetic one.
The dependency nobody tracks
The pivot booth is a single point of failure. If its interpreter falls ill, misses a flight or hits a technical fault, every booth downstream goes silent - not just the one language you were worried about. Most agencies track this in someone's head or a spreadsheet column, and find out it was insufficient on the day.
The practical mitigations are: staff the pivot booth first and best, brief it most thoroughly, and know before the event exactly which booths depend on it.
When to use relay, and when not to
- Use it when a direct pair genuinely is not available, or when the direct team would require flying someone in at a cost exceeding an extra booth.
- Avoid it on sessions with live interaction, voting, or tight timing between speakers.
- Never chain twice if you can avoid it. Two-stage relay is workable; three is where quality visibly falls apart.
Price this in about a minute
The free calculator turns languages, days and delegate count into booths, teams, equipment and a total. Every rate editable, no signup.
Open the calculator