What do the Korean tourism industry and pioneering European T&I business Interprefy have in common? As of this fall, they’re both key players in the remote simultaneous interpreting business.

Yesterday, leading RSI platform Interprefy announced it has partnered with the Korea MICE — Meeting, Incentives, Convention and Exhibition — Association (KMA) to offer its services for all their events. And as we see an increasing number of standalone platforms and better options for add-ons to existing online video meetings (think Zoom and Webex), this makes a lot of sense for a company that has been around for the last seven years.

It also makes sense given the pandemic-induced difficulties faced by the MICE industry, which has had to pivot on a global scale. Back in June 2020, The International Association of Conference Interpreters (AIIC) held an event for its members forecasting what we see today: a slow return to in-person meetings, ever-increasing online events, and an intense focus on hybrid meetings.

Interprefy can integrate with dozens of online meeting platforms, including Hopin, Adobe Connect, and Cadence, to provide multilingual solutions for all those options. Kiyuree Kim, International Coordinator at KMA, said the decision to partner with the Swiss company was easy, and she described the RSI provider as “extremely simple to set up” for event audience and organizers alike.  

This comes on the heels of a partnership with the first graduate program in interpreting and translation technology, announced just two months before the KMA one. The European Masters in Technology for Translation and Interpreting (EM TTI) is a two-year program completed through a consortium of four universities. Subjects include computational aspects of language study, machine translation, natural language processing, and interpreting technology.

Interprefy will provide placement opportunities for students and input on the course, as well as participate in events and seminars organized by the program. Such early exposure is a smart choice for the company — future professionals with a newly minted degree will most likely become evangelists for a company worth an estimated $20M.

In a competitive market, exclusive partnerships are often the golden goose. With this announcement, Interprefy scored two different and strategic ones.