Context

Every year, the team of the "School of the Free and Caring" organizes the largest educational festival in Ukraine, "Teachers of the Future".

challenge

The festival format involved presentations on a big stage – but foreign speakers spoke English, while the audience needed Ukrainian translation here and now. Hiring live simultaneous interpreters is expensive, complicated, and unreliable in a live format. Furthermore, the quality of human simultaneous interpretation at large events often leaves much to be desired: the interpreter gets tired, loses pace, and part of the meaning gets lost. For the festival team, this was also a reputational stake: a poor translation could ruin the impression of the entire event.

Why now?

"Teachers of the Future" reached a new scale: the international program became a systemic part of the festival rather than a one-off experiment. A technological solution was needed that could be launched on stage, scaled, and replicated at each subsequent event – without dependency on the human factor.

Fears and how we addressed them

The main concern was the quality of the translation. Machine translation was associated with "Google Translate" and clunky phrases that cause laughter rather than help. No one wanted a subtitle to appear on the festival's main stage that would trigger chuckles in the audience. We demonstrated the system's operation in practice even before the festival: GCP Translation paired with GCP Speech-to-Text delivers a qualitatively different level compared to the familiar translator interface. After the demonstration, all doubts vanished.

solution

Our team deployed a synchronous translation system based on Google Cloud Platform: the speaker's speech is recognized in real time via GCP Speech-to-Text and then instantly translated from English to Ukrainian via GCP Translation. The text is displayed on a screen next to the stage – the audience reads the translation synchronously with the presentation. For the deployment, we set up a GCP Landing Zone and wrote Python scripts to automate the processes. The solution is fully cloud-based and scales to any event format.

result

• The "Teachers of the Future" festival took place with real-time synchronous translation – without a live interpreter on stage.

• The quality of delivering the content of the presentations exceeded the organizers' expectations.

• The system demonstrated stable performance in a live format and confirmed its scalability for future events.