KUDO Meeting | Multilingual Meetings

Stocktaking can easily drop to the bottom of your priorities when you’re in hypergrowth. You are just too busy delivering the best possible service and keeping the pipeline open and flowing smoothly. And did I mention interviewing and hiring extraordinary talent? That’s a 16-hour day right there.

But every now and again you get a breather, on an occasional long weekend when you can actually take a look at the pressure gauge readings. Only to realize you should have looked much sooner. It is a fun exercise. And it tells you things.

Starting with the most obvious indicators, like the logarithmic month-to-month growth in multilingual meetings on KUDO, from a few hundred thousand to 27 million minutes monthly, in the first six months of 2020 alone.

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But as we dig deeper into the data from actual meetings and the languages spoken during those meetings, things can get a little counterintuitive.

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For starters, it is interesting to see French ahead of Spanish in a global top 10 language ranking. And notice how Italian and German made it into the top 6. Who would have thought!

As more languages are spoken in a meeting, the specific composition changes, too:

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English and Spanish top the chart, as expected. But as more languages are added to a session, Chinese, Italian and German start elbowing their way in.

Once the language count hits five, Chinese and Spanish fade away with Italian, German, and Japanese going up the ladder. Incidentally, 4-language meetings are actually more popular than 3-language meetings. At least in the 2,000+ meetings held on the platform monthly, from January to June of 2020.

Anatomy of a KUDO Meeting (in the first six months of 2020)

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4 languages

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3 hours

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6-8 interpreters

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75 participants

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4 presenters

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2 hosts

In a nutshell, the simple yet powerful message we can glean from these numbers could be summarized as follows: