A museum guest lecture, on every iPad and the big screen
The Fo Guang Shan Buddha Museum regularly hosts speakers from the art and culture world. When it welcomed a special lecture on the strategy of the National Museum of Asian Art — delivered in English to a largely Chinese-speaking audience — Orato Flow translated it live in two formats at once: an iPad in front of each guest, and the room’s shared screen. No headsets, no interpreter booth.
Fo Guang Shan Buddha Museum, Taiwan
The challenge
A museum trades in cross-cultural exchange — but a guest lecture given in one language can leave half the room behind. When an international speaker presents to a bilingual audience, the usual options are poor: interpreter booths are costly for a single talk, and handing out headsets changes the feel of an intimate lecture.
Art talks are also full of specific names, places, movements and terms — the kind of vocabulary a rough translation flattens just when precision matters.
How Orato Flow helped
Orato Flow ran the translation two ways at once. Each guest had an iPad in front of them showing the live translation as the speaker talked, and the same captions were projected on the room’s screen for everyone to follow together. Guests could read at their own pace on the iPad, or look up at the shared screen — whichever they preferred.
A custom glossary kept proper nouns and art-world terminology consistent, so the names of artists, works and institutions came through cleanly rather than being approximated.
The outcome
The lecture reached the whole audience in the language they read — a one-language talk became a bilingual event, with almost nothing to set up beyond the iPads and the screen already in the room.
For an institution built on cross-cultural exchange, the language of the speaker stopped being the limit on who could take part.
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