Translate a Microsoft Teams meeting in real time

Microsoft Teams is the meeting tool of large, distributed enterprises. Those organisations are the most multilingual workplaces — and the most poorly served by Teams’ built-in translation. Teams offers live captions and translated captions, gated by licence tier and limited in language coverage. For an employee who would rather listen than read a call in their second language, Teams provides no native answer.

Loquira sits beside Teams without touching its audio chain or requiring an admin to approve a new app. The host runs Loquira on a phone; attendees who want translation join through the Loquira link from their own device.

Why this matters in enterprise contexts

The friction in enterprise translation tools is not technical — it’s procurement and IT. Adding a new Teams app means raising a ticket with IT, waiting for security review, scheduling deployment. Loquira’s parallel model bypasses all of that: nothing is installed in Teams, nothing in the corporate Microsoft 365 tenant changes, and the listener experience is on the listener’s personal phone if they prefer that over a corporate-issued laptop.

For all-hands meetings, leadership town halls, and customer calls that cross regions, this matters. The team running the meeting can deploy translation in five minutes without involving anyone outside their own desk.

Recommended setup

• Microphone. A wired or wireless headset is most common in Teams contexts. The microphone guide covers the trade-offs; for translation specifically, what matters is consistent close-mic positioning.
• Loquira device. A phone on the speaker’s desk, close to the microphone source. In a conference room with multiple presenters, position the phone where it can hear all speakers, or run a session per speaker.
• Distribution. The Outlook invite is the primary channel. Teams chat is the fallback. For all-hands events, also post in the relevant Teams channel an hour before the call.
• Headphones for listeners. Most enterprise headsets have headphone capability — the listener uses the headset for Teams audio and a phone with earbuds for Loquira’s translated audio, or simply mutes Teams and listens exclusively to Loquira.

All-hands and webinar-style Teams events

Teams Live Events (now Teams Webinars in many tenants) follow the same pattern. The host’s microphone feeds both Teams and Loquira; the join link is shared in the event registration confirmation. Attendees in listen-only mode are the natural Loquira audience — they’re not contributing audio, only consuming it.

For events with multiple presenters across geographies, the per-speaker session model from the Zoom setup applies directly. Each presenter runs their own Loquira session from their own location; the listener switches between sessions as the active speaker rotates.

What about Teams’ built-in translation?

Teams offers live translated captions in a growing set of language pairs, available on certain Microsoft 365 licence tiers. Where licence and language pair both line up, the captions are usable and can be combined with Loquira’s audio without conflict — captions on the Teams UI, audio on the listener’s phone.

The gap Loquira fills is the broader set of language pairs and the audio-first listening mode. A listener reading captions in a 60-minute meeting will be exhausted; a listener with translated audio in earbuds participates the way a native speaker would.

Limitations specific to Teams

• Corporate firewall and proxy. Loquira’s listener app runs in a browser and requires standard WebRTC connectivity. If your corporate network blocks WebRTC, listeners should use their personal phone on cellular data — typically the simplest path.
• Recording and transcription. Teams’ built-in transcription captures Teams audio. Loquira’s transcript is separate. For compliance contexts, treat them as parallel artifacts.
• Phone-dial-in attendees. Attendees on the PSTN dial-in cannot use Loquira through the same line. Direct them to the Loquira link on a separate device.
• Government and regulated tenants. Some Teams deployments restrict external links in invites. In those tenants, share the Loquira link through a different channel (email, internal portal) ahead of the meeting.