How much of your meeting still exists in your language a week later?

Run this test on your last cross-language meeting: one week later, what can each participant still open and read in their own language?

Not "was the meeting translated." Almost every platform can now answer yes to that, with an asterisk. The test is what remains. The decision your Portuguese colleague wants to quote back in a dispute. The action item your German teammate needs to re-read before the follow-up. The three weeks of context a new hire from Bogotá has to absorb. The number procurement asks you to confirm from the call two Tuesdays ago.

A meeting lasts forty-five minutes. Its outputs get used for months. And on today's major platforms, translation is built for the forty-five minutes — the moment the call ends, the translated layer disappears, and the record that remains speaks one language.

This post is the audit: what each vendor's own documentation says survives the call, and in whose language. Then the architectural reason the answer comes out the way it does — and what it looks like when a meeting is built to outlive the call instead.

A meeting's real lifespan

The industry measures meeting translation on two axes: how fast (latency) and how wide (language count). Both describe the live call. We've argued elsewhere that a third axis decides more purchases than either — how much of the meeting comes back in your language — and the week-later test is that axis stretched to its natural length.

Because the call is the shortest-lived thing the meeting produces. What actually circulates afterwards:

• Decisions — cited in later meetings, escalations, and audits, often word-by-word.
• Action items — re-read by the people executing them, days later.
• History — the searchable record a newcomer reads to catch up, and the reference the team searches when memory disagrees.
• Documents — the contract, the spec, the deck that the meeting was about.

If translation exists only during the call, then every one of those artifacts exists in one language — usually English — and everyone else works from memory or from a second-hand summary. The organization's memory is monolingual even when its meetings weren't. A participant who heard the meeting in Spanish spends the following week working with a record they can only read in English.

What survives the call, vendor by vendor

Everything below is from vendor public documentation, checked August 2026. Links in the footer.

Microsoft Teams

Teams documents the live layer thoroughly — translated captions in 31 languages, an AI Interpreter agent in 10 — and is equally explicit about the afterlife:

• Translated captions aren't saved. Microsoft's caption documentation states captions are not stored after the meeting; the translation exists only while the meeting runs.
• Recordings capture original audio only — the Interpreter agent's translated audio is not in the recording.
• Translated transcripts exist only live. Afterwards, the transcript that remains is in the spoken language.

The full walkthrough of the live features is in our Teams live translation post; the summary here is one sentence in Microsoft's own docs: nothing translated survives the meeting.

Google Meet

Meet's Gemini-powered speech translation translates spoken audio between English and five languages, one pair per meeting. On persistence, Google's documentation is direct:

• Speech translation is not available in recordings (or live streams) — it's a live-only beta, capped at 90 minutes per meeting.
• No audio is saved. Google states plainly that speech-translation audio isn't stored — a clean privacy answer, and also a complete answer to the week-later test.
• Translated captions, the older text feature, are likewise an on-screen live view.

Details and limits in Google Meet live translation.

Zoom

Zoom's live stack is the broadest of the three — translated captions in 36 languages, a five-language Voice translator, human interpretation channels — and its documentation describes all three as live views:

• Translated captions are rendered on screen, per participant, while the meeting runs. Zoom's translated-captions documentation does not state that the translated stream is saved after the meeting (checked August 2026).
• The Voice translator speaks synthetic translated audio live, in meetings only, on the desktop app. Its documentation likewise does not state that translated audio persists anywhere (checked August 2026).
• What Zoom's recording stack keeps is the meeting as spoken — the original audio and its transcript.

The live features are mapped in Zoom live translation.

The AI notetakers

Otter, Fireflies and their category are the mirror image of the platforms: built precisely for the afterlife — transcripts, summaries, search — which makes their language model the interesting part:

• The transcript persists in the language the meeting was held in. Otter transcribes in six languages (English, Spanish, French, German, Japanese, Chinese); Fireflies claims 100+ with auto-detection. Either way, one meeting produces one transcript in one language — the spoken one.
• A meeting held in English produces an English record, however many languages its readers think in. The notetaker solves "we forgot what was said," not "half of us read this at half speed."

The category comparison is in Otter alternatives and Fireflies alternatives.

The week-later audit, in one table

The pattern in the middle column isn't an accident, and it isn't vendors forgetting a feature. It's architecture.

Why translated moments can't become translated history

A caption is a view — text rendered over a live stream for as long as the stream exists. When the call ends, the stream ends, and a view of nothing is nothing. The same holds for translated audio synthesized on the fly: it's played, not kept. Translation implemented as an overlay dies with the thing it overlays. That's not a bug in Zoom, Teams or Meet; it's the honest consequence of where translation sits in their architecture — a layer on the call.

For a meeting's history to exist in every reader's language, translation has to be a property of the place that holds the history, not of the call that produced it. The chat message, the recap, the document need to live somewhere that renders them per reader — this week, next month, for the member who joins in October.

That's the difference we mean when the InterMIND homepage says "a space for everyday communication " rather than "video calls with translation." It's also why we treat a meeting becoming a channel as the product working as intended, not as a leftover artifact.

What a space that outlives the call looks like

Concretely, in InterMIND:

• The meeting persists as a channel. The call is an event inside the space; when it ends, the space — members, chat, files, history — stays.
• Chat history reads in each member's language. Messages are translated per viewer, and that applies to the history, not just to messages arriving live.
• Every signed-in member gets the recap in their own language. After the call, the AI recap — summary, decisions, action items — is delivered per participant, each in theirs.
• Documents translate on request — 30 languages, inside the same space as the meeting they belong to.
• Voice comes back as a recap, honestly labeled. We removed live transcription deliberately; the persistent trace of what was said is the recap, not a word-for-word multilingual replay. If your compliance case needs a verbatim record, that's what recording — under the host's control — is for.
• You choose the jurisdiction the space lives in. History that persists is history that's stored; where it's stored is a first-class setting, with an EU data path and zero data retention on AI processing.

And because quality claims about translation age badly, the translation itself is benchmarked publicly, per language pair, every month — the history is only worth keeping if the translation in it holds up.

Run the audit on your own stack

Five questions, answerable from any vendor's documentation in an afternoon:

1. Where do translated captions go when the meeting ends? If the docs don't say they're saved, they aren't.
2. What language is the recording's transcript in? "The spoken one" means your multilingual meeting has a monolingual record.
3. Can a participant read last month's chat in their own language? Not "can they machine-translate an export" — can they open it and read it.
4. What does the participant who missed the meeting receive, and in whose language?
5. Who can verify the translation quality of whatever does persist? A record nobody can trust is a record nobody uses.

If the answers are "nowhere, English, no, an English summary, nobody" — you don't have a multilingual meeting tool. You have a monolingual archive with multilingual moments.

Try the week-later test with a real meeting

• Try the live demo — no signup; hear per-participant voice translation, then look at what the room leaves behind.
• See the benchmark — per-pair, per-month translation quality on real traffic, methodology included.
• How one InterMIND meeting is built — the architecture behind the space, for the technically curious.
• Where the transcript, summary and action items actually live — the other half of the question: not what language the record is in, but who owns each file and what breaks when you move it.

FAQ

Are Zoom translated captions saved after the meeting?

Zoom's translated-captions documentation describes a live, per-participant caption view and does not state that the translated stream is saved after the meeting (checked August 2026). What Zoom's recording features keep is the meeting as spoken — original audio and its transcript.

Are Microsoft Teams translated captions or Interpreter audio saved?

No — and here Microsoft is explicit: captions aren't saved, translated transcripts exist only during the meeting, and recordings capture original audio only, without the Interpreter agent's translated track (checked August 2026).

Does Google Meet speech translation work in recordings?

No. Google documents speech translation as a live beta — not available in recordings or live streams, capped at 90 minutes per meeting — and states that no audio is saved (checked August 2026).

Can you get a meeting transcript in another language?

From the major platforms, the transcript that persists is in the meeting's spoken language. AI notetakers persist a transcript too — also in the spoken language. Translating a transcript afterwards is an export-and-translate workflow, outside the meeting tool. InterMIND takes a different route: the persistent record — chat history, recap, documents — is rendered in each member's language inside the space itself.

What does "a space that outlives the call" mean?

It means the meeting doesn't end when the call does: it persists as a channel holding the chat, files, recaps and history, and every member reads that history in their own language. The call is an event inside the space, not the container of everything.

Why does history in your language matter if you attended the meeting live?

Because the work happens after: decisions get cited, action items get re-read, disputes get settled by the record, and new teammates catch up from it. If all of that exists only in English, everyone who thinks in another language does the follow-through at a disadvantage — which is where the meeting's actual value lives.

Sources: Microsoft — Use live captions in Teams meetings, Microsoft — Interpreter in Teams meetings and calls, Microsoft Learn — Meeting transcription and captions, Google Meet — Learn about Speech Translation, Google Meet — Use translated captions, Zoom — Enabling and configuring translated captions, Zoom — Using the Voice translator for meetings, Otter — supported languages, Fireflies — supported languages. Vendors change plans and language lists over time; check their pages for the current state. All facts checked August 2026.