Why Multilingual Asylum Interviews Need More Than Translation

The scale of that challenge remains significant worldwide, with the European Union offering a particularly timely example. According to the European Union Agency for Asylum (EUAA), EU+ countries received approximately 822,000 applications for international protection in 2025. At the end of the year, around 863,000 cases were still pending at first instance.¹

Language sits right at the center of this process. EUAA describes the personal interview as the main opportunity for an applicant to present their claim and says it is essential that applicants, interviewers and other participants understand one another fully.²

That makes multilingual communication more than a convenience. It is part of the operational foundation of the interview itself.

The Language Challenge Extends Beyond Interpretation

Interpretation is already an established and important part of asylum procedures. EUAA states that interpreters play a key role in enabling communication between interviewer and applicant, while its guidance emphasizes confidentiality, impartiality and accurate communication.³

But authorities face a broader operational challenge around that conversation. The interview may also need to be captured, attributed to the correct speakers, documented, reviewed and retained according to organizational policy.

AudioCodes Meeting Insights Edge, a powerful AI-driven meeting intelligence solution that resides entirely within an organization’s own network, brings these activities together. Case officers and applicants can speak and hear the conversation in their preferred languages through real-time bidirectional voice translation, while live speech-to-text transcription allows authorized participants to follow the interview in their selected language.

The important difference is that translation and transcription are part of the same controlled interview workflow rather than isolated activities.

From Spoken Conversation to Review-Ready Record

A multilingual interview does not stop being important when everyone leaves the room. What happens afterwards matters too.

EUAA guidance notes that applicants should be informed about how an interview will be recorded, such as through a verbatim transcript, audio recording or interview report, as well as the opportunity to clarify potential mistranslations or misconceptions.⁴

Meeting Insights Edge supports this need for traceability by creating timestamped, speaker-attributed transcripts, translations and structured summaries. Authorized teams can then edit, approve, export and retain the resulting interview record according to policy.

That can reduce repetitive documentation and manual handoffs while giving reviewers a more consistent body of information for case follow-up. Instead of translation being one stage and documentation another, the conversation can move through a controlled process from the first spoken question to the retained record.

Keeping Sensitive Conversations Inside the Authority’s Environment

Immigration and asylum interviews can contain highly sensitive personal information. That makes the location of AI processing and data retention an important consideration, particularly for authorities with strict security or data-control requirements.

Meeting Insights Edge is designed to process recordings, transcripts, translations, summaries and insights within the customer’s environment. It can also support air-gapped deployments, with customer-defined access, retention and audit policies.

This allows authorities to introduce AI-powered multilingual capabilities without automatically sending interview content to an external cloud AI service. The result is local AI intelligence combined with organizational control over how sensitive conversational data is processed and retained.

Supporting Officers During the Interview

Operational intelligence can also help while the conversation is taking place. Meeting Insights Edge supports customizable keyword and phrase alerts that can notify authorized personnel when predefined procedural, safeguarding or case-specific terms appear. Depending on an authority’s requirements, these could relate to issues such as legal representation, language assistance, urgent medical needs or trafficking and exploitation.

Importantly, these alerts are designed to trigger authorized review. They do not assess credibility, eligibility or case outcomes. Human judgement remains where it belongs, with the responsible professionals.

This reflects a broader principle behind the solution. AI supports the interview process rather than replacing the people responsible for it.

One Workflow for In-Person and Remote Interviews

Authorities also need consistency across different interview settings. Meeting Insights Edge supports a unified controlled workflow for secure-room, video and phone sessions, helping teams apply the same approach to capture, translation, transcription and record creation across in-person and remote interviews.

That matters because EUAA guidance on remote personal interviews specifically identifies security, confidentiality, technical arrangements, procedural safeguards and quality considerations as issues authorities need to address.⁵

The operational goal is therefore bigger than simply translating speech faster. It is to create a repeatable multilingual workflow in which people can understand one another, authorized teams can follow what is being said and the authority can retain a traceable record under its own policies.

AudioCodes helps organizations unlock the full value of voice, transforming every conversation, whether human or AI, into a strategic asset that drives better business outcomes. For immigration and asylum authorities, that starts with something even more fundamental – making important conversations clearer, more consistent and easier to review while keeping control of sensitive data.

 ¹ European Union Agency for Asylum, Latest Asylum Trends 2025

² European Union Agency for Asylum and Intergovernmental Consultations on Migration, Asylum and Refugees, Practical Guide on Interpretation in the Asylum Procedure, February 2024

³ Ibid.

⁴ European Union Agency for Asylum, Personal Interview

⁵ European Asylum Support Office, Practical Recommendations on Conducting the Personal Interview Remotely