First: is it actually the internet?
Open any website on the computer running Yazyk, not on your phone.
| What happens | What it means |
|---|---|
| No website loads | The connection is down. Everything below applies |
| Websites load fine | The uplink is up, and something between this machine and the service is in the way |
Do not spend more than a minute on this. If the machine has no internet, no amount of clicking in Yazyk changes that.
What still works, and what does not
Translation stops. All of it. The translating and the voice both happen at a service we call over the internet, so with the connection down there is nothing to send and nothing coming back. There is no offline mode, and there is not going to be one, because that is a different product.
What keeps working:
- Anyone already listening on a phone stays connected. Their page does not break and their link does not stop working.
- The transmitter and the receivers stay powered and connected.
What people hear in the meantime is whatever was already queued, and then silence. Not an error and not a noise. Just nothing.
Translation comes back on its own when the connection returns. Nobody has to press anything. The run keeps retrying the whole time it is down, waiting a little longer between attempts up to about ten seconds, and it never stops trying. So translation resumes within roughly ten seconds of the internet coming back.
What it does not do is catch up. Speech during the outage is dropped rather than held, so those minutes are simply gone. A sentence that was half-said when the connection died is thrown away too, rather than being stitched onto the first words after recovery, which would put a sentence on screen that nobody actually said.
What to do, in order
- Leave Yazyk alone. Do not press Stop, and do not restart it. Restarting achieves nothing without a connection, it costs the phone listeners their audio, and it throws away the retrying that is going to recover the run by itself.
- Tell whoever is at the front, quietly, that translation is off for now. Do it before anyone in the room has to ask.
- Check the obvious thing once. The router or the modem, if you can see it and somebody has already said it is fine to power-cycle. If nobody has said that, skip this step.
- When websites load again, wait. Translation resumes on its own within about ten seconds, from that point onward. It does not catch up on what was missed.
- If it has not come back a minute after websites load, that is worth reporting. Save the log and tell your administrator, rather than restarting repeatedly during the service.
There is no step that recovers translation without the internet.
Telling the room
If it is going to be off for the whole service, say so plainly and early. The failure people forgive is the one they were told about. The one they resent is sitting with a headset that never works, wondering whether it is their fault.
Something like: "The translation is not working this morning, our internet is down. Sorry. It will be back next week."
Do not promise it will come back mid-service. It might not.
Afterwards
Worth writing down while it is fresh, because this is what decides whether it is worth doing anything about:
- How long was it out?
- Was it the whole building, or only the sound-desk machine?
- Has it happened before, and how often?
- Did translation come back on its own, and how long after the websites did?
If the connection drops regularly, that changes the product and not just the procedure. Tell us rather than absorbing it every week. If the drop-outs are Wi-Fi, a wired connection to the sound-desk machine usually fixes them cheaply. If the whole building loses internet, that is the provider or the modem, and only a second connection helps: mobile data for that one machine.
Why it works this way
Everything that can run on your own computer does, which is why an outage costs you the translation rather than the whole setup. The translating and the voice are the two things that genuinely cannot run locally, because doing them at this speed and quality needs hardware nobody has in a sound booth.
The reconnecting in step 4 is why the advice is to wait rather than to act. The run treats a lost connection as something to sit out, not something to be restarted through, which is what lets a short outage cost you only the minutes it lasted instead of also costing you every phone listener.