best way to set up breakout rooms by language

[sulllins]

At work we regularly host Zoom trainings with 80-100 people in English with Spanish interpretation. Attendees are from all over the place with different devices, different tech skills, and different language skills. Trainers often want to use breakout rooms but so far I haven't figured out a good way to get folks into the breakout rooms in their chosen language.

Does anyone have an efficient way for getting participants of a particular language into a breakout room together?

Things I have tried:

- Go off their language chosen at registration and pre-make breakout rooms. The problem with this is, depending on who is in the meeting, participants may choose English or Spanish that day. When we've preassigned them to a Spanish room, they don't participate or ask to be put in a different room.

- Ask folks who want to be put in a Spanish speaking room to ignore their breakout room invitation and stay in the main room, and then we can manually assign them to a room. Problem with this is, if they join late, miss the interpretation or don't understand directions, are still learning how Zoom works and don't know to ignore the breakout room invitation... or then we get mixed up with the people who chose not to participate in a breakout room and are sitting unresponsive in the main room.

- Asking a poll question. Then we realized that in the moment we can't see specifically who answered the poll until after the meeting... so not helpful at all!

- Coworkers stated they tried to have people select their breakout rooms and it didn't go well. Can we change the label of a breakout room to say en español so folks know to join that one? Is it still true that on Zoom on iPads/iPhones/Chromebooks doesn't allow participants to choose rooms? 

- Tell participants to change their participant name to add in English or español - but then people often just don't change their name.

Thank you!

[Bort]

I would suspect the easiest would be to name each breakout room as the language the room will be supporting, then allow the participants to self-select the breakout rooms. It won't be ideal, since participants likely won't evenly distribute themselves, but I'm not sure how else to best handle this.