Doing something with TechEd slides

by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2005/05/29 14:35 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2005/05/29/423032.aspx

In years past, I had seen shows at the Front Row Theatre in Cleveland (it is no longer around, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is on the site where it used to be). I was struck at the time by the way that the performer would be facing different parts of the audience at different times. So you did not always get the performers, but you got all of them for some of the time....

Anyway, in years past when doing technical presentations in places like Stockholm and Amsterdam, I would usually work to get my slides localized -- of course in a bilingual form so I could still read them! :-)

(Also, when speaking in London I would try to get rid the Americanisms when I "localised" them)

I was thinking about maybe trying to do the same thing for TechEd in July, but I realized that a lot of the attendees will be coming from all over Europe, so trying to get them localized into Dutch may not really capture as much.

So I thought about that long-gone venue and started toying with the idea of trying to get different slides done in different languages, all over Europe.

It would roughly analagous to letting lots of people see some of the show localized, whether it was text in Nederlands, Frysk, Deutsch, français, ελληνικά, español, suomi, Magyar, íslenska, italiano, norsk, polski, Português, română, русский, hrvatski, slovenčina, shqipe, svenska, Türkçe, україньска, Беларускі, slovenski, eesti, bosanski, latviešu, lietuvių, euskara, македонски, srpski, Elsässisch, Occitan, Corsu, brezhoneg, hornjoserbšćina, Lëtzebuergesch, Rumantsch, Cymraeg, åarjelsaemiengiele, or any other language across Europe.

So, does it sound interesting? Comments welcome!

Do you speak any of these languages and would you like to help out? You can send a piece of email to me at michkap -at- microsoft.com (munge in the obvious way!).

# Anders on 29 May 2005 4:22 PM:

Hi,

To be honest - most of us (i'm from denmark) are used to hearing presentation in english and reading books in english and would like to keep in all in english.

# Michael S. Kaplan on 29 May 2005 4:49 PM:

Of course English would also be there (so I can read it, too!). This would just be a nice adjunct....

# Mihai on 29 May 2005 5:46 PM:

I am not sure how are you going to display the slides in so many languages. Or are you going to distribute localized slides to the participants and display only the English version?
Then you should consider distributing printed versions, since not all participants will have laptops.
But then you have another problem: how many do you need for each language?
See, is not that easy :-)
Anyway, if you decide to do this, I can translate into "română" :-)

# robdoyle on 29 May 2005 6:14 PM:

Oops, you forgot Gaeilge :-)

# Michael S. Kaplan on 29 May 2005 6:22 PM:

Mihai -- I am saying that each slide would have one other language, not that I would try to get every slide translated into every language -- the latter would be way too hard to orchestrate! I'll follow up on the other with you offline....

robdoyle -- thats why I put that "or any other language across Europe. :-)

# Adrian Gonzalez on 29 May 2005 6:53 PM:

Michael, if you are still interested I could help you with spanish and italian. I'm a native spanish speaker and lived in Italy for 3 years. I still work with some italian guys here in Cyprus so I haven't forgotten the language, unfortunately I haven't learnt greek yet :P

Ok, if you are interested, drop me a mail: agonza@gmail.com

Adrian

# Michael S. Kaplan on 29 May 2005 8:29 PM:

Mail on its way -- wow, offers for a lot of different languages here and by mail. This is going to be great, I think.

# Kate Gregory on 30 May 2005 11:32 AM:

I have done cross-Canada speaking tours many times. On one occasion we decided to get the slides translated into French for the Quebec City and Montreal events. I am always simultaneously translated at these events anyway. So I spoke in English to French slides, but most of the audience was hearing a French translation and seeing French slides. It wasn't hard at all... I knew the deck well and most technical terms are the same in French and English. Also lots of i18n talks start with a few slides in another alphabet. So why not? As long as the full deck is available in English too.

# Matt Phillips on 2 Jun 2005 5:33 AM:

FYI: Last time I was in TechEd Amsterdam the largest contingent was Dutch, followed by English.

# Michael S. Kaplan on 2 Jun 2005 7:08 AM:

Hi Matt -- I could be holding out a false hope then. And Nederland just voted to not accept the EU constitution, too. Sigh....

# uhhh on 19 Jul 2005 1:17 PM:

the front row theatre was not located where the rock hall now sits

# Michael S. Kaplan on 19 Jul 2005 3:51 PM:

Hmmm... really? Every site I found in web searches claimed it was. I never actually went to the latter, only to the former. So I am relying on internet hearsay as my source....
Please consider a donation to keep this archive running, maintained and free of advertising.
Donate €20 or more to receive an offline copy of the whole archive including all images.

go to newer or older post, or back to index or month or day