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Turtle Partnership Blog

Where’s Gab?

Gabriella Davis  April 27 2009 03:13:56 PM
I've been quiet here for a while (I'm sure no-one other than my mother noticed!) but that's been due to the amount of travel I've been doing, it seems that it's only when I'm in the office I can gather my thoughts and decide what to blog about.  Need to work on that more.

Last week I was invited to present at Dannotes the Danish Lotus User group in Denmark.  It was a great conference with a bigger turnout than I was expecting from a user group and I did presentations on ID Vault, DCT and Websphere.  Unfortunately my presentation was in English and although everyone there had extremely good English, I felt the usual shame of a person with only one language talking to a multi lingual audience.   It did make me decide that next time I present in country where the first language isn't English, I will arrange to get my slides at least translated into the local language and present with those.  Do you think that would be valuable ?

This week I'm again on a tour of England ! Tomorrow I'm manning the UKLUG stand at LCTY in Manchester, and on Thursday in London.  Feel free to stop by and ask me questions about UKLUG (to which the answer may well be "we haven't decided yet!") and anything else.  On Wednesday I'm in Lewes and Friday in London again.  Next week though is shaping up to have some time in the office so expect to see more blogging from me then.
Comments

1Lars Olufsen  4/27/2009 4:23:49 PM  Where’s Gab?

Gab, although I sadly wasn't present at DanNotes, I've had the pleasure of watching you present at Lotusphere.

I'm sure localized slides might fare well with a few people, but to most (at least most Danes), it's really not an issue. We learn english at school from about age 11. 95% of what we watch on TV is in english (well ... american english, sadly), and just about everything we do as business people and especially IT people is in english, at least from a terminology point of view.

In my opinion, watching danish slides while listening to the queens english (or yours) would just confuse me.

If at all, I would suggest presenting in english using english slides, and making both english and danish slides available for download by choice.

That would make it easier for us, not to understand the content, but to shamelessly rip it into OUR presentations, and plug it as our own work ;-)

But when it comes to understanding presentations in english, I think what would help us is to make sure that there is time enough to speak at a slightly slower pace than when speaking to "the natives", and be aware that when one STRAYS from the context of the slides, the risk of misunderstanding goes up.

Personally, I think you present well. It's that wee Béal Feirste leprechaun that troubles us ... and apparently, he's on the schedule next time at DanNotes ... ;o)