Referential

In Seville (Spain) for the EU's big E-twinning conference with teachers from twinned schools all around the EU, and with many, many languages spoken. I did a keynote - well, I am pretty keen on schools working together across the old national boundaries - and with over 500 folk there it was rather curious to talk to an audience with relayed translation in process. With a relayed translation system the translator generating the langauge you have selected for your headset may not be listening to the primary speech, but to a translation of it - so as a listener you may be getting "your" version quite a while after the speaker has said their bit, to be translated, and translated again first. Thus if I say something perhaps slightly witty, the ripple of smiles and chuckles takes a really long time to go round the audience - and some bits of the audience don't smile at all (lost in traanslation...).

I also rather enjoyed the national and regional "old" media cameras arriving to film what was a quite wired and connected conference - and then pointing camaeras the many delegates who themselves were filming for twitcam, blogs, YouTube, whatever. Old media filming new media... Hmmm. I smiled, but not all the press did - I wonder what message their brains had translated that image into...