Claudio Ferreira Filho’s talk Brazil / A strange success case was my highlight of the 2006 OpenOffice.org conference. So I was delighted to be asked to address their 2nd annual conference this year.

Due to the vast size of Brazil, this is held as a videoconference across a number of sites. It’s actually an incredible piece of organisation, and it’s a tribute to the amazing organisation OpenOffice.org has in Brazil. As it’s a videoconference, beaming me in from Scotland should have been easy.

Well, it never quite works like that, but we eventually got the technology working and I was able to screen my Impress presentation. I talked through each slide one sentence at a time, with a translator translating between each sentence. Once I got into the rhythm, it all seemed to me to run smoothly. I’d timed my talk at 15 minutes (in English) to fill a 30 minute slot, and everything went to time.

However, it did feel a bit cold and impersonal compared with the way I normally rabbit on in English. I wondered what benefit the delegates gained from my presence – would it have been better just to get one of the guys over there to deliver it in Portuguese? My slides were all in English, and actually contained a lot more information than my talk (reversing the rules of normal presentations).

So I’m still not sure what’s the best way to do multi-language presentations. At the OpenOffice.org Conference this year we had one presenter who gave his talk in Chinese, one slide at a time. His slides had been translated into English, and as soon as the presenter stopped speaking, the translator simply read out what was on the slides (which the audience had already read). It was deathly.

I’d be interested to hear from people who’ve attended multi-lingual conferences. What has worked best for you?

And to the guys in Brazil – thanks for the invitation. Have a great conference!

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