{~} Back from the (almost) dead {~}

Phew. Going to a three-day conference and giving the very last lecture can be mighty stressful. Especially when your moderator is a former co-director of studies and, to add insult to injury, all breaks are cancelled because the conference hall abolutely has to be left empty on time...

I got my message through, I guess, but I had two big problem with my communication, so I've heard. You can read here the summary of what I was supposed to present. I say suppose because, after testing the presentation with an esteemed colleague, it did not work out. Yes, I had the presentation date wrong. I thought it was April 10th, but it was March 10th... (thanks Hélène for the heads-up on that one) so I focused the paper on economic changes affecting audiovisual translation production. Turns out the problems were that 1) I was not clear enough with the fact that I was stating phenomena applying to the Quebec market only and 2) I tried to play it as a researcher looking back on my own practice but I came off as if I was playing for two teams. A no-no in academic context. I have to say I hate MS Power Point, but I admit that I should have cut way more text out of my presentation. And stuck on one aspect.

I also saw that two Keynote speakers were way out of line and that my presentation was much better in that sense. I guess these guys had nothing to prove to anyone since they were big wigs... An interesting aspect is that those two American bigwigs invited to talk about translation only knew English... ZOMG paradox!

Oh well, the upside was that I met a lot of interesting people, and most of the Finnish team that came from Turku yliopisto (among which was my former co-director) I got to eat with them at one of the best restaurants in Montreal : Ouzeri, a real Greek resto that is always full of people.

So, that was one of the reasons I did not post for a week.

Posted by phonono at mars 15, 2007 09:32 PM