2008-04-12

Conference fun (NKFUST)

It's always fun to see a school with "technology" in its name running into problems with said technology, our school (After almost seven years, General Affairs is still unable to let the bell ring on time - or at all...) is no exception. But this time the topic was translation and interpreting (even though they called it "interpretation"), not technology in language teaching, so let's ignore that.

This was the first time some of my students went with me, and although one of them had pretty high expectations and was a bit disappointed later, I still think the day was not wasted for them. I was in fact surprised to see so many students on the list, even from more northern schools. (Though, funnily, they had not put my name on that list...)

There were bits of theory presented that were not too closely related to my job, and maybe next time I should really prepare a camera and snap photos of attendees sunken into deep self-reflections (as long as I am not too busy self-reflecting myself), but there were a few presentations that kept even my students very awake.

Something I really like about conferences at NKFUST: Foreigners are not considered idiots speaking only their native language, and people do not care what language is used in presentations, questions and answers. If you want to attend such conference or a certain presentation, you have to be able to understand more than one language, otherwise you're at the wrong party, period.

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