Tuesday, November 22, 2005

ATA Conference in Seattle

In some ways, it was a better conference than usual: an interesting city, good fish restaurant, some interesting presentations, and the chance to meet again with old friends.

The hotel was not the best, given the number of people that came this year: the elevators were always overcrowded and took forever, and many of the conference rooms were way too small.

As usual, the presentations were a mixed bag: most had either too narrow a focus to be of interest for most people, or were slanted too much towards beginners... for example the presentation on using word macros was, in my opinion, way too basic, as was the one on XML.

Other presentations were much better. Of those that I attended the best was definitely the presentation and seminar on legal translation from Italian into English. Also very interesting and topical was the presentation on "Neutral Spanish" (and why such thing does not exist and is totally unnecessary).

Our own presentation was fairly well received; I did not present very well - I was nervous, and it showed, but Franco did much better in his part of the presentation (as well as in his presentation with Microsoft on MT).

Probably the best part was meeting again with Masaki, our partner that now works at Microsoft: we went twice with him at an excellent fish restaurant: especially the first evening we had an excellent time, the four of us remaining at our table for ours, talking about translation, Microsoft, and the "good old times" at J.D. Edwards.

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