Ben Forta

I’ve presented training sessions hundred of times, many of them hands-on sessions, and many of them sessions that were simultaneously translated in to other languages. But I had never attempted a hands-on session with simultaneous translation before – until today, here at MAX Japan. And it was quite the experience. The session went well, it was the same Hands-On ColdFusion Powered Ajax that I presented in Chicago and in Barcelona, but with a twist. My hand-out notes were translated into Japanese, and the attendees were using the Japanese version of ColdFusion (with Japanese Dreamweaver on Japanese Windows). Getting the machines set up was fun enough, but the real challenge was providing help. I was looking at ColdFusion error messages in Japanese and trying to figure out what they meant by the few English words and the Java stack trace, clicking on Windows and browser dialog boxes by trying to remember what button was in where, typing on a Japanese keyboard (finding : and / and # and % was fun enough, but the tiny space bar meant I kept hitting keys that switched languages), dealing with invisible embedded characters that threw off the compiler … as I said, quite the experience. In addition, some of the instructions seemed to get lost in translation. For example, the instructions said to “Type the following between and “, and several typed those exact words into the CFC. And so on. Fortunately the session run for 2 1/2 hours (instead of the 1 1/2 in MAX US and MAX Europe), so we got through all of the content. Still, it made for an interesting afternoon!