Playing Past Language

Rio de Janeiro 2011

We were presenting at a conference thanks to a wonderful colleague from Brazil. I don't speak Brazilian Portuguese so there was old school simultaneous translation. A translator made my English understandable by repeating each sentence right after me. We had practiced... a lot!

Maybe 50 people in the room and we had decided to do an experiential exercise with everyone. It required throwing tennis balls in groups of 10 or so.

Pretty much chaos!

Lots of laughing! At us, at the translator, between the participants.

We more or less modeled and mimed what we wanted people to do and the translator, in his awesomeness made it up as he went along with us.

It worked!

We were playing, language was secondary. Lots was learned!