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Event in Venlo (NL)

jouke on 2003-09-13T08:05:37

Yesterday I went to Venlo. Since Venlo is pretty much the other side of the Netherlands compared to where I live, there must be a good reason for me to take my car and drive to Venlo.
There was. The disability council of Venlo had organized an event, an exhibition if you like with some talks and quite a few booths. One of the members of the council had heard of pVoice and invited me to have a booth there too. Apart from feeling honoured to be invited, I thought it would be a good opportunity to promote pVoice.

To make a long story short, it was a nice event, with mostly a wrong audience for pVoice, and not as many visitors as the organization expected. But I wasn't disappointed.
A few people were interested in pVoice, I gave a couple of demonstrations to those, and some people took a brochure I created with them. One person, who works a lot with disabled people was very interested and very much liked the fact that pVoice 2.1 will be available in Turkish, because some people he works with, are Turkish (we have a lot of Turkish and Moroccan people in the Netherlands).
Apart from that some people were more generally interested, and the woman from the council that invited me, offered to ask someone she knows to translate pVoice into Moroccan, which I think will be a valuable addition to the available languages.

One very nice challenge I faced there was a blind woman, who wanted to know more about pVoice and even wanted to try it out herself. I think I did a pretty good job explaining to her how it works, although I was rather nervous, hardly ever having spoken to a blind person, not knowing how to explain purely visual things on a computer screen. She left thanking me for my patient explanation, so I think I did well :)

Moroccan

drhyde on 2003-09-13T11:07:59

You do know that people speak Arabic in Morocco? True, their dialect will be different from that of (eg) the Gulf states, or Lebanon, or $insert_arabic_country_here. But it would seem to me that it would be more useful to get a "standard" Arabic translation - where standard Arabic is what the Quran is written in - unless you have the resources to have a veritable host of Arabic dialects translated. Standard Arabic will be understood throughout the Arab world.

Re:Moroccan

rafael on 2003-09-13T13:16:12

Standard Arabic means using the Modern Standard Arabic, official language in the arabophone countries, which is quite modernized compared to the Classical Arabic (the one the Quran is written in.) Link.

Re:Moroccan

TorgoX on 2003-09-13T22:41:45

And all Jouke needs is a Modern Standard Arab!