On Mon, Sep 14, 2009 at 5:13 PM, church.of.emacs.ml church.of.emacs.ml@googlemail.com wrote:
Because I speak only English (and German), but no Spanish, I had no personal advantage of bilingual aspects of the conference. Nevertheless I support the idea of multilingual Wikimania.
They were doing bidirectional translation so you did have an advantage. You could have gone to a Spanish-speaking talk and had it translated for you, then asked questions in English and had them translated to Spanish for the speaker, and then heard the reply in English through your headset.
Anyway these rumored individuals who said they "wouldn't come because it was bilingual" probably had mistaken prejudgements about the implementation. Perhaps they thought a Spanish speaking person would be standing on stage with the speaker translating every sentence the speaker said?