My Experiences: Day 18 - 1st September: Work and Play...

#ibmcsc China 30

Goal Setting Workshop

Just a few last steps to our final presentation and closure of the project. One of the deliverables that we had committed to our clients was a workshop for their employees which we conducted today. The topics included Team work, Team Building activities and Goal Setting. We also played a few team building games which was fun. One of the challenges presenting something through an interpreter is that you get a delayed response to something you say. You are all animated with lots of expressions when you are speaking but there is absolutely no response from the audience as they do not understand a word of it. I found it funny today when Irena was presenting because she was all excited and the everyone was looking at her as if it is a mime :)

It also takes double the time for the meetings and presentations as everything has to be translated back and forth and we have to keep that in mind while deciding the duration of the meetings or presentations. Our interpreter and translator, Lisa, is exceptional. She is studying interpreting for her master's and is helping us on this project as an intern. Lisa has been involved with this project from the beginning and she understands our thinking process now. You can't do a literal translation as it would not make sense without understanding the context and Lisa does a great job of getting it right. It is great to have her on our team. Every document and presentation is being translated by her and again, the time to translate all the documents also has to be taken into consideration while planning the activities.

Team Games

Some fun activities as Ice Breakers - Paper Planes :)

We also celebrated Irena's birthday today with a team dinner at a Sichuan restaurant (very very tasty food) followed by Karaoke night. Karaoke is very popular in China and you can see board with 'KTV' written everywhere you go in the city which is the place for Karaoke. We had a private room with a touch screen console, a huge screen for the lyrics and mics for the Karaoke. It was great being with everyone and just relax. Everyone is tired and a bit stressed these days as we have a very few working days left and lot of things to complete for the project. This was a good stress buster and it was nice to see everyone enjoying.

Tomorrow is the last day in the week as a 3-day holiday starts from Thursday. It will be great if we can close a few things tomorrow so we don't have to think about the project during holidays.