Exam Paper and Translations

Wasn't feeling great at all today. Was tired and weak and my stomach was unsettled. Don't know if it's the diet, the water (or the ice) or the humidity and heat. Luckily, the work isn't too strenuous. In fact, the problem selection went super fast. Maybe a bit too fast at the end, in any case I was a little disappointed at the outcome. I guess I wished that a second combinatorics problem had been selected for once, especially as I liked so many of them. Also, a paper that where the four most accessible problems come from only two subject groups: geometry and number theory, doesn't seem like a very balanced paper to me. But, anyhow.

The morning started with a meeting of "the English Language Group" of which I'm not part, so my presence was not needed (meaning I got to nap for a good hour). In these meeting the anglophone leaders decide on the wording of the paper, i.e. translate it from a mathematician's lingo into good "Queen's English". Then they argue for a while about dots, commas and semi colons.

The meeting dragged a bit, so it wasn't 'till after lunch that we could approve the official english version and proceed to have other language groups start work on the other four official versions: french, spanish, russian and german. When those were ready we met again to approve those. I noticed some disparities between the wordings of the english, french and german versions, but saw that this could facilitate my own translation work. However, it was decided yet again to change the wording slightly and again we waited for official versions. Official versions approved we now waited for computer access, or in my case, for an electronic version of the paper, because I was going to do my translation on my laptop, to avoid all foreign keyboard issues. I don't know why it took so long, but we had to wait yet an hour before they would open access to the computers, luckily though I was able to get a personal copy for my laptop fast and once I started working my translation went pretty fast. I finished, turned in print outs of my translation and walked back from the conference room. On the way back, alas, I learned that an error had been discovered in the paper and that an emergency meeting would take place after dinner.

Dinner tonight took place in the discotheque area of the hotel, we were supposed to have some sort of a show under dinner. I sat with the Romanians this time, chatted and joked with F. under dinner, but really did not have much appetite. Some singers/dancers performed medleys of old songs, including The Beatles, and some well known latin american hits. It was somewhat fun. The Romanians sang along, nice and loud! They smoked a lot too, I was actually feeling kind of sick towards the end of the meal.

Dinner finished sort of abruptly as we had to have this extra jury meeting. Fortunately, the error was easy to fix, some marginal cases just had to be eliminated from the problem announcement. This still meant that everybody had to redo, or insert the modification into, their translations, before jury meeting the next morning.

I was tired and really only wanted to go to bed. Walking on the beach was tempting though: feel the sand between your toes and put your feet in the luke warm water and stroll in the moonlight. But, well. I sat with F. in the hammaks on the beach for a while, then gave up and went in. Hope to feel better tomorrow.