Signing

When I thought about it, I could have added to my 'collection' of present and former European Commissioners, as there was one speaking at the conference I was at. But in fact, she's so obscure that I don't think anyone would have thanked me for it.

More interesting was that this bilingual conference (some speaking in English, some speaking in French; interpreters in operation) was signed. This was the first time I'd seen this in a conference in Brussels. Clearly the signers were listening to a feed as they had headphones on all the time. Now that might have been to help them concentrate and to cut out the ambient noise, and they were listening to the original on all occasions and signing from that, or it might have been because they were signing on the basis of the spoken French (including the interpreted French when the speaker was speaking English), or the spoken English (same caveat applies). Complicated, I know, but I was just wondering. Equally, I don't know whether they were signing into British Sign Language or French Sign Language, or what the differences between them are (wiki seems to suggest they are quite different). And it's not the case that one interpreter was interpreting into BSL and one into FLS, because they kept swapping around when speakers were actually speaking.