Presentation Guidelines

Guidelines for Presentations (slides, video, audio)

The information on this page is in 5 parts:

  1. The deadline for you to send your presentation file(s): Friday, 2 November 2018, end of the day (GMT/UTC).
  2. Specifications for your presentation (see details below; separate for Lecture Theatre and for the Education and Energy rooms).
  3. File naming and formatting requirements, and
  4. Where to send your file(s).

If, after reading the details below, you have any further questions concerning your presentation, workshop or poster, please contact us at presentations (at) asling (dot) org . We will endeavour to help clarify things or assist, as possible.

the AsLing TC40 Organising Committee

2. Specifications

Lecture Theatre

1. DISPLAY – Presentations will be projected by the venue’s technician from a PC on the balcony, with a beamer onto a screen behind the stage. You will have a remote mouse to advance from slide to slide and a red-dot pointing device.
2. DISPLAY FORMAT – WIDE SCREEN ! Projection will be in wide-screen format (16:9 relationship) at a resolution of 1360 x 768. Format your presentations accordingly.
3. PRESENTATION SOFTWARE – Presentation files must be either in Microsoft Powerpoint (2013 or earlier) or pdf. Files in OTHER FORMATS will need to be converted!
4. NO INTERNET BY DEFAULT – The primary presentation PC has NO INTERNET CONNECTION.
5. SHOULD YOU REQUIRE INTERNET access from within your presentation or in addition to the presentation, PLEASE LET US KNOW as soon as possible, at the latest when sending your file.
In this case, an alternate presentation PC will be used during your talk.
6. SOUND – The venue technician can arrange to feed sound from the presentations laptops to the lecture theatre sound system, if required. Presenters are asked to inform us of this requirement as far in advance as possible.
7. USE OF OWN EQUIPMENT (not recommended) – Should you need to use your own equipment, you will need to make sure that it has a USB socket and that the machine can run an executable file (.EXE file) which is used to connect the device to the projection system; the venue uses a system called “ClickShare” in the room. (This system works for PC/Windows or Mac computers. Note that although there is some information on the internet indicating that it works for some Linux versions, the vendor, Barco, says “Support for the Linux client has ended as it requires an enormous effort to support all the Linux distributions and their quick updates, while the usage rate of the Linux client was/is very limited. However, the customer can still share using [… either] the MirrorOp extension within the Google Chrome browser or […] the Google Cast extension within the Google Chrome browser on Ubuntu.”)
8. LIABILITY RE OWN EQUIPMENT and LAST MINUTE FILE REPLACEMENTS – Use of your own equipment, the requirement to access information live from the Internet and/or replacement of your presentation files at the last minute (on the day of the presentation), while permitted, is at your own risk. The conference schedule cannot make any allowances for delays in starting your presentation, or even the inability to show it at all. Your presentation time slot is over, as scheduled, regardless of how long it takes to get your presentation up and running.
9. LIABILITY RE USE OF THE INTERNET – No venue, no conference can guarantee successful access to the Internet at a given time, nor the speed of the Internet at any point in time. The requirement to access information live from the Internet is at your own risk. The conference schedule cannot make any allowances for delays in starting your presentation, or even the inability to show those parts or aspects that depend on Internet access. Presenters are strongly advised to have backup local files available (incl. but not limited to screen captures of what they would prefer to show “live”, and to be ready to switch to such local backup visuals, if Internet access to the required sites or files proves inaccessible or inordinately slow. Such backup files should be made available to AsLing prior to the conference, or at least one-half day prior to your scheduled presentation time slot, to enable AsLing to make such file(s) available to the venue’s technician. Your presentation time slot is over, as scheduled, regardless of how long it takes to get your presentation up and running.
10. MAKE SURE YOUR PRESENTATION FITS YOUR TIME SLOT – Check that the size/length of your presentation fits your assigned time slot, leaving the final 5 minutes for Questions and Answers (Q&A).

Education and Energy Rooms
1. DISPLAY – Presentations will be to a wall-mounted 65-inch/165-cm flat screen.
2. DISPLAY FORMAT – WIDE SCREEN ! Display will be in wide-screen format (16:9 relationship) at a resolution of 1360 x 768. Format your presentations accordingly.
3. PRESENTATION SOFTWARE – Presentation files may be in Powerpoint 2013 (or earlier), or pdf. Files in OTHER FORMATS will need to be converted!
4. INTERNET ACCESS AVAILABLE – Internet access is available by default in both rooms.
5. — left out so that sub-points match those for the Lecture theatre —
6. SOUND – The LCD Screens in the Education Room and Energy Room have speakers for sound output. The volume is controlled via the wall mounted box under the screen, which also switches the input from VGA to HDMI, as well as turning the screen on or off. To use the speakers you can either use: (a) the headphone jack that connects to the headphone socket on your laptop if you are using the VGA connection, or (b) straight from the HDMI plug if you are using HDMI.
7. USE OF OWN EQUIPMENT (not recommended) – Should you need to use your own equipment, please let us know, giving your reasons for doing so (e.g. use of proprietary software for your presentation/workshop). We will provide you with connection requirements.
8. LIABILITY RE OWN EQUIPMENT and LAST MINUTE FILE REPLACEMENTS – Use of your own equipment and/or replacement presentation files provided at the conference, while permitted, is at your own risk. The conference schedule cannot make any allowances for delays in starting your presentation, or even the inability to show it at all. Your presentation time ends as scheduled, regardless of how late it starts, due to problems with files provided after the deadline noted above, or due to problems connecting up your own equipment. Workshop moderators, especially sponsors’ moderators may use their own equipment, but here too, any time lost trying to connect to the venue’s screens or due to equipment incompatibility is at your own risk.
9. LIABILITY RE USE OF THE INTERNET – No venue, no conference can guarantee successful access to the Internet at a given time, nor the speed of the Internet at any point in time. The requirement to access information live from the Internet is at your own risk. The conference schedule cannot make any allowances for delays in starting your presentation or workshop, or even the inability to show those parts or aspects that depend on Internet access. Presenters and workshop moderators are strongly advised to have backup local files available (incl. but not limited to screen captures of what they would prefer to show “live”, and to be ready to switch to such local backup visuals, if Internet access to the required sites or files proves inaccessible or inordinately slow. Such backup files should be made available to AsLing prior to the conference, or at least one-half day prior to your scheduled presentation time slot, or be available on your own PC which you use for your presentation or workshop in either of these rooms. Your presentation time slot is over, as scheduled, regardless of how long it takes to get your presentation up and running.
10. MAKE SURE YOUR PRESENTATION, POSTER PRESENTATION or WORKSHOP SLIDE SET FITS YOUR TIME SLOT – Check that the size/length of your presentation, workshop, or poster fits your assigned time slot, leaving at least the final 5 minutes for Questions and Answers (Q&A).

4. File name(s) and format(s)

4.1. As noted in section 3 above, presentations to be held in the Lecture Theatre must be in either Powerpoint 2013 (or earlier) or pdf. AsLing asks that, even if you wish to present a pdf, you send us an editable Powerpoint slide IN ADDITION to the pdf, so that, if we find it necessary or recommendable, we can send you back edited examples for your consideration. Past years’ experience has shown that many presentations have benefited considerably from reformatting recommendations by experienced AsLing chairs.

4.2. Please name your file(s) as follows: a. Start with the letter “L” (Lecture Theatre) or “E” (Education Room). Should we also be using the Energy Room, the prefix will be “G”.
b. Add “1” or “2” (for Day-1 or Day-2, depending on which day your event will be).
c. Following a hyphen (“-“) add the start time of your event, in hh.mm format (e.g. 10.15 for 10.15 am or 15.45 for 3.45 pm). Note that colons (:) cannot be used.
d. Following another hyphen (“-“) add the surname (last name) of the (first) presenter.
e. Following another hyphen (“-“) add a few key words from your title, e.g. QT21, ALST, “Improving_Translator_Competencies”,”Kamusi_Pre-D”, replacing spaces by underscores.

A few examples of the above (taken from an earlier year’s schedule):
•“L1-12.05-Melby-QT21” (for a Day-1 event in the Lecture Theatre from 12.05 to 12.35 on “QT21: a new era for translators and the computer”, by Alan Melby.
•“L2-13.55-Doherty-Improving_Translator_Competencies” (for the Day-1 event in the Lecture Theatre from 1.55pm to 2.25pm on “Improving Translator Competencies by Teaching Statistical Machine Translation …”, by Stephen Doherty.
•“E1-15.45-Benjamin-Kamusi_Pre-D” (for the Day-1 event in the Education Room from 3.45pm to 4.05pm “Kamusi Pre-D – Source-Side Disambiguation and a Sense Aligned Multilingual Lexicon”, by Martin Benjamin.
•“L2-11.25-Zerfass-memoQ” (for the Day-2 event in the Education Room from 11.25 to 12.25 on “How to get the best out of memoQ”, by Angelika Zerfass.

4.3. If you provide additional files, such as local backups for things you’d prefer to show directly on the Internet, name these the same as your main presentation, adding as a suffix, “-2-insteadOfInternet”, “-3-insteadOfInternet”, etc.

4.4. NOTE that such files need to be in either PDF or PowerPoint formats. No software can be installed on the presentation PCs of the Lecture Theatre. Visuals from other software need to be in the form of series of screen captures, gathered into a PDF or PowerPoint file. If using your own PC in the Education  or Energy Room, you can, of course access any other software locally installed on your equipment. Just keep in mind that projection is in Wide-Screen, i.e. 16:9; files formatted for Regular screen projection (4:3) will either be stretched overly wide, or have their lower parts cut off.

4.5. A few formatting tips, based on problems we’ve noted in past years:

4.5.1 FONT SIZES: Avoid font sizes that are too small to read for persons sitting further back than the first row or two. As a rule of thumb you should use 24 pt fonts (or larger). Spread your information over several screens rather than trying to compress too much onto a single screen. If a screen capture results in lots of small print information, add zooms of critical parts, showing these as you refer to them in your talk.

4.5.2 COLOUR CONTRAST and SURFACE DIFFERENTIATION: Likewise, make sure that you have strong contrast between any background colour(s) and your text, keeping in mind that when projected, contrast is less focussed than on the high-resolution screens of today’s computers, notebooks and tablets. Also the projector does not support as many colours as a modern notebook or other flat screen device. Avoid text in light shades of pastel colours, or use of pastel shades as background. Use either white or a very light solid colour as background and stark, dark contrasting colours for your text, or a dark background with white or light yellow text. And keep in mind that some of your audience may be colour-blind or have reduced abilities to differentiate between colours with similar hues. When including comparative graphs or graphic lines, add formatting differences as well as colour. E.g. while the “red” line may be solid, the “blue” line could be dashes, and the “green” line composed of dots. Or, when using bars, have one bar with diagonal lines like slashes (/), another with diagonal lines going the other direction, like back-slashes (\), a third with cross hatching (X) while a fourth could be a solid colour.

4.5.3 EMBED FONTS: When saving your files (both PowerPoint and PDF) click the options to “embed fonts in the file”, preferably “all characters”, not only those used in the presentation; a slight change might result in a new problem if you didn’t include all characters. This prevents your presentations suddenly looking a lot different, and text wrapping in unfortunate places if the presentation PC needs to use alternate replacement fonts. These options make the files larger. But it is worth it, if it helps you to present your information as you really want to show it, not mangled in conversion.

5. Where to send your file(s)

Please email your presentation file(s), including – if you wish to present a pdf – please also an editable Powerpoint or OpenOffice/LibrOffice Impress version, to:

presentations (at) asling (dot) org

by no later than Friday, 2 November 2018, end of the day (GMT/UTC).