Watching United States President Barack Obama's town-hall meeting with Chinese youth on xinhuanet.com was a unique experience. It was like reading a foreign play: I had to visualize how the US president interacted with his Shanghai audience, how he calibrated his mega-watt charm and whether many of the questioners were indeed as tongue-tied as the transcript seemed to suggest.

The live text broadcast left a lot for imagination. It also offered a fascinating study into linguistic subtleties, not that simultaneous translation contains any subtleties. Many colloquialisms in speech, when rendered into Chinese text, took on a special tone, unusually formal and slightly condescending. But surely it was not a problem for those present as their English proficiency was lavishly praised by Obama.

I could certainly imagine Obama's eloquence and humor. He probably made the audience laugh when he said there's no course one can take to get a Nobel prize.