Expect the unexpected, volunteers say
Radio presenter puts Swahili skills to use
A test for language services volunteers held at Beijing Foreign Studies University. [BFSU] |
To ensure that all the accredited participants of the Beijing Games, including officials, athletes and sponsors, can communicate with one another in August, the Beijing Olympic organizing committee (BOCOG) plans to offer interpretation services in 52 languages as well as Chinese, English and French.
With over 200 national Olympic committees expected at the 2008 Games, officials are scurrying to round up people who are bilingual in unlikely combinations, such as Chinese and Amharic, a Semitic language spoken in parts of Ethiopia.
"We will offer professional translation and interpretation services for 44 languages," said Zhang Yong, language services division chief of BOCOG International Relations Department. "For the less widely-spoken ones, we will only prepare volunteers for some delegations."
In all, about 110 translators and 200 interpreters will be needed for the Games, he said.
The translators will work on info2008, an information system focusing on the athletes and daily news, while interpreters will be stationed at all the Olympics venues. They will also operate a multi-language switchboard.
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Interpreters wanted
BOCOG plans to offer services for the following languages:
English, French, Spanish, Russian, Arabic, Japanese, Portuguese, German, Korean, Italian, Greek, Polish, Hungarian, Czech, Romanian, Serbian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovak, Thai, Turkish, Persian, Danish, Lithuanian, Hebrew, Azerbaijani, Norwegian, Latvian, Armenian, Vietnamese, Mongolian, Slovenian, Hindi, Georgian, Macedonian, Indonesian, Amharic, Lao, Estonian, Albanian, Farsi, Icelandic, Tagalog, Cambodian, Burmese, Moldavian, Catalan, Luxemburgish, Bosnian, Dutch, Finnish, Swedish, Bulgarian, Malay and Urdu.
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Zhang's division will grow more than tenfold in the coming months as 1,300 volunteers are brought in from foreign- language universities and other sources.
"We are also hitting up organizations like the Foreign Ministry, China Radio International (CRI) and China Foreign Languages Publishing and Distribution Administration," said Chen Chen, who is in charge of volunteer recruitment.
Some bilingual speakers are hard to find, she added, especially those proficient in Danish, Greek and Norwegian.
BOCOG began looking for retired foreign-language experts at Chinese organizations several years ago to plug this gap. CRI has recently been doing the same.
"I was born in the Philippines but I became a naturalized Chiense after I came to CRI in 1964. I know that the languages in the Philippines are complicated," said Li Lin, a 79-year-old retired expert.
"It's not easy for China to hold an Olympic Games, so I want to do something for the country."
Such figures are welcomed by BOCOG.
"The young volunteers who were born after 1980 are very enthusiastic towards the work, but their language skills are still a little weak and they are not used to dealing with emergencies," said He Chuan, vice-director of the International Relations Department.
"The older 'experts' have the advantage of experience. They also know how to deal with foreigners properly and handle emergencies."
Overseas students are another important resource that BOCOG is drawing on. In November, it called on more foreign students to join the volunteers.
