Found in Translation

Swifter, Higher, Stronger… Louder?
London. Beijing. Athens. Sydney. Atlanta. Barcelona. Seoul. These are some of
the cities that have hosted the most recent Summer Olympic Games, in which
athletes from more than two hundred different nations participate. That’s a lot
of countries, which means a lot of languages, which means—you guessed it—a
lot of translation and interpreting.
“People assume that interpreting for sports is easy. It’s not,” explains Bill
Weber, chief interpreter for the Olympic games.
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“In the summer, there are
twenty-eight different sports, and interpreters have to prepare for all of them.”
There are four hundred different disciplines within those sports. In other
words, Weber has to find interpreters who can render words like tiller
(archery), klaxon (water polo), and back kip (gymnastics) with the same ease as
they interpret terms like clove hitch (sailing), sculling oar (rowing), and
fetlock (equestrian events).
But even the mastery of two languages is not enough to meet the standards
for Olympic interpreters set by Weber, who speaks six languages with varying
degrees of fluency. The interpreters he recruits need to have two sets of
languages—active and passive. In a passive language, an interpreter can listen
to and understand information in order to convey it into an active language,
which is one they also speak fluently. Weber rarely recruits interpreters who
have just one language combination. Ideally, they need to have at least two
languages and a string of passive languages. This enables them to interpret in
more directions, and for more athletes.
It can be a challenge for interpreters to speak as the athletes speak, using less
formal terminology. Many of these interpreters are not athletes themselves—
they work primarily as conference interpreters, so they are more accustomed
to the long-winded sentences of political speeches than the comparatively
concise language of athletes. Because of this, interpreters have to refrain from
using the high-level language they are used to using, which is more difficult
than it might seem.
The group of interpreters that Weber oversees is quite an elite one, and it
changes somewhat with each Olympic Games. Because English and French are
the two official languages of the Olympics, the team of interpreters is smaller
when the host city is located in a country in which the members of the media
speak either of these languages. For the Olympics in London, only about

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eighty interpreters were needed for Weber ’s team. For Beijing, two hundred
were required because Chinese is not an official language.
But what about all the communication that takes place when the camera isn’t
rolling? In addition to the interpreters who work with Weber, there are
typically between four thousand and ten thousand volunteer interpreters who
work everywhere from the multilingual help desks to the playing fields. A
tremendous number of other language services are used as well, such as
telephone interpreting—used whenever an Olympian, family member, or staff
member needs to communicate via telephone—or written translation—
required for everything from the restaurant menus at the Olympic Village to
the signs on bathroom doors.