'Too many languages'
Peter Berlin/IHT Monday, August 23, 2004
ATHENS The press conference after the men's table tennis doubles finals spun into chaos more dramatically than any of the slice shots in the match that preceded it.
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The Chinese winners, Ma Lin and Chen Qi, had modestly played down their own contribution on Saturday, praised their partners and coaches and then had fallen silent, staring down into their laps as the interpreter rendered their words into English.
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Then came the turn of the silver medalists from Hong Kong. As Li Ching, who was born in Hong Kong, started to speak, a journalist at the back of the room began shouting. This rapidly turned into a chant taken up by half a dozen of his colleagues.
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After a brief exchange with the rattled interpreter, Li smiled, waved a hand and started to speak again. This time there were cheers.
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The Hong Kong news media had wanted Li to speak Cantonese, the principal dialect in Hong Kong, but the interpreter spoke only Mandarin. Li chattered away animatedly for five minutes. Occasionally he chortled, evidently at his own jokes, which drew laughter from the back of the room. When he finished, his partner, Ko Lai Chak, a defector from the Chinese team, gave a monotone translation in Mandarin. It lasted two minutes.
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Then the professional interpreter gave an English version. He took less than a minute. The Greek interpreter offered her version: one sentence.
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After the Hong Kong pair had finished answering questions, Li leaned back in his seat, looked along the table to the bronze medalists and said, in heavily accented but quite intelligible English, "Over to you guys."
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Then a Dane called Finn started speaking in English.
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And that's when a German journalist got up to leave, saying: "That's enough. Too many languages."
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Like Euro 2004 earlier in the summer, the Olympics brings together athletes, journalists, fans and politicians from various countries and cultures and proves that, even on the rare occasions when they care to listen to one another, accurate communication is almost impossible.
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After Francisco Fernández, a Spaniard, finished second in the men's 20-kilometer walk on Saturday, he was besieged in the narrow battlefield called the mixed zone by Spanish journalists. For those who were chasing the winner, Ivano Brugneti, or were elbowed to the back of the scrum or simply did not speak Spanish, the Olympic News Service issued a helpful "flash quote" as it does after almost every event.
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Fernández, it said, had explained that both his father and his coach died this year and he dedicated his victory to his coach. It seemed like a breathtaking insight into the priorities of a top-level athlete. In fact it was an error.
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A correction quickly followed. Fernández had said that his coach, who was like a father to him, died this year.
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In its babel of languages, the Olympics are Euro 2004 cubed. What made the Euro so interesting was that it was the European Union at play. And it strongly suggested that the European nations will never be able to talk clearly to each other (and that most do not care). The agreed common language of press conferences was English, as it is in Athens. The French, of course, turned up without an interpreter and were fined. They borrowed a UEFA official who bewildered journalists by translating the word déchets correctly but unintelligibly. So Jacques Santini, the coach, reportedly said his team's bad passing was "leftovers." He meant that it was a waste.
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The Italian interpreter happily reversed Giovanni Trapatoni's meaning. Trapatoni said he was not going to change his team. The interpreter told the non-Italian speakers that Trapatoni would change his team. The Portuguese interpreter was painfully shy until his audience grew impatient with his whispering. Then he told them angrily that he was not going to shout just so that they could hear him.
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Sometimes even the shared language of English is not enough. Indian journalists are forever bemused to find they have to repeat their queries two or three times.
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After the 100-meters final, Veronica Campbell, the Jamaican bronze medalist, sat in patient, dignified silence at the end of the dais while all the questions went to either the winner, the Belorussian Yuliya Nesterenko, who answered through a interpreter, or Lauryn Williams, the silver medalist, who chatted away in American English. "Someone ask the Jamaican a question," muttered one journalist.
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At the end of the session, someone did, asking the three finalists to list all the dope tests they had undergone this year. Nesterenko started. Williams followed. Then, with midnight fast approaching, the moderator, eager to wrap up his evening's work, stood up. Despite the subject matter, Campbell was not to be denied. She grabbed her microphone and out came the richest, thickest of Jamaican accents. There were looks of incomprehension round the room.
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International Herald Tribune

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