The Nagoya Asian Games closed on 4 October, and a group of us in the office read through the reporting together. As a translation company that has spent years handling both written work and interpreting in Shenzhen, what interested us was not the medal table but the practical question underneath it: how tens of thousands of volunteers kept an event of this scale communicating across dozens of languages. Having worked through the material, we identified four lessons that apply just as readily to our ordinary business. None of them is a new theory; all of them showed up at the Games in concrete form.
Lesson one: stock the rarer languages early
Japanese was the staple requirement, while Korean, Russian and Arabic appeared in rotation. Our own scheduling works the same way. Interpreters for English are rarely hard to find, but requests for Japanese simultaneous interpreting, Korean liaison work or Portuguese for a factory audit often arrive only three to five days before the event, and around dates such as the Canton Trade Fair the better interpreters’ diaries are full well ahead. Clients planning an international conference or exhibition would do well to lock in their interpreters at least two weeks beforehand; the language cannot be conjured up on the morning.
It is a quiet rule of the trade that the rarer the language, the longer the lead time, and the reasons are simple arithmetic: fewer qualified interpreters, fewer of them working freelance, and competing bookings from the same handful of international events. Planning the languages alongside the venue and the guest list is far cheaper than rescheduling the day.
Lesson two: the hard part is the setting, not the language
The volunteers’ duties went well beyond passing words between speakers. Some accompanied athletes to hospital; some took visiting competitors sightseeing; others sat through the long, technical business of scoring and appeals. This resembles the liaison interpreting we provide from one week to the next: working dinners, factory floors, hospital departments, government counters. Every setting has its own way of speaking, and an interpreter needs more than the language itself — a sense of what should be said in that room, what information must never be dropped, and when a question needs to be clarified rather than merely converted into another tongue.
Lesson three: terminology is prepared before anyone arrives
Suzuki Yuna, the 20-year-old volunteer in the gymnastics hall, read the rulebook repeatedly before competition began; that is the professional instinct. When we assign interpreters to conferences and large projects, we ask clients in advance for the agenda, presentations and background material, and put together a glossary for the interpreter to work from. For written jobs — tenders, contracts, technical manuals — we build termbases by industry so that the same word stays consistent throughout; a document that calls a part a “component” in the first chapter and an “assembly” in the third is not merely untidy, it can alter the technical meaning.
Glossaries repay the effort twice over. They shorten the interpreter’s preparation, and they give the client a record that travels into the next event: a second product launch or a follow-up audit starts from familiar ground rather than from scratch, and over a programme of meetings the consistency becomes part of the client’s own voice in another language.
Lesson four: machines are fast, but critical moments need a person
Some attendees at the Games reached for translation devices in an emergency, and the devices have their uses. But a coach correcting a movement, a doctor asking what hurts, or a sentence weighed carefully across a negotiating table, all leave very little room for a machine’s error; a small misunderstanding can become an injury, a missed treatment or a concession nobody intended. Our own approach treats the machine as a tool: it speeds up a first draft and helps check terminology, while the final wording, and the spoken word in the room, remain under human supervision. The distinction is not romance about human work; it is a judgement about where error is tolerable and where it is not, and that judgement is itself part of the service.
If you have an international meeting or a visiting overseas client in the near future, or if contracts, tenders or academic certificates need translating and certifying with an official stamp, send the requirements and languages through our contact page and we will come back with a concrete proposal and a delivery date; the services page sets out the full range of what we handle. Two companion pieces complete the picture: “Nagoya Asian Games Close: the Language Service Behind 40,000 Volunteers” and “She Interpreted at the Asian Games at 20: a Skill Checklist for Sports-event Interpreters”.