Interpreting at the Olympics Over the Years

By Kyle Chow

Last month, the 2024 Paris Olympics had hundreds of millions of people around the world glued to their screens watching athletes from over 200 regions compete in 32 sports. The Paralympics, which ended just this past week, similarly featured athletes from a record 167 regions competing in 22 sports. Have you ever wondered about how this melting pot of athletes, spectators, and coaches who speak different languages are able to communicate with each other? Well, one critical part of the language services that go into this is the human interpreters, who tirelessly work to make the Olympics and Paralympics accessible to an international audience. And with technology evolving exponentially, the way interpreting is carried out has changed drastically even just over the past few years - let's take a closer look:

Pre-Pandemic

Before 2020, interpreting at the Olympics was fully in-person. On-site interpreting came along with enormous coordination difficulties due to the sheer amount of variables involved.

Interpreters needed to:

• Commute out to the correct venue (there are countless numbers of them for the many sports involved)

  Get there at the right time (many events can go shorter or longer than expected depending on the nature of the sport)

• Be sent out for the right languages (there's no telling which regions will actually win the medals and be in the press conferences until the event actually plays out)

Tokyo 2020

The COVID pandemic forced the world to adapt to remote work, and the Olympics were no different. Many foreign volunteers who were supposed to fly out to Tokyo were barred from doing so due to Japan's strict travel restrictions at the time, and circumstances called for a shift to remote interpretation:

• A translation app was created that those at a venue could download for simultaneous remote interpretation.

  Booths were built in the main press center so professional conference interpreters could work without needing to commute, with other interpreters calling in from different countries entirely.

These systems, however, did not come without challenges.

• For example, some press conferences were streamed through Microsoft Teams, which did not have robust interpretation features at the time, and this forced interpretation to be consecutive (interpreter waits for speaker to finish before beginning interpretation) rather than simultaneous (interpreter interprets while speaker talks, so less stopping is required), causing press conferences to go on much longer than normal.

Paris 2024 and Beyond

With remote simultaneous interpreting technology evolving rapidly, the Paris Olympics were able to build upon the infrastructure set up during the Tokyo Olympics.

• A dedicated hub was built for interpreters to prepare in.

• When necessary, interpreters would enter interpretation booths staffed with technicians.

• Almost all interpretation was simultaneous (for comparison, over half the interpreters at the 2000 Sydney Olympics were consecutive interpreters). 

The shift toward remote rather than in-person interpreting has overall resulted in benefits for everyone: operational staff have an easier time coordinating interpreting assignments, interpreters no longer have to deal with chaotic commutes, and audiences get to enjoy a smoother experience with the increased percentage of simultaneous interpretation.

It is also worth noting that recent advancements in AI could make the Games accessible to even wider audiences. For example, the 2022 Beijing Winter Paralympics saw the incorporation of an AI sign language interpreter developed by Baidu AI Cloud, which generated digital avatars for live interpretation. One can imagine that AI interpreting could potentially be applied to lower resource languages so that more groups could suddenly become able to enjoy content in their language - after all, the Paris 2024 Olympics only officially offered services for 11 languages, which barely scratches the surface of the linguistic diversity represented in the 200+ regions the athletes were from.  

We in the localization industry are quite familiar with the idea of bridging gaps between cultures, and this overarching goal underpins the Olympics and Paralympics as well, with translators and interpreters at the heart of it. So, while many of us get to sit back and enjoy the excitement of the Games in our own language, let's not forget that behind the scenes lies many hardworking people that work across cultures and borders to make it possible for us to have that experience.