Big Games – Big Achievements!

The XXII Olympic Winter Games is a major international multi-sport event being held in Sochi, Russia. It will start on 7 February 2014. A tremendous amount of work has been carried out in the run up to the Olympics, including in the field of linguistic support. Work to provide linguistic support to the XXII Olympic Winter Games in Sochi began in 2010.

The company was faced with the task of choosing the most efficient way of handling orders received from the Organizing Committee. To make the work of the customer more convenient, our engineering department developed an order management and quality assessment system based on the corporate portal. This was specified by the customer as one of the advantages of working with Janus.

In order to handle the orders in real time and perform on-the-spot translation and interpretation, an implant office including four Janus employees was established at the Customer’s premises. Janus and the Organizing Committee jointly conducted the recruitment of employees for all projects in the framework of linguistic support of the Olympic Games.

Together with terminology specialists from the Organizing Committee, Janus developed the new Sochi 2014 Russian-English terminology glossary of sports terms. The guiding principles when the material was being put together were accuracy in translation and thorough editing, including consultations with members of sports federations and, as a result, the terminology presented there was successfully used to prepare translators for work at sporting events. Besides carrying out translation and interpretation projects, Janus and the Sochi 2014 Organizing Committee held a number of joint projects, which became one of the most prominent events in the industry. In 2012, Sochi hosted the second Forum “Sochi 2014: Translating the Games”. It was held by the Organizing Committee of the XXII Olympic Winter Games and Janus Worldwide.

The event was attended by over 300 participants from various cities (London, Islamabad, Jakarta, Beijing, Atlanta, Barcelona, Kiev, Moscow, St Petersburg, Kaliningrad, Sochi, Khanty-Mansiysk, Chelyabinsk, etc.). During the Forum, a fairly wide range of issues relating to various aspects of translation at the Games was discussed. It covered topics such as how translation was going to be managed during the preparation and staging of the Games, the work of interpreters and translators, linguistic volunteers, etc.

And most importantly, of course, translations! The “white” Olympics in figures:

From 2010 to 2013:
Translation – 31 million words
Interpretation – 170 events

2014 (only for the period of the Olympic Games)
Translation – 4 million words
Interpretation – 700 events

The most important part of the work is still ahead – the ХХII Olympic Winter Games!