Yes, Oui, Si, and Hai: Interpreters ready for Tokyo Olympics
Run faster, jump higher Equestrian event showcases US team
TOKYO, Aug 29, (AP): Alexandre Ponomarev is the chief interpreter for next year’s Tokyo’s Olympics. He speaks more than a half dozen languages: Russian, English, Spanish, French, German, Danish and Ukrainian. And he can get by in a handful of others.
But at times, even he needs an interpreter – for instance, when he’s working in Japan.
“I can’t speak all languages, unfortunately,” he said, answering in English in an interview with The Associated Press. “I wish I could.”
Next year’s Olympics will be an interpreter’s delight: more than 10,000 athletes representing about 200 nations or territories, many of which also have minority languages that are spoken alongside the national language. tive interpretation, which is slower and gives an interpretation only after the speaker finishes several sentences. Ponomarev said he worked his first Olympics in 2008 in Beijing, and took over as the chief in Rio. He credits his mother with getting him started, smuggling DVDs of American films into the old Soviet Union. He singled out Star Wars and Indiana Jones.
He eventually trained in Moscow and the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey, California. Under the Soviet system, he was assigned to study Danish, which is not widely spoken but helped with German and gave him a conversational understanding of Norwegian and Swedish. “Once you acquire one language, it just stacks up,” he said.
Meanwhile, just after Boyd Martin, Lynn Symansky and Doug Payne won gold at the Pan American Games and qualified the US eventing team for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, they and other top eventers were in Virginia for another international competition.
The first phase of the three-day event, the dressage, is rather formal. Riders in tailcoats and horses with braided manes perform a dance of sorts inside a rectangular arena known affectionately as the “sandbox”.
The heart of the competition is the cross-country, a gallop through open fields and over solid obstacles that has horses splashing into water one minute and going airborne over the side of a hill the next. The goal is to jump all of the obstacles without horse or rider falling and to do so within the time allowed. Few succeed.
Next up is the show jumping, when the horses need to prove they still have enough stamina to jump a course of fences that knock down oh-so-easily when rubbed.
Martin, a two-time Olympian, Symansky and Payne were joined at Mars Great Meadow International last weekend by others who ride for the US team, including Phillip Dutton, a veteran of six Olympics who took individual bronze in Rio de Janeiro in 2016, and William Coleman, who competed at the London Olympics in 2012.