Bienvenue. Bienvenidos. Willkomen. Yokoso.
When the world’s mountain bikers came to Durango for the World Mountain Biking Championships, they came speaking more than 20 languages, and we needed to speak many of those languages, too.
And that’s where I came in. Before I was the Neighbors columnist at The Durango Herald, I worked in international business. That background led to my hiring by the first ever World Mountain Biking Championships organizing committee, with myriad responsibilities.
My first job was translating correspondence with the Union Cycliste Internationale into and out of French, the formal language of the cycling world, and the letters needed to be quite formal, too.
The correspondence was snail mail, of course, and looking back, it’s amazing all we accomplished without the Internet.
One person would not nearly be enough, so soon thereafter, I started making calls to create a corps of interpreters. And while it might have been difficult to find a wide variety of foreign-language speakers in the Durango of my youth, by 1990, the area had become much more cosmopolitan. Starting with the faculties of Durango High School and Fort Lewis College and expanding by word of mouth, we eventually recruited more than 50 volunteers speaking more than a dozen languages. Pretty good for a small town.
The need was particularly great for European languages, including a lot of French speakers, as all announcing at events was required to be bilingual, French and English, and French speakers were also needed to serve as guides for UCI officials.
Mountain biking was so new, and the interpreters were chosen for their language skills, not biking knowledge, so none of the interpreters knew terms for different aspects of the sport or the equipment. Creating glossaries for each of the languages took some time. I’d be the first to admit we created a few terms of our own when a language didn’t seem to already have a word for a specific term, but we tried to make them as descriptive as possible. I’ve always wondered if some of those words entered the official lexicon for the sport in those languages after first appearing at Durango’s Worlds.
The single biggest challenge was getting all the national anthems. Jan Roshong, chairman of the Music Department at FLC, got on the phone – a landline, of course – to a friend in New York City, who found several CDs with appropriate national anthems on them. We didn’t have all 32, but our hope was that the more obscure nations wouldn’t have athletes standing atop the awards podium, so the anthems wouldn’t be needed. Fortunately, they weren’t.
Only one part of the event wasn’t a grand adventure, the biking crash between Italian team member Markus Rainier and Japanese rider Hiraoki Kumeda. My phone rang about 10:30 p.m., and Ed Zink, head organizer of the championships, was on the line. “There’s been an accident,” he said.
I first called a Japanese and Italian interpreters before heading down to Mercy Hospital. Upon arrival, I learned we needed a German speaker, because Rainier hailed from South Tyrol, the part of Italy abutting Austria. None of the interpreters had signed up for this kind of critical duty, but they were there when they were needed.
It was another way Durango could be proud of the way we handled the inaugural World Mountain Bike Championships, and an adventure none of us would ever forget.
abutler@durangoherald.com
