Language Policy and Planning for the Modern Olympic Games

Jie Zhang

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781501500473
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Lingüística

This book is the first longitudinal study that addresses language policy and planning in the context of a major international sporting event and examines the ideological, political, social, cultural, and economic effects of such context-specific policy initiatives on contemporary China. The book has important reference value for future research on language management at the supernational level and language services for linguistically complex events. At the same time, it presents some broader implications for current and future language policy makers, language educators and learners, particularly from non-English speaking backgrounds.

Foreword by Ingrid Piller

Chapter 1 The Modern Olympic Games as linguistically complex events

1 The socio-politics of the Modern Olympic Games

The history of the Olympic Games goes back to Ancient Greece. The Ancient Olympic Games were a series of athletic competitions held between various city states of ancient Greece in honor of the Olympian gods and continued for twelve centuries (776 B.C. – 393 A. D). Olympia became the site of these historic ancient games that sowed the seeds for the world’s largest and most influential sporting international event of modern times, the Modern Olympics. On 6 April 1896, the Olympic Games, after an interruption of more than 2,000 years, were revived in Athens by French educationist Baron Pierre de Coubertin with the lofty ideal of promoting international harmony and understanding through sporting competition. The Modern Olympic Games are an international multi-sport event established for summer and winter games and organised every four years. The Ancient Olympic Games celebrated physical excellence and served a primarily religious purpose. In their modern form, while still ostensibly about physical excellence, the Games also play a cultural, economic and often political role (Toohey and Veal, 2007, p. 1). With its swift expansion in all dimensions, the Modern Olympic Games are no longer, if they ever were, just a sports event, but de facto a cultural, economic, and political phenomenon.

Within the social sciences, the socio-political significance of the Olympics as a premier sporting event for nation-states has been increasingly acknowledged in recent years (e.g., Blain, Boyle and O’Donnell, 1993; Brown, 2000; Brownell, 2005; Burton, 2003; Dyreson, 2003; Essex and Chalkley, 1998; Houlihan, 1997; Ikhioya, 2001; Jaffe and Nebanzahl, 1993; Smith and Porter, 2004; Toohey and Veal, 2007). The pursuit and sponsorship of mega-sporting events such as the Olympiad has become an increasingly popular strategy of national and municipal governments worldwide. It is widely claimed by Olympic bid cities (in many cases, in tandem with the national governments that back them) that this mega-event can bring about social and material change, such as sport infrastructure improvement, sustainable urban development, global media attention, booms in tourism,and most importantly the promise of long-term image enhancement for strengthening national identity and international recognition.

No other events can compete with the Modern Olympic Games in attracting such a large scale of global attention for two weeks. In recent decades, some 10,000 athletes from over 200 countries, accompanied by a similar number of coaches and officials, as many as 15,000 accredited media representatives, and hundreds of thousands of spectators, have gathered every four years for more than two weeks to participate in, report on and watch this sports event which is in turn viewed on television, listened to on radio, read about in the print media and browsed on the Internet by billions of people around the world (Toohey and Veal, 2007, p. 1). In this sense, the Olympic Games are also a global media event. For an Olympic host country, global media exposure is a double-edge sword. The Olympic Games constitute a major opportunity for the host city and country to showcase its culture and project a positive national image through powerful print, broadcasting and electronic media. At the same time, however, the host city and country also open themselves up to intense international media scrutiny.

Hosting the Olympic Games is a mixed blessing commercially, too. On the one hand, the tourism benefits, corporate sponsorship and commercialisation of the Games generate significant income. However, the state-of-the-art buildings and technology needed to attract the Games have rendered hosting both the summer and winter events a rather expensive and grand scale operation (Wamsley and Heine, 1996). Each host city and country, expecting great rewards from the Games, has to pour enormous material and human resources into staging the event. The ever-growing scale of the Modern Olympic Games has actually made it more difficult for the Games to be held in non-Western developing countries. Under the leadership of Juan Antonio Samaranch, former President of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), the Games began to shift toward international sponsors who sought to link their products to the Olympic brand. The sale of the Olympic brand has made the Games move away from the ideals of pure competition and sportsmanship and become indistinguishable from any other commercialised sporting spectacle. In recent decades, the tension between the rhetoric of amateurism and the realities of commercialism has been a central contradiction of the Olympic Games (Blain, Boyle and O’Donnell, 1993, p. 186).

Since the world’s nation-states started to come together in 1896 to compete, politics have never stayed out of the Olympic arena. Sport is often constructed as “the great equalizer” (Hogan, 2003, p. 100), and as such the Olympic Movement is assumed to foster international goodwill, peace and equality through free and fair competition between the athletes of the world (International Olympic Committee, 2007). Some scholarly and popular discourses also identify sport as a ‘universal language’ that transcends not only national boundaries but also national identities. However, Dyreson (2003) argues that “sports have almost always been, in their modern form, an arena for the exhibition of tribal and especially national identities rather than an occasion for the celebration of universal human communities” (p. 92). Substantial research on the Olympics has shown that the reality of this mega-sporting event is much more complex and controversial than those rosy promises. The tension between the rhetoric of internationalism and national concerns is another central contradiction of the Olympic Games (Blain, Boyle and O’Donnell, 1993, p. 186). Judging from the management and organisation of the Olympic Games, the Olympic Movement is still Western-dominated and will continue to be so in the foreseeable future (Brownell, 2007). As the capital of an Asian developing and socialist country, Beijing’s selection as the host city of the 2008 Olympic Games, therefore, carried profound socio-political significance in Olympic history. Due to the global significance of the Modern Olympic Games, to become an Olympic power has been “the persistent and ultimate dream of China” (Dong, 2005, p. 533).

2 The Modern Olympic Games as linguistically complex events

The Ancient Olympics were not international in the modern sense of the term as they allowed only free men who spoke Greek to participate in the Games. The Modern Olympic Games that have been held since 1896 are multilingual events. Although the Athens 1896 Olympic Games were the biggest international sports event staged at the time, the Games were attended by merely 241 athletes from 14 countries² (International Olympic Committee, 2020a). Women and people of colour were not among the athletes. In 2004, one century later, the Summer Olympics returned to Athens, with 10,625 athletes of different races and sexes competing from 201 countries (International Olympic Committee, 2020b). If the first Athens Olympic Games were a set of sports competitions involving just over a dozen countries, all of them except Hungary using Indo-European languages, the second Athens Olympic Games were truly an international mega-event in which communication was conducted across hundreds of countries and languages.

The Modern Olympic Games, especially those after the Second World War, are complex linguistic events. Due to the grand scale of the Modern Olympic Games and the diversity of cultural and linguistic backgrounds of competing nations, it can be anticipated that communication across languages and cultures would present many difficulties and challenges. Therefore, organisers of such events have to make important language policy and planning decisions to ensure a quality experience for athletes and visitors during the event. However, accommodating the linguistic needs of all participants to the Games is an extremely arduous task. From the translation of all official documents, media reports, tourist information and linguistic signs to interpreting at official ceremonies, competition venues and press conferences, and to providing instant information to foreign athletes, coaches, officials, journalists and visitors in their own language(s), language services are embedded in all aspects of the preparations for the Olympic Games, and play a crucial role in making the sporting events truly global celebrations.

The Modern Olympic Games offer rich resources for the research of Language Policy and Planning (LPP). Firstly, as the Modern Olympic Games involve participants coming from more than 200 countries and regions with over 80 official languages, there are important issues concerning status planning. At the early stage of overall planning, the organiser will make a conscious choice of the language variety(ies) that will become the official and working language(s) of the Games. Specifically, the status planning issues of the Games include the selection of language(s) used for aspects such as official documents, websites and ceremonies, media communication, competition venues, cultural activities, public announcements, signage, accompanying of VIPs, visitor reception, and spectator guidance. Status planning has a close relationship with prestige planning. A language’s status is its position with respect to other languages in a specific social environment, and prestige is how this relationship is perceived by those who inhabit that social environment (Ager, 2005). Prestige planning is directed at those goals related to the image of a language. Prestige planning can create a favorable social psychological environment for the implementation of language planning by creating a positive image of a language. Past Olympic Games have witnessed language promotion activities (via official/government, institutional, pressure group, individual) to improve the image and value of languages in the Olympic movement and international domains. In the Olympic spotlight, the Chinese government attempted to use the Games to “teach and promote the Chinese language to the world, and to demonstrate that Chinese is in fact a language used worldwide” (BOCOG, 2002). Promotional programmes have been developed to encourage and assist foreigners in learning the Chinese language, such as contests for debating, singing and storytelling. Starting from 2005, a section on “Learning the Chinese Language” were added to the publicity materials the Olympic organising committee sent overseas (BOCOG, 2002). Moreover, the Modern Olympic Games often promote corpus planning activities in the host city, such as coinage of new terms; spelling reform; compilation of dictionaries; formulation of English translation standards for public signs; creation of a sports terminology corpus and a portal to access it; and development of machine translation software, websites and applications. The recent history of the Olympic movement has seen the attempts of non-Anglophone host countries to develop a set of English translation norms that define “standard” usage of English in the public sphere and rectify “non-normative” English orthography and grammar. Unlike status planning and prestige planning, which are primarily undertaken by the IOC and national governments of host cities, corpus planning generally involves planners with greater linguistic expertise. Finally, acquisition planning (also called language-in-education planning) is used by the organiser to achieve the purposes of status planning, prestige planning and corpus planning through education and training. For an example, in the preparation for the 1988 Olympics, the Seoul Olympic Organising Committee developed a language education plan and employed diverse training methods to improve foreign language proficiency of Games operation personnel. Frequently, acquisition planning is integrated into a larger language planning process in which the statuses of languages are evaluated, corpuses are revised and the changes are finally introduced to society on a national or local level through education systems, ranging from primary schools to universities. This planning process can entail a variety of activities, such as popularisation of a national or international language in schools; language training for athletes, coaches, officials, and Olympic volunteers; cultivation of less commonly taught language (LCTL) professionals; development of bilingual teaching programmes; compilation of language teaching materials; and establishment of language proficiency tests.

To sum up, the Olympic Games are linguistically complex and culturally diverse events which require “a strategic overall plan for the cultural and linguistic dimensions of the Games” (LO Bianco, 1994). Language skills are closely related to the success or failure of the Olympic Games, and the provision of high-quality language services for the Olympic Games needs comprehensive, practicable and sustainable language planning. Comprehensiveness means that language planning for the Olympic Games should cover all targets, domains and types of language services; practicability refers to the fact that the organisers need to formulate Olympic language service plans on the basis of its own sociolinguistic situation, multilingual resources and financial budget; finally, language planning for the Games should be sustainable which requires the organisers to embed language planning for the Games in the host country’s long-term strategic plan of political, economic, educational and cultural development, leaving Olympic legacy for sustainable development of the society.

3 Literature review

3.1 Language management of the IOC

The International Olympic Committee is an international non-governmental no...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of abbreviations and acronyms
• Chapter 1 The Modern Olympic Games as linguistically complex events
• Chapter 2 Remaking China in the Olympic spotlight
• Chapter 3 Researching the LPP for the 2008 Beijing Olympics
• Chapter 4 Beijing’s commitment – international language environment
• Chapter 5 Assessing Beijing’s foreign language environment
• Chapter 6 Imagined communities and identity options in Beijing Olympic English textbooks
• Chapter 7 The linguistic landscape of the Olympic city
• Chapter 8 China’s Olympic language services – legacy, transformation and prospect
• Chapter 9 Conclusion
• Index