Olympic Diary: Strine strange lingo full of pitfalls

I didn't expect a New Zealander. Wandering for four days through the polyglot babble of journalists - 20,000 of them - covering the greatest show on earth, I was uncomfortably aware of my country's linguistic insularity.

Most European New Zealanders - recent waves of immigration aside - speak only one language and many tend to view with suspicion anybody who has taken the trouble to extend their linguistic horizons.

So when I bowled up to the language assistance desk and asked (in fluent English) to see whoever was in charge, the last person I expected to see was a compatriot.

Actually, Mary Rix-Miller, the so-called "language manager" at the main press centre on the Olympic site, has been away so long she doesn't even speak of New Zealand as home any more.

Hamilton-born and raised at Kiwitahi near Morrinsville, she now lives in Toulouse in southwest France. It was the last stop in a long world tour on which she set up house in Austria, Mexico, Brazil, France, Japan and Sweden - mostly with her then husband, a French diplomat.

The legacy is a fluent command of German, French, Spanish and Swedish.

At the Olympics, she's in charge of a team of 900 - most of them volunteers who can deal with a crisis in any one of 60 languages.

Among those are 120 professional simultaneous interpreters who are for my money the decathletes of brain function.

Believe it: watch the TV news and repeat, word for word, what the newsreaders and reporters are saying. Your eyeballs will melt as your brain overheats. Then imagine having to reproduce at live speed all the nuances, implication and idioms in another language.

"We try and get native speakers [of other languages] who have lived in Australia for a long time," says Rix-Miller, adding that Strine is full of pitfalls for speakers of English as a second language and for English speakers trying to translate into a target language whose idioms they do not intimately understand.

"A phrase like 'no worries' [a local expression which has hugely amused many Americans here, who keep translating it in their newspapers as 'way cool'] can make people very worried if it's too literally translated," she says.

"They think: 'Why is she telling me not to worry? What am I meant to not be worried about?'

"Likewise some people will understand 'see you later' as meaning that a person is not available at the moment and you should come back later."

Many, if not most, of the press who currently swirl through the centre where the language services booth is prominent in the foyer have a working command of English. But demand for language services is bound to increase when the Games start on Saturday.

Stands to reason. People whose daily work is communication often have to deal with English as well as their native language.

But if you devote your life to being faster, higher or stronger than anyone else on the planet, you don't get time to master either English or French, the two official languages of the Games.

And, Rix-Miller says, the athletes' needs for linguistic help go way beyond assistance at press conferences.

Strict procedures need to be followed at dope tests to protect findings from later legal attack. Athletes having to take the dais to receive medals "often have no idea where to go or what they're meant to do when they get there."

Then there are the "flash quotes" gathered by official reporters from athletes seconds after their events have finished.

These are immediately translated into all the main languages - and others on request - for feeding out to waiting reporters whose deadlines may not wait for a later press conference.

In the heat of competition, the agony of defeat or the rapture of victory can prompt athletes to give vent to their feelings in terminology not suitable for a family newspaper.

But Rix-Miller says she and her staff are no censors.

"There are two schools of thought on it, but we take the view that if they said it we translate it."

The decision about whether to print it verbatim, of course, can be made on newsdesks around the world.