Australia was in plenty time for it Olympic Games. Hardly any last minute panic. Athens was different. They were still painting the night before the opening ceremony.

Beijing is different again The Summer Olympics will start at 8 p.m. on Aug. 8 next year. And Beijing is ready. Very ready.

Throughout Beijing, countdown clocks are planted in well-trafficked areas, serving as up-to-the-second counters. They are hardly needed. Yes there are some cranes around and some construction workers but by the felicitous 8/8/08, a sparkling, freshly painted, neon-glowing Beijing will be unveiled to the world.

In Beijing, officials say they hope to have construction finished on the venues by the end of this year, and before August, they plan to run 44 test events to ensure that each venue is prepared for the Games. D Day should have been so well planned.
Wang Hui, executive deputy director of communications for the Beijing Organizing Committee, said, ‘It actually shows our attitude. We’re being very meticulous in terms of preparing for the Games.’ Meticulous. The very word.

For Beijing, for China, next summer’s Olympics is about so much more than sports. It’s being billed as a coming-out party, announcing China on the modern-day world stage. (Two years after that will be Expo 10, Shanghai and it will be a case of who put on the best show. A semi-friendly rivalry.)

In Athen before the Games many Greens were already exhausted by the effort. Wang Hui said, ‘I also witnessed a similar attitude prevailing in Torino. Everybody was pretty exhausted once the Games began. It’s quite different for China. We’ve been dreaming and expecting these games, anticipating it for over a hundred years.’

Since they learned in 2001 that Beijing won the bid to host the Games, the Olympics have been woven into the everyday life of just about every single local resident. English is being taught to every grade-school student. Throughout China, textbooks have been passed out in schools and everyone is learning about the spirit, the history and the ideology of the Olympic movement. It will be fantastic.
Source: Baltimore Sun

China’s two largest websites are having a battle — nothing physical — over Olympic advertising sales rights.

In one corner, Sohu, the Internet content sponsor of the Beijing Games, claims that online ads from other sponsors with the Beijing Olympics logo can only appear on its website. As our illustration shows Charles Zhang for Sohu signed an agreement to that effect in Beijing, in November, 2005.

In the opposite corner Sina says it plans to boost its Olympic content — no law against that — and also its development and marketing to attract all kinds of advertisers. And, of course, most of these will be Olympic advertisers.

Sina and its partners have also contested Sohu’s claim of exclusivity. They say Sohu’s sponsorship only entitles it to create the official website for BOCOG and to use the Beijing Games logo of a running man in its marketing.

Olympic organizers have confirmed Sohu’s marketing rights as an Olympic sponsor, such as its eligibility to use the Olympic logo. It has also promised crackdowns on any company that tries to establish or imply an association with the Games without paying any royalties.

Sina has since toned down its ‘Olympic marketing’ publicity campaign.

Olympic marketing officials have yet to confirm that Sohu.com owns the exclusive rights to carry online ads from other Olympic sponsors.

Sina says it plans to deploy a 450-strong team to cover the Games in Chinese, English, French, German, Spanish and Arabic.

Sohu has dismissed Sina’s strategies. It uses the analogy of ‘a regular army to a small band of guerrillas’ when comparing itself to Sina in terms of Olympic news coverage. That is a pretty dangerous analogy to use. Guerrillas have hammered regular armies many times. Read up on Chinese history to see some star examples.

All of which is reminiscent of the Australian Olympics. Qantas was not an official sponsor. But no Australian can tell you what airline paid for that privelege. All the advertising from Qantas seemed to suggest that it was the official carrier. Without directly saying so to the 3.8 billion viewers who watched the games on television. And the advertisements were pretty much all Qantas.

The official sponsor was Ansett Airlines. Which has now gone out of business. Qantas is the official Olympic carrier for the Beijing Games. Not all of the action at an Olympic Games is of a sporting nature.
Source: China Daily

Before you ask a polyglot is someone who can speak a lot of language. This does always imply virtue in a person. Robert Maxwell was a polyglot but not a decent chap.

For the Olympic Games, Beijing will be offering a multi-lingual computerized information service which will accessed by way of mobile phone and will have speech recognition built in. The answer will be computerized speech for a computer polyglot.

To achieve this level of voice recognition is no mean feat, especially within the limitations of a mobile phone circuilt.

Yet Pan Jielin, who works on employing speech recognition technologies in Olympics-related service, told Xinhua Beijing will be the first city in the world to extensively offer the multi-lingual computerized information service.

(Interesting that he gave a paper in 2000 at the Sixth International Conference on Spoken Language which was held in Beijing. He co-authored Effective Vector Quantization for a Highly Compact Acoustic Model for LVCSR which gives you an idea of the level at which this is working.)

Beijing tourism authorities estimated Beijing will host at least 550,000 foreign and 2.2 million domestic visitors during the Olympic Games.

Pan Jielin, associate director of Thinkit Speech Laboratory at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) Institute of Acoustics, said, ‘We now only have Chinese and English services, but will expand to other languages including French, German and Spanish.’

The lab has developed the embedded multi-lingual speech recognition engine, which picks up acoustic features of human speech, coverts sound signals to bytes, compares discourses of speakers with various syllables in different languages, and optimizes match-ups from algorithmic processing. In a matter of seconds, speakers could get a response from the system.

Pan Jielin said, ‘The core technology of speech recognition applies to any language if we get big enough speech databases.’

Zhao Qingwei, the lab’s chief technology officer, said, ‘We are very competitive in processing the Chinese language because we’re able to get excellent Chinese databases, including those of dialects.’ He said they bought native-speaking English databases from American companies.

Pan Jielin said, ‘We’re quite confident of recognizing more than 90% of speeches of certain topics, such as road and traffic information, Olympic competition results, Olympic venues information, and weather information.’

This is not the place to raise doubts about the viability of a process but speech recognition from many voices is the last great hurdle for computers. Some systems, already widely in use, have problems with some accents.

For example, a system very widely used in Australia can only recognize the word ‘one’ if it is pronounced ‘wun’ and users have to adapt their speech to suit the machine. It may be easier with a tonal language such as the Cantonese dialect but with English, which has literally countless style of pronunciation for any given set of words, it is a monster hurdle in computing. If it works as suggested it will be one of the biggest legacies of these Olympics.
Source: BeijingReview

A temporary church will be set up in the Olympic Village during the 2008 Games for Catholic athletes, and all churches in Beijing will be open to Catholic tourists. (Our illustration is of a church in in Wangfujing Street, in Beijing, NOT the temporary church which is not yet built.)

As the Olympics site states: China is a country with religious freedom and respects every religion. Buddhism, Taoism, Islam, Catholicism and Christianity are religions found in Beijing. Religious activities are carried out in Buddhist temples, Taoist temples, mosques and churches in Beijing. The most well known of these are: Catholic East Church, Catholic South Church, Gangwa City Christian Church, Chongwenmen Christian Church, Niujie Street Mosque, Dongsi Mosque, Guangji Temple, Guanghua Temple, Baiyun Taoist Temple and Yonghegong Lamasery.

Liu Bainian, vice-president of the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association said the Beijing diocese is training priests fluent in foreign languages to celebrate Mass during the upcoming Games. He said, ‘All will be arranged in accordance with the practices adopted by other Olympics host cities.’

A religious service center will be set up in the Olympic Village with professional religious personnel providing services to meet the needs of athletes from various religious convictions although there has to be a limit to the number of religions that can be catered to.

However, it is important, and it has been arranged, that athletes and those who accompany them, can enjoy different dishes specially made in accordance with their religious beliefs.

A total of 60 volunteers from the five major religions in China — Buddhism, Taoism, Islam, Christianity and Catholicism — recently attended a three-day training session organized by the Beijing municipal administration of religious affairs for providing religious services during the Games.
Source: China.org.cn

Another legacy of the Olympics will be a new ability for foreigners to order a meal in Beijing. Soon most dishes and drinks will have proper English translations.

Beijing Tourism Bureau has released a list of translations for 2,753 dishes and drinks and is waiting for feed-back. The list, once finally fixed, will be used in restaurants across the country.

A team set up by the Beijing Municipal Foreign Affairs Office and Beijing Tourism Bureau has been working on the problem since March last year, backed by a committee of 20 language experts and catering service managers.

Feng Dongming, the head of this translation program and vice dean of Tourism School of Beijing Union University said, ‘The names of Chinese dishes have long been part of our culture. We should translate them in a way that people of other cultures can understand them.’

Translators have divided the dish names into four catalogues: named by materials, by cooking method, by tastes, by name of a person or a place.

Translation of the first type is done simply by linking the the name of each material with a hyphen.

For instance, ‘Mushroom-Duck’s Foot’ and ‘AmentJuice-BalsamPear’, which, we are told, helps foreign guests to recognize the materials and content of the dish.

Except that the writer in his pitiful ignorance has no idea what Ament Juice is although there is a singer in Pearl Jam with the second name of Ament but that may not be the connection.

Nor yet Balsam Pear. Research shows that Balsam Pear is the name for a member of the squash family which resembles a cucumber with bumpy skin. When first picked, it is yellow-green, but as it ripens, it turns to a yellow-orange color.

The second type is translated according to cooking methods. Some Chinese cooking methods are unique and do not exist in other countries, like stew, quick-fry or saute, braise, and chilioil-boil. The translators now put the method in the beginning, followed by the material, forming a verb-noun phrase.

For instance, ‘Stewed Diced Pork and Sweet Potatoes’ and ‘Fish Filets in Hot Chilioil’.
The third type begins with the taste or texture of the food. For example, ‘Crispy Chicken’.

The last type is named after either its creator or the place it originates from. Such examples include ‘MapoTofu’, which is a kind of Tofu invented by Mapo.

The committee also plans to launch a training program to equip waiters and waitresses with knowledge of the dish names in case customers demand explanations. They can start by explaining Ament Juice to one ignorant Westerner.
Source: China Daily