Questão 88 (2º semestre) da UFG 2014 (inglês)

In the world of language translation and interpreting, you get used to certain challenges: slang and idiom, poor pronunciation and thick accents, regional dialects that aren’t well-documented, and many other standard problems. At the Olympics, many of these problems raise their ugly heads all at once, and it’s not uncommon to double-up interpreters assigned to press conferences because the language load is so huge and the mental stress so acute that a single interpreter often burns out and falls behind.

This past week, though, something altogether unusual and interesting happened when Sage Kotsenburg won the Gold Medal in the slopestyle snowboard event in Sochi. His triumphant press conference where he attempted to explain his thought process and the resulting routine that won him the Gold was almost like listening to a new language being invented right in front of your eyes – and believe this translation professional when he tells you that every interpreter, translator, and other translation services worker in that room earned their living and then some during that press conference!

A 1620 Japan

Here’s Kotsenburg’s routine as outlined in Snowboarder:

“Landing a cab 270 to switch, half-cab on back 540 off flat down, half-cab layback slide off the cannon back 180 out, cab double cork 1260 holy crail, frontside 1080 off the toes rocket air, then a 1620 Japan.”

Yes, that is all technical jargon and it all actually means something. In a situation like this, no amount of translation experience matters: this is simultaneously a perfectly legitimate sentence in English and completely untranslatable by anyone unless they share a technical snowboarding background and make sense of the word salad of terms there. That last bit, by the way – the 1620 Japan – is the complex move that Kotsenburg decided to add to his routine just a few minutes before competing, and involves rotating in midair exactly four and a half times.

Glossário:

challenges: desafios
double-up interpreters: intérpretes trabalharam em pares