US Olympic cyclists say sorry for smog masks

Submitted by Barry Smittins on August 7, 2008 - 02:56.

What is this about? I couldn't make this stuff up if I tried! Why in the WORLD should they apologize? If anything, CHINA should be apologizing to the athletes for forcing them to breathe such crap air!

Four US Olympic cyclists who caused an outcry when they arrived at Beijing airport wearing smog masks have today apologised to Games organisers.

The four - Mike Friedman, Bobby Lee, Sarah Hammer and Jennie Reed - said that they were wearing the masks because of pollution fears, a touchy subject for the Chinese authorities.

As the Chinese capital remains shrouded in smog today, Jim Scherr, the chief executive of the US Olympic Committee, revealed that the four had said sorry.

"It probably wasn’t the most opportune time for these athletes to wear these masks,” he said, adding they had written an apology to Beijing Olympic Organising Committee (BOCOG).

But US officials said they would not ban US athletes from using masks to combat pollution if they felt it was needed because of air quality conditions.

“They have the right to wear masks if they feel it’s in their best interest to do so,” Scherr said.

“Hopefully they won’t have to use them and the air quality will be good."

Officials have today insisted once more that air quality is safe for athletes. Figures from China’s official Environmental Monitoring Centre deemed the air quality to be level two or “fairly good”.

Beijing enjoyed unusually blue skies last weekend following last-minute anti-pollution measures introduced on July 20, prompting optimism that organisers had managed to control air quality ahead of the Games.

Today, however, a murky haze hung over the main Olympic venues in northern Beijing, combining with high humidity and temperatures of 34C (95F) to create challenging conditions for competitors.

The quality of the Chinese capital’s air has proved a thorny public relations problem, but organisers said that plans to invoke further emergency measures before Friday’s opening ceremony would not be activated.

The authorities have already removed one million of the city’s 3.3 million cars from the roads and shut down more than 100 polluting factories and building sites in an attempt to clear the smog.

They said they were prepared to ban even more vehicles in Beijing and surrounding areas if conditions got worse, but the BOCOG spokesman said that organisers had backed away from such a move.

“The conditions are not unfavourable at the moment and my understanding is that we are not going to be taking any extra measures,” he told reporters.

Despite the reassurances from both Beijing organisers and the International Olympic Committee, some of the 10,000 visiting elite athletes continued to express their concern about the conditions.

The Spanish tennis player Fernando Gonzalez, who was playing a practice match with Wimbledon and French Open champion Rafael Nadal, said he was hoping for an improvement.

“The conditions are really tough with the pollution and it’s really hot. We don’t have too many days to adapt so I hope to be much better than today,” he said.

Jacques Rogge, the IOC chief, warned last year that poor air during the Games could result in the suspension of some events, particularly endurance races such as the marathon.

Ethiopian world record holder Haile Gebrselassie withdrew from the marathon because he feared the pollution could damage his health, although he will run the 10,000m.

source: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/sport/olympics/article4470968.ece

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I wonder how "sorry" was translated

Submitted by spinuzzi on August 7, 2008 - 05:38.

You may remember that in 2001 the Chinese insisted that we apologize for an air collision over international waters. We produced that apology, but we insisted on controlling the translation. The Chinese were not entirely satisfied with the apology, but reframed it for internal consumption.

There was no official Chinese version of the letter, a deliberate tactic that allowed for politically necessary imprecision in China's domestic presentation. The embassy provided its own translation into Chinese of the letter, which revealed the complexity of precisely translating terms of contrition.

The letter's first, general expression of ''sincere regret'' over the missing pilot is rendered in the embassy's Chinese version as ''chengzhi de yihan,'' a close equivalent of the English. Then the letter asks the foreign minister to ''please convey to the Chinese people and to the family of Pilot Wang Wei that we are very sorry for their loss.'' This time, ''very sorry'' is translated as ''feichang wanxi,'' an expression of sorrowful condolences, but not one implying culpability.

The ''very sorry'' expressed in the letter for the unauthorized entry into Chinese airspace during the emergency landing is translated by the Americans as ''feichang baoqian,'' which is a strong way to say ''very sorry,'' but stops short of the acceptance of responsibility that China had demanded.

Nowhere did the word for a full-fledged ''apology'' -- daoqian in Chinese -- appear, in the English version of the letter or in the Chinese translation released by the United States, apparently on its own. But in their public descriptions of the deal and letter tonight, Chinese officials and news writers tonight used other Chinese terms for ''sorry'' and ''regret'' without providing an entire, official translation of the letter, clearly hoping to emphasize how much the United States had backed down.

While there were no published claims that the United States had actually used the term ''daoqian,'' an account of the letter by the New China News Agency translated ''very sorry'' twice, using another term that can imply some culpability as well as regret: ''shen biao qianyi.'' This literally means to deeply express regrets or an apology.

That particular usage is not used by the embassy in its own Chinese text of the letter. But in the official news agency's largely indirect account it is put in quotation marks, as though directly from the letter, and the Foreign Ministry spokesman repeatedly used this term when describing the American letter at a news conference tonight.

And that is what this Olympic apology is about too: reassuring the Chinese domestic audience.