Small but international event

[+-CJ-]

We celebrated Geocaching Day this August in our city with a small event (9 people attended). I organized a stroll and excursion in one of the old districts of Moscow, provided old photos of the area, explained what was here and there under tzars and in the Soviet period. Besides, I placed three simple but different puzzles on our way so participants could enjoy hunting. Our walk ended in a cafe where we spent about an hour talking about different geocaching issues. I tell this story to make clear what type of event I mean in this thread.

 

The only major problem I had was language. There was a couple from Finland, a girl from Sweden, one guy from Germany and other were Russians. The Swedish girl had Russian origin and spoke out language fluently. The German guy had very slight accent and his Russian was just great. However the Swedish couple didn't speak Russian. Some of our Russian participants knew English poorly. I found myselft in an awkward situation. It was an excursion, not just "hello - goodbye". I spoke mostly English at first but had to stop from time to time to repeat what I just said in Russian. This was not so easy and make all our walk slower. After about 40 minutes the Swedish participants left our group (they had tickets to some sport attraction) and I continued in Russian.

 

I understand that this situation may seem rather unusual for those who live and play geocaching mostly in the US, as well as for cachers from some countries of Western Europe where English is known by most of population. However you might have attended events (or even organized them) where not everyone could speak/understand English. How did organizers of these events solve the problem?

[+stijnhommes]

I'm afraid (or rather glad) that I can honestly say that I've never attended any sort of event where language was a problem for me. In most cases the participants were fluent in Dutch, English or German meaning that I could talk to them. On holiday in Venice the cache owners were smart and kind enough to provide English translations for their descriptions because they know their town is very popular with tourists.

 

The only way to solve the problem in an event is to have people who speak several languages who can act as translators and have descriptions of caches translated to whatever language you need.

[+dprovan]

It sounds to me like you had a wonderful event! I'd say the only problem here is that you're worried about it. If it's helping, don't feel bad about repeating yourself in two languages. I've been a listener in the kind of situation, and I don't mind waiting while something's repeated for someone else to understand. Don't feel it's all on you, though, so feel free to encourage someone else to translate for a third language, which sounds like it would have worked in the case you describe. And assume people won't understand you but are still enjoying the trip, so gesture and show your enthusiasm for what you're showing people. (An event with a tour?! OMG, that's so cool!) And no pressure to keep anyone engaged: if they aren't getting anything out of it, it's OK for them to decide to leave.

 

The important thing is to make the conditions clear in the description so everyone knows what they're getting into. In this case, I can see you did a great job of that, too.

 

Looking through the logs, I see that in the "will attend" logs, people implicitly gave you a feel for what language you should use, so even they were doing their part.

 

You shouldn't be asking how to do better because you already showed everyone the best way to do it.

[+NYPaddleCacher]

I'm afraid (or rather glad) that I can honestly say that I've never attended any sort of event where language was a problem for me.

 

Last year I had a long layover in Zurich and saw that there were a couple of events (a flash mob, and a regular even) occurring while I was there. The description and all the will attend logs were in German so I posted a note asking if anyone would be speaking English (I don't speak any German). I got several responses back including one from a couple that lived in the U.S. for awhile, spoke very good English, and offered to show me around in Zurich prior to the event. I had a really good time and language was never an issue.