​As part of the first ever Winter Youth Olympic Games, which took place in Innsbruck, Seefeld and Kühtai from 13 to 22 January 2012, the Language Services department of the Organising Committee chose the latest version of Kilgray’s memoQ translation memory software to handle the large translation workload before, during and after the Games. Ease-of-use, flexibility and reliability were among the key factors behind the decision to work with the growing software developer based in Hungary.

“After looking at the different options available on the market, we decided that memoQ was the translation-software solution which best served our needs,” says Language Services Manager Daniela Rodriguez Bonelli. The small core team of full-time translators and interns were faced with the challenge of presenting all of the official publications produced in the run-up to the Games in English and French – the two official languages of the International Olympic Committee – as well as translating all press releases and the content on the official website (www.innsbruck2012.com) into both of these languages plus German in order to open up the inaugural Winter Youth Olympic Games to the local population.

A further key area in which memoQ proved its worth was by guaranteeing consistent usage of both established Olympic terminology and new terminology created for Innsbruck 2012. “It was very important to the IOC that existing terms were used in the correct way. At the same time, we often had to develop our own terminology. This was particularly the case when it came to translating into German, since the last time Olympic Games were held in a German-speaking country was in Innsbruck in 1976, so much of the latest Olympic terminology was practically non-existent in German. Once the official terminology had been established in all three languages, memoQ made it much easier to use these terms in a coherent and consistent way,” explains Thomas Timlin, Senior Translator and memoQ project manager at Innsbruck 2012.

During Games-time, the Language Services team (including three translators based in the Main Press Centre with remote access to the memoQ server at Innsbruck Headquarters) translated as many as twenty articles a day about the events, results and background stories of Innsbruck 2012, which IOC President Jacques Rogge hailed as a “superbly refreshing” at the Closing Ceremony on 22 January. Over the ten days of the Games, 462 pages (121,645 words) of source text were translated, mostly from English into French and German. Indeed, since first introducing memoQ in the summer of 2011, the Language Services team has translated a total of 2372 pages (965,632 words), including key documents such as the 150-page Chefs de Mission Manual.

The inaugural Winter Youth Olympic Games may now be over, but the Language Services team still has the task of proofreading and translating several important documents and, of course, the Official Final Report. “We have worked on so many documents about the Games using memoQ,” explains Rodriguez Bonelli, “so translating the Official Final Report will be much faster and more efficient than it would be without using memoQ.”