This year’s World Masters Games opened on Saturday in Taipei and New Taipei City to complaints over the state of the facilities and the translations of people’s names.
The multisport event, open to individuals rather than national teams, is to run until May 30.
“There have been many problems since Taipei and New Taipei began preparations for the Games three years ago,” Taipei Citizens Sports Promotion Association chairman Kang Chia-wei (康家瑋) said yesterday. “Now we see a mess of glitches and blunders in its publicity, promotion materials and gift packs, as well as on-site mismanagement issues.”
Photo: Tien Yu-hua, Taipei Times
Kang said the two cities’ officials should put in extra effort to ensure things go smoothly for the duration of the Games, but if the disputes and bungling keep on happening, it would make it very difficult for Taiwan to gain hosting rights for another major international competition.
Taiwanese documentary film-maker Ho Chao-ti (賀照緹) yesterday wrote online that she signed up for swimming events, and headed to the venue at University of Taipei’s water sports facility in the city’s Tianmu District (天母) yesterday morning.
“We wanted to do practice laps in the pool before the competition got under way, and headed to the dressing room, but most storage lockers were broken and the locks unusable,” Ho said. “Only a few lockers were usable, but we found that inside they were full of trash, food and drink containers, chopsticks, used tissues, and even plastic bags for prescription medicine.”
“The dressing room also had quite a few foreigners using many different languages, but the feelings of disgust on their faces made me feel quite ashamed... I don’t understand how the organizers failed to check and clean the trash from inside the lockers,” she wrote.
Meanwhile, attention has been drawn to the numerous bad translations of names of participants, volunteers and Games officials. A man surnamed Wang (王) received his name tag reading “King Next Day,” while others complained of strange and misconstrued words in English, instead of using phonetic transliterations.
Some people online have said that the contractor responsible had appeared to use Chinese artificial intelligence tools, as DeepSeek and Baidu Translate give similar results when converting the same names from Mandarin to English, raising security concerns that personal data could be sent to servers in China.
Concerns were raised online that the name tag contractor could be a Chinese business in disguise, as well as the possibility that other companies contracted by the Taipei City Government for the Games could have the support of Chinese capital.
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