Articles and Stories

October 7, 2014

American Football. Just as the name says, it is ‘American’, an American sport. Very few other countries have football teams or understand the game. Teams in other countries are mostly connected with U.S. military bases.

Some countries say ‘football’ but they actually mean ‘soccer’. When you search the Internet for ‘football leagues around the world’, up comes a site showing a soccer ball.

Canada is the only other country which has its own football league. There are, however, some key differences between the games played in Canada and the U.S.

Football is a complex game with many rules and specific terms. Wikipedia shows a glossary of terms and rules and, if copied and pasted into a Word file, turns into 35 pages. Children learn the game as part of their life, many even before starting school and, once attending school, football becomes part of their school activity from an early age.

Understanding all those rules as a foreigner is very difficult. It is not just the rules, it is about everything surrounding football, like the tailgate parties, fantasy football, college games, homecoming games, Super Bowl, the stats, etc.

I was invited to the Cardinals vs 49ers game on the 21st of September. I thought I would be the only foreigner attending, but there were others. “What just happened?” I overheard several times, then eavesdropped on the explanation given by an American. It was very noisy in the arena and I did not understand everything, but it felt good to know that others also had problems understanding the rules. Even after many years in the U.S. there are still parts about the game that I don’t fully understand.

I took a closer look at the terms in the glossary and wondered how to even start translating them if your country does not have a football team or official rules mentioning such terms. Many of the terms do not seem translatable and would have to remain in English. Would these English expressions then be understood by a reader?

For projects involving highly country specific content like football, it is very important to have a professional translator inside the U.S. to review the translation to make sure that the content is understood correctly. It is always a good idea to have a second translator review any translation for accuracy, but if the content is country specific, like it would be with football content, a second reviewer in the U.S. is a must.