For three weeks, our reporter Éric Desrosiers and our photographer Marie-France Coallier will share their experience of covering the Beijing Winter Olympics, from the backstage to the competitions.
He is the best friend of our Chinese hosts and, consequently, ours too. Small, flat, rectangular gray plastic cases, look like small remote controls that volunteers, hotel staff, COVID-19 testing center attendant, cafeteria cashier, post office clerk, and agents security always have on hand.
As soon as gestures and three words of English are no longer enough to understand each other and another colleague who is more versed in language is not there to help us, they pull out their little machines in which they say a sentence in Chinese in pointing at us so that we can hear a metallic voice and read it on a small screen that tilts forward the English translation.
The result is not perfect, but generally good enough to understand what we sometimes already suspected with discouragement like: “that other credit card doesn’t work either”.
This text was financed thanks to the support of the Transat International Journalism Fund.The duty.
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