As you can imagine, my command of Chinese still has a long way to go. I know how to say a few everyday words and I have learnt those that are most repeated in training sessions, but here, you rely on the interpreter for almost everything.
All teams have this person. He is usually a young guy, who speaks English and in some cases, understands something about basketball. In our team, none of the Chinese players speak English and therefore the method of communicating is via “Pancake” (as the translator is called). They normally all give themselves an English name, as they say that we are not able to say their Chinese name properly. His name is Huoo, but all of the players, even the Chinese, call him Pancake.
Pancake becomes your shadow during training. Wherever I go, he comes with me. He translates all of the instructions, corrections, words of encouragement, etc and he even gets angry if I raise my voice. Or at least, that seems to be the case….
Another curious thing is that one of the players is called by his number by his teammates. Therefore, we have “Number Five” in the team, who is our starting point guard and played in this year’s Rockies match in the All Star CBA.
Communication outside the training sessions is another story. Pancake is not there. Even at the Hotel, there are not many people who speak English and you have to use the new technologies for anything you need. We get by with an i-phone application that appears to translate into Chinese quite well. You write what you need in English and show the photo… and you do that for everything, in taxis, restaurants, shops…
