What do you get when you combine 32 national soccer teams, 350,000 overseas visitors, and US$3.2 billion in media and marketing revenues? Plenty of opportunities for multilingual communications, that’s what. Because the FIFA World Cup is being held in an African nation for the first time, we spoke to a local South African firm to learn more about how the arrival of the international sporting event has affected the local language services scene.

Folio Online, the only South African company to grace our list of the top language service providers in Africa, has handled some interesting translation projects as a result of the World Cup preparations in the company’s backyard.

“We’ve seen all kinds of different projects — website localization, translation and editing for product and tourist brochures, press advertisements for clients in many industries,  South African language booklets for soccer tourists, phrasebooks in all of the participating countries’ languages, voice-over work, and more,” explains Johan Botha, Director of International Clients at Folio Online.

The company also translated signage and wayfinding materials, as pictured here, and plans to provide interpreting services for various events that will take place during the World Cup.

There has been no shortage of language services work to go around — after all, written translation is required for the 11 official South African languages, plus all of the languages of the participating teams. The World Cup website itself is available in Arabic, English, French, German, Spanish, and Portuguese. According to Botha, the projects have mostly come to the company via existing clients, such as advertising agencies and event organizing companies.

Linguistic barriers aren’t the only ones that must be addressed for the international players, organizers, and spectators. In the process of translating many multilingual signs to assist local sports fans with navigating, Folio Online noted that the list of items prohibited within the stadium included not only umbrellas and motorcycle helmets, but Zulu shields and spears — not likely an issue for past World Cup events.

One thing’s for sure — the expected 450 and 500 million viewers will be tuning in to an international sporting event that promises to be unique and special in many ways. With a signature song called “Hope” with lyrics penned by Nelson Mandela himself, the South African setting promises to transcend barriers of many types –not just linguistic, but geographic and cultural.