Handball is not as popular sport as football but attracts a lot of close fans. One of the most important aspects of the team is language – efficient communication between players and the other members of the club is often key to success on the court.
One of the clubs for which language is crucial is Vive Kielce, which started in 1965. Winning the Champions of Poland for decades and winning as the first Polish team Champions League, over the years it has become a global powerhouse and a showcase of the city and region. Over the long term, more and more foreign players, also the most popular ones, have started to opt for playing in Kielce. They supported their choice by citing the amazing atmosphere between the players and the club members, the best fans, a willingness to win the most important trophies, and the locale of the city. Despite this, a lot of sportsmen are not from Poland and have never dealt with the Polish language, and it is the only language which is used to communicate. The prep period to the season very often starts in August when the new players come to Kielce. Then, their one of several tasks is to learn our language to be able to communicate efficiently during training, but also in the city. In the beginning, teammates help out linguistic beginners and translate in English or in the language that they speak, but after some months, or sometimes even after a couple of weeks, new players are able to communicate efficiently. When the player is not confident enough to speak Polish, support from a professional translator is proposed, but it is a rare sporadic situation. For instance, the coach Talant Dujshebaev (Spanish with Kirghiz origin) said that he would do the interview in Polish, and he did so. He did not want to be helped with oral translators or translating questions by the interviewer, arguing that when someone plays in a Polish club, they should know its language and use it, and the other players have the same opinion.
Unfortunately, not for every club is the language so important on the same level. In a lot of foreign clubs, players do not communicate in the mother tongue of some club, and most of them often use English. In such situations, players also very often speak their original language, and if they do not understand something, they ask for a translation. It can make efficient communication harder, for example during training or matches, when the most important are speed and precision, but the process of the Polish language assimilation (which is thought as one of the most difficult ones) is time-consuming and tedious, so it is necessary to wait for success in that field a little bit longer.
Some of the clubs are oriented on winning trophies, but for many of them good communication between players, the language and atmosphere in general are also extremely important. The example of Vive shows that not always is a staff of specialists – who speak a lot of languages – necessary, but it is worth having contact with a translation agency, which in a sudden emergency can assist with organising written or oral translation.
(translation K. K.)
