Offensive manual to be changed

BEIJING – The training manual for thousands of volunteers working the Beijing Olympics and Paralympics is going through a rewrite because of “inappropriate language” used to describe disabled athletes.

About 20 pages from the 200-page English-language document were unavailable online Thursday following complaints about clumsy stereotypes.

Zhang Qiuping, director of Beijing’s Paralympic Games, did not offer an apology and attributed the problems to poor translation.

“Probably it’s cultural difference and mistranslation,” Zhang said Thursday.

“The training department and volunteer department made this training guide with the purpose of providing better service,” Zhang added. “For the problems … that the guide used inappropriate language to describe people with disabilities, we’ve already asked the author to modify the relevant content.”

The Chinese-language version of the text remained online and was nearly identical to the English, using essentially the same stereotypes to refer to the disabled.

A section dedicated to the disabled says that “paralympic athletes and disabled spectators are a special group. They have unique personalities and ways of thinking.”

To handle the “Optically Disabled,” the guide offers the following: “Often the optically disabled are introverted. They have deep and implicit feelings and seldom show strong emotions. … Remember, when you communicate with optically disabled people, try not to use the word ‘blind’ when you meet for the first time.”