Taipei [Taiwan], May 19 : Concerns over potential Chinese involvement in translation services have added fuel to the mounting criticism surrounding this year's World Masters Games in Taipei and New Taipei City, Taipei Times reported.
Participants and organisers are facing backlash over mistranslated name tags, poor venue conditions, and general mismanagement, raising questions about Taiwan's readiness to host future international sporting events.
The multisport competition that opened on Saturday, and which welcomes individual athletes rather than national teams, is set to run until May 30. However, the event has already sparked widespread dissatisfaction from both local and international attendees.
"There have been many problems since Taipei and New Taipei began preparations for the Games three years ago," Taipei Citizens Sports Promotion Association chairman Kang Chia-wei was cited as saying. "Now we see a mess of glitches and blunders in its publicity, promotion materials and gift packs, as well as on-site mismanagement issues," he said.
Kang urged city officials to increase efforts to stabilise operations over the remaining days of the Games. He warned that continued mistakes and disputes would damage Taiwan's credibility and significantly hurt its chances of winning hosting rights for future major events, reported Taipei Times.
Further embarrassment emerged when acclaimed Taiwanese documentary filmmaker Ho Chao-ti described poor hygiene and maintenance at the University of Taipei's water sports facility in Tianmu District. Ho, who signed up for swimming events, said she encountered unusable lockers, most of which were broken or filled with garbage, leftover food containers, chopsticks, tissues, and even bags for prescription medicine.
"The dressing room also had quite a few foreigners using many different languages, but the feelings of disgust on their faces made me feel quite ashamed... I don't understand how the organisers failed to check and clean the trash from inside the lockers," she wrote online.
Adding to the controversy were awkward and incorrect English translations of names on participant and staff name tags. A man surnamed Wang received a tag that read "King Next Day," while others complained of similar distortions. Critics suggested that Chinese artificial intelligence tools such as DeepSeek and Baidu Translate may have been used by contractors to generate the English versions, leading to suspicions that personal data might have been sent to servers in China, Taipei Times reported.
Online commenters expressed concern that the translation contractor may be a Chinese company operating under a false identity and raised alarms over the broader possibility that other vendors hired by the Taipei City Government could also be backed by Chinese capital.