Edmonton Elks continue to forge ahead with multilingual broadcasts | 24CA News

Victor Cui isn’t resting on his laurels.

On Saturday evening, the Edmonton Elks’ dwelling sport versus the B.C. Lions would be the first professional soccer contest to be broadcast in Punjabi. This achievement follows the franchise’s earlier milestone in 2022 once they had a regular-season matchup carried in Cree.

And already Cui, the Elks affable president/CEO, is seeking to broadcast Edmonton video games in different languages.

“Chinese, as an example, is one of them,” Cui stated throughout a phone interview. “Last year, we started even looking at a broadcast in Ukrainian because we wanted a way to welcome all the new Ukrainians that we’re bringing into our community.

“That one was a little bit (more difficult) because there’s not enough experience to pull it off.”

And that’s the important thing, Cui stated.

“The ability to story-tell in sports comes with experience,” he stated. “That really is a key criteria, finding somebody who can be comfortable enough with that and have enough experience to be calling a live game.

“When it comes to live sports, you have to think on your feet and have experience doing that.”

On Saturday evening, broadcasters Harpreet Pandher and Taqdeer Thindal, who work on Hockey Night in Canada’s Punjabi crew, will name the Edmonton-B.C. sport. The Elks partnered with My Radio 580 AM, an Alberta multilingual radio station, to hold the competition throughout the province and supply it nationally through its on-line participant.

What’s extra, Sher-E-Punjab Radio AM 600, of Richmond, B.C., may also carry the Elks-Lions broadcast.

“With a Punjabi population of over 300,000 in British Columbia, this historic broadcast enables a whole new segment of football fans to enjoy our great game,” Lions president Duane Vienneau stated in a press release. “We commend Victor Cui and the Elks for making this happen.”

Canada is dwelling to a Punjabi inhabitants of roughly a million individuals, in response to the 2021 Canadian census. Alberta has the third-largest Punjabi inhabitants amongst Canadian provinces at 126,385 individuals, in response to the census.

B.C. has the second-largest neighborhood at 315,000 individuals.

In 2022, the Elks partnered with Windspeaker Media to broadcast a regular-season sport versus the Winnipeg Blue Bombers in Cree.

“That was so well received that it was kind of like a proof of concept for us in a way,” Cui stated. “In that process we also said, ‘What other languages should we do?’

“This isn’t the first time that sports has been done in multiple languages, this is what everyone around the world does. It’s just that we’ve been a little bit behind it in Canada in some of our sports. But if you look at the NHL, it has been doing a Punjabi broadcast for some time now and that’s a great example for us to learn from and improve upon.”

Cui expects there shall be one other broadcast of an Edmonton contest in Cree someday and in an ideal world he’d wish to see Elks video games carried in a number of languages.

“I would love to get to the point where we could do every home game in multiple languages but each one of these is a testing,” he stated. “I think you have to give it time for the new concepts to breathe and let other people embrace it.”

Cui is hopeful that making Canadian skilled soccer extra available to totally different cultures will solely serve to develop the sport.

“One of the initiatives we’ve got to be focused on is how do we introduce the sport to new fans,” he stated. “How will we make it as non-intimidating for brand spanking new followers to take pleasure in and find out about this expertise?

“And it’s not just a cultural thing, it could be a gender thing, an age thing. There’s always different things that make it intimidating if you’re not a fan. We want to get rid of those barriers.”

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