Turin or Torino? Depends on whom you ask

NBC, locals use one version, newspapers another for Olympic host city

	The official name of the Olympics is "Torino 2006," but the English translation for the Italian host city is Turin.
Vandeville Eric / Gamma Press file

updated 4:22 p.m. ET Feb. 9, 2006

Turin or Torino? It’s the Olympic version of “You say tomato, I say tomahto.”

The city in northern Italy that’s hosting the Winter Olympics is “Torino” to the locals and NBC. For most of us non-Italians, it’s always been Turin.

“I believe readers are seeing it on television with the NBC logo, it says ’Torino,’ the Olympic Games,” Ron Fritz, sports editor at The News Journal in Wilmington, Del., said Tuesday. “And then they see it in the paper, ’Turin,’ and they’re thinking we got it wrong.”

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The explanation for the different versions is simple.

Sort of.

“Turin is the English translation of the Italian word Torino,” said Clara Orban, a professor of Italian at DePaul University. “Standard practice in the United States is if a city name has been translated differently, go with the English translation.”

That’s what The Associated Press is doing. Its policy — and it was around long before Turin was awarded the Olympic Games — is to use the English version of foreign cities. It’s Rome, not Roma. Munich, not Muenchen. Moscow instead of Mockba or Moskva.

And Florence isn’t going to be called by its Italian name, Firenze. At least not without an accompanying map so people would know what city that is.

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“We use Turin in accordance with our long-standing style to use English names on English-language wires,” said Terry Taylor, AP sports editor. “It’s the Shroud of Turin, for instance, not the Shroud of Torino. And when the World Cup comes to Germany this summer, we will write that games will be played in Munich, not Muenchen.

“Of course, in the interest of accuracy, we will not Anglicize the name in full references to the Olympic organizing committee, which uses Torino, and we will not change Torino to Turin in quotations.”

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The New York Times, Sports Illustrated and many other news organizations follow similar policies. Travel writers at the Times, for example, have been calling cities by their English names for years.

“For us, it’s a pretty simple style rule,” said Tom Jolly, sports editor at the Times. “We follow Webster’s and The World Fact Book as our guide. Generally those are spelled in an Anglicized fashion.”

Even the Italians go with English translations sometimes. One of their top soccer teams is AC Milan, not AC Milano, and it’s supposedly because when the club was founded, the namers wanted to stick with the sport’s English roots.

So why the linguistic confusion?

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