Language Relativity in Legacy Literature: A Systematic Review in Multiple Languages

Abstract

Since the Olympic Agenda 2020, legacy has been widely used as a justification for hosting the Olympic Games, through which sustainable development can be achieved for both events and host cities. To date, no universal definition of legacy has been established, which presents challenges for legacy-related international knowledge transfer among host cities. To address this gap, a multilingual systematic review of the literature regarding the concept of legacy was conducted in French, Japanese, Chinese, and English. Using English literature as a baseline, points of convergence and divergence among the languages were identified. While all four languages value the concept of legacy as an important facet of mega-events, significant differences were found within each language. This finding highlights the importance of strategies that align different cultures when promoting sustainable development of some global movements such as the Olympic legacy. Sport management is replete with international topics, such as international events and sport for development, and each topic is studied simultaneously in several languages and with potentially differing frameworks and perspectives. Thus, literature reviews that examine the English literature, exclusively, are innately limited in scope. The development of partnerships and resources that facilitate cross-lingual and cross-cultural consultation and collaboration is an important research agenda. More research is needed on knowledge translation across languages.