Derik Bron, son of Diederik and Mary Bron of Sedro-Woolley, was one of a handful of volunteers selected by the Beijing Olympic Games Organizing Committee to be a translator in China this summer.

Bron, 22, will work at the site of the Olympic sailing events, Qingdao International Marina, located southeast of Beijing on the Yellow Sea. He will join a team of about 15 volunteers and staff at the Qingdao Language Center to prepare multilingual updates on the progress of the Games.

Bron graduated in 2005 from both high school and Skagit Valley College through the Running Start program. He spent his high school sophomore year in the southwest Chinese city of Lijiang, Yunnan Province, where his parents taught English, then proceeded to study Chinese and linguistics as a college undergraduate at Western Washington University, graduating in 2007.

His graduate Chinese studies program at Valparaiso University in Indiana began last year with a seven-week summer immersion program in Hangzhou, China, and he has been sharing an apartment at school with three graduate students from China.

Bron said he is scheduled to arrive July 14 in Qingdao, Shandong Province, to prepare for the Aug. 9-21 Olympic sailing events. As an Olympic Games volunteer, he will pay his own travel expenses, but will stay with an Olympic host family in Qingdao, where his food and housing will be provided.

“I’m really looking forward to this opportunity of living with locals,” Bron wrote in a recent e-mail, adding that he hopes to eventually land a job in China.

The enthusiastic linguist will complete English-to-Chinese translations, proofread Chinese-to-English translations written by Chinese volunteers, and perform other translation work requested by Olympic officials.

“I’m hoping that this will be a chance to really put my Chinese skills to the test,” Bron said. “My vocabulary is going to be stretched tremendously and I’m going to be able to gauge where I stand on the road to fluency.”