We are pleased to announce the release of the new rulebook along with its translations into Catalan, Dutch, French and German.
After our proposed changes went through the public consultation process and were reviewed by the NGBs and IQA trustees, the rules team determined which changes would be incorporated into the new rulebook as well as the final wording.
You can download the final version in English and its translations in Catalan, Dutch, French and German.
Compared to the public consultation phase three changes were applied:
- If a player subs out-off stick their replacement will also be off-stick.
- The change for counting the scores will be reviewed for next years rulebook.
- The clarification for pushing rules was pushed to next years rulebook.
More detailed information about the changes will be found in the rulebook appendix and the rulebook itself. In case of any questions, you can reach out to the rulebook team via [email protected]
“The 2026 rulebook is the very first rulebook in IQA history with a simultaneous multilingual release. As translation manager, this is what I always dreamed of but wasn’t sure we’d ever pull off. This achievement is the result of years of hard work of a team of amazing volunteers and of improved collaboration with the Rules Team. As an international organisation, we want everyone to have access to our resources in a language they can understand, and having the rulebook available in more languages from the start contributes to that goal”, said Joke Daems, Translation Manager
“My thanks goes out to all the volunteers who made this happen: Marc Alcalà i Rams, Jordi ”Shaggy” Galaso Serret, and Marc Pascual Roldán for Catalan; Neia Mink and Chula Bruggeling for Dutch; Dmitry Parrell and Alison Merlin for French; Anouk Nyfeler, Jannis Grimm, Kris Träg, and Raphael Traini for German. I’d like to especially mention Jannis Grimm, our rulebook editor, one more time, as he is also the one who helped us go from independent Word documents a few years ago (which needed to be formatted separately for each language, leading to enormous amounts of extra work for everyone involved) to ever improved and more automated workflows and file management. While the workflow is far from perfect, we improve a little every year, and I don’t think many people understand just how much work goes into all of this”
“Because of the work for previous versions of the rulebook and our collective use of technology (translation memories and glossaries), the work on the 2026 rulebook was much more manageable (translators who could start from the 2024 translation ‘only’ had to translate 15% of the 2026 rulebook). I expect the same trend to continue for future editions and hopefully more and more languages as we grow”
“We currently have concrete plans for translations into Brazilian Portuguese, Italian, Polish, Spanish, and Turkish, although for many of these languages, we only have one volunteer. If there is one thing my experiences at the IQA have taught me, it is that one single individual can have a genuinely meaningful impact on our sport, so if you’re reading this and you feel like contributing, please reach out via [email protected] As we’ve now reached our first big dream of a simultaneous multilingual rulebook release, we can dream of expanding to all IQA languages someday”
Credit feature image: Estelle Brision