Locals will be able to apply to become volunteers for World Expo 2010 Shanghai next month, organizers said yesterday.

The Shanghai Expo will need at least 20,000 volunteers within the World Expo site, said Zhang Renqing, the supervisor of the Volunteer Department of the Bureau of Shanghai World Expo Coordination.

As well as recruiting local volunteers, the organizers will also sign up volunteers from throughout China and overseas in December next year, Zhang said.

There are 38 different roles that volunteers can fulfill ranging from interpreters and media assistants to traffic guides.

"We expect most of the volunteers to be college students who will be relatively free. This is very different from the Beijing Olympics which lasts a fortnight - the Shanghai Expo will last for 184 days," Zhang said.

"We will have to have volunteers working for more than seven consecutive days. They will also have to take part in two or three days' training. For most employees this will not be possible," he said.

As a practice for 2010, the Expo exhibition, now being staged in Shanghai's Urban Planning Exhibition Center, recruited 50 volunteers from city universities to help guide tourists around the site.

They all have to speak fluent English.

Some 1,200 elementary students yesterday visited the exhibition as an educational day out.

More than 80,000 people have visited the exhibition since it opened on August 5. It will close on Sunday and move to Nanjing, the capital of Jiangsu Province, next week.

(Shanghai Daily September 6, 2007)