4/3: Translating the Global News

While I was scrolling through the New York Times homepage this week, I noticed two buttons hiding above the familiar elaborate title logo. In tiny lettering, I read the words: Español, and 中文. Clicking them leads to versions of the NYT homepage completely in Spanish or Mandarin, although the articles featured and the layouts are different for each language. As I wandered through the site, clicking on hyperlinks, I also mentally wandered through a host of questions: Why these two languages and no others? Are these articles translated from English, or written originally in their respective languages? If they are translated, who is doing the translating: professional journalists, or professional translators? And who decides which features of the NYT are available in languages other than English? 

There are dozens of little ways we interact with the news in our daily lives—reading newspapers physically or online, watching television, listening to the radio or podcasts, hearing something repeated from friends or overheard in the dining hall, and perhaps most frequently, scrolling on social media. Whether we notice or not, this stream of words is key to how we perceive the world, particularly parts of the world where we cannot go or situations we have not physically experienced. And, especially for massive global news agencies, every word in this stream was carefully chosen, edited and polished for its intended demographic. 

With this in mind, the idea of major news outlets like the New York Times making material efforts to expand to different language communities—such as paying people to translate articles or design a site in another language—becomes not just a logistics question, but also a question of how these efforts might influence people's entire view of the world. Even besides the notion that language shapes our realities, the presentation of news across languages simply varies based on community or national context and beliefs. Simply put, the language we listen, watch, or read in influences how we think, behave, act. 

When I went searching for answers about the New York Times specifically, I also discovered that the organization aims to carefully curate how its readers perceive its multilingual work. Published in English and Spanish by the same writer, this article insists that the NYT's multilingual work aims to "offer a global journalism to better understand local realities" and "protect the richness of language and its nuances." Multilingual journalism, it seems, is based on the idea that there is not one global reality but numerous local realities, even within one broader language community. And without understanding other languages, we have no way to access any of those other realities. 

If you read the news in English, it can be easy to fall into a trap of believing that English is a default, a neutral starting point from which others branch. This, of course, is absolutely untrue; English language news reflects and constructs just one of those multiple linguistics realities. So next time you are reading news in your native language, especially if the article mentions other language communities or countries, it might be productive to think about how people reading in another language might be receiving that same news. Even better, if you speak or are learning the other language—you can go out and read! Reading news in another language is not only a way to increase your reading comprehension; it provides insight into how other people think, and how their realities are shaped. 

The question of who exactly is doing the translation is often relegated to small bylines or tags at the end of an article, if it is mentioned at all. But translators are not just neutral bridges between two languages. Just like we might look into the background and credentials of the writer of an article, understanding the translator is important. Is it individual bilingual writers translating their own work? Or professional translators hired for the sole purpose of translation? At least for the New York Times, it seems to be a mix of both. 

Of course, it's telling that NYT focuses on just Spanish and (Mandarin) Chinese. As a business, they want the largest possible number of subscribers, so hosting three out of the top four most spoken languages in the world is a profitable choice. Why overlook Hindi, the last of that list? In another case, the Washington Post publishes Arabic translations of some its Opinions columns: why opinions specifically, and which ones get prioritized for translations? What agenda do American news sources have for interacting with global audiences? These questions are all hiding behind the exciting fact of news available across languages.

In summary, increasingly globalized news agencies, and not just American ones, can control how the realities of the world are presented by working in multiple languages. This is, as we've realized, is a powerful position to be in. Those two little buttons on the Times homepage are much more complicated than just a simple bridge crossing between languages—there are nuances, pitfalls, and questions to ask as we walk along that bridge from one language to another.

For more, you can check out one reporter's reflections on working with translators and interpreters, this article about principles of journalistic translation, or this book chapter about translation in global news (available through the Brown library).