Market researcher and business consultant at CSA Research for leading global firms "Without data, you're just another person with an opinion"
Translators in and behind the news: What should you do if 14% of your prospective consumers felt more comfortable using a language than the one in which your company does business? You’d probably try to translate everything. This is the decision that faces US companies in appealing to the country's 41 million people who speak Spanish. CSA Research covers the Spanish-language opportunity in reports such as our "Non-English Economic Opportunity in the U.S.” analysis (https://lnkd.in/e8p5tKZY). So what do these companies do? As our research has shown, some can’t make the business case for translation, while others wrestle with practical challenges. For example, newspapers and news broadcasters face content volatility, velocity, and volume challenges. They must deal with misinformation propagated by official, private, and dark sources. This week the New York Times took an introspective look at how it provides the Spanish-speaking community in the US and abroad with translated content. Rather than translate everything, it takes a curated approach to the challenge, publishing up to a dozen translated articles per day, a bespoke home page in Spanish, a WhatsApp channel, and its El Times newsletter. For this article, the Times interviewed Elda Cantú, a senior editor on its international desk. She heads a team of three editors and a dozen freelancers who translate select articles into Spanish for readers. Cantú highlighted a major concern during the US election cycle – “[providing] accurate and up-to-data information on the candidates…in a widening sea of election misinformation.” Besides that, her team faces the challenge of explaining arcane American concepts like polling – “We want to make sure our journalism provides people with the opportunity to make better choices. The Times’ process should be familiar to any global content specialist. First, they collaborate with various parts of the newsroom and audience teams to pick potential stories. That curation step includes getting input from reporters and editors who think their stories would interest Spanish-speaking readers. Next comes production, when the articles are assigned to translators. That’s followed by at least two layers of editing. The process, she explained, is to be quick “but most importantly, [be] clear, accurate, and faithful to the original.” That’s the goal of language professionals everywhere. I’ve attached the full New York Times article to this post. It's freely downloadable for 10 days, so read it quickly. If you’d like to see more about CSA Research for translators, see the open-access survey of freelance linguists https://lnkd.in/eU6WzWrr.