translation nation
I’ve been thinking about this snippet of NPR’s Morning Edition that aired on Monday, which talks about The Pressures Of Being An Interpreter At A High-Stakes Summit (you can also read it as an article), and it got me thinking about how important “translation” is not just if you’re working on adapting international content for a media org, but also if you’re in the media in general.
The acts of choosing the correct way to present a story, filtering out the noise, boiling jargon down, and making sure to not turn your audiences off by using the wrong word or tone — doesn’t that make us all interpreters, in a way, for our respective readerships? And if we thought about our jobs as reporters and editors and marketers and PR specialists in that context, what does that mean for the responsibility we then have to do it right, even when no one’s necessarily “watching”?
Like Deez Links? Forward this to someone else lost in translation thoughts.