Foreign-language news for English speakers

Zia Daniell Wigder | January 11, 2008, 11:19 AM

While enrollment in foreign language courses at American colleges is indeed increasing, today just 10 percent of those born in the US speak a language other than English (the figure is 20 percent for the overall US population; the British fair slightly better at 30 percent). Native English speakers are thus largely reliant on English-language news sources: just three percent of online consumers in the US, for example, indicated they access a foreign-language news source monthly.

An increasing number of sources have emerged to try and make non-English language news more accessible to the English-speaking world. A print publication that was popular back in my grad school days, World Press Review, has since ceased its print publication, launching an online edition to translate the “best of the international press” from 20 different languages. And last year Language Weaver introduced Kontrib, a Digg-like site using the company’s statistical machine translation software to translate articles from global sources (interestingly, both Google and Yahoo offer their own automated “Translate this page” options next to non-English language Web search results, yet neither company offers this option on their news searches).

More recent initiatives have used community-based translations to bring non-English language news to the English speaking world. Harvard Law School-founded Global Voices, for example, has a global network of contributors who identify and translate news from around the world.

Not all initiatives are destined for success. UK-based Blognation, for example, which sought to have in-country native speakers write in English about Web 2.0 developments around the globe, shut down at the end the year due to a lack of funding. Indeed, making foreign-language news accessible to the English-speaking audience is only part of the battle; cultivating interest in the news presents an equal if not greater challenge.