The role of translation in collaborations (CJS2022 Day 1)

10:03PM May 25, 2022

Speakers:

Stefanie Murray

Oni Advincula

Attendee

Jesús Del Toro

Nissa Rhee

Jonathan Kealing

Keywords:

spanish

translation

community

translate

collaboration

chicago

english

story

important

outlets

content

translators

people

claudia

project

language

newsrooms

news outlets

spanish language media

part

And now I'm really excited to welcome on stage my colleague Adi, as you fill up a very treasured member of the Center for Cooperative Media staff who's going to moderate the next conversation, which is a really, really important one, we're going to take a look at the role that translation has played in collaboration here in Chicago. And I'll turn it over to oni to introduce our panelists and get the conversation going.

Hi, everyone, I was told would be so quiet. So let's get loud. Welcome to our panel discussion on the role of translation color in collaborations. Thank you for joining us. I'm only Advincula. I am Project Coordinator for ethnic and community media initiatives at the Center for Cooperative Media. And I will be your moderator for this session. Before we dive in, I will ask our wonderful panelists here to introduce themselves, and then we will go straight to the presentations on the collaborate, collaborate, collaborative translation project. Let's start with you Jesus Del Toro.

Thank you very much. I am Jesús Del Toro. La Raza is a Spanish newspaper here in Chicago, founded in 1970, we have more than 52 years serving Latinos Spanish speaking community in Chicago. Recently, we have started to do collaborations with several outlets to operate here in the city. And one very important component of that collaboration is the translations that allow us to include content originally in English, and to include that in our pages and websites. And also in some degree to allow English outlets to republish Spanish content original in Spanish, and then translated into English. However, we will speak about that and

Yes, Hi, I'm Nissa Rhee. I'm the Executive Director and co founder of borderless magazine. We got our start after the Muslim travel ban is just a really quick response media project not meant to be the nonprofit news outlet it is today. But today, we publish a couple times a week on our website borderless mind that org every story is published in English and Spanish and our Spanish online audience is about 45% of our audience. And in addition to recording and publishing, we have two more programs, we have our Pathways Program, which is creating opportunities for emerging journalists from immigrant communities to learn journalism skills and work in the news outlets. And our immigration REPORTING LAB, which is through what we're doing a lot of this translation partnerships and collaborations where we're giving other newsrooms, the skills and the tools they need to better report and serve our immigrant communities in Chicago.

Hey, everyone,

I'm Jonathan Kealing. I'm the chief network officer at the Institute for nonprofit news. I oversee all of our editorial collaboration efforts in partnership with my perfect colleague, Bridget, who's in the audience here today [SPANISH TRANSLATOR SPEAKING]. So I work on our amplify News Project, which at various times has integrated translation into our efforts and as ambitions to keep doing that. So I'm excited to be here to hear from a couple of experts and to add our perspective on how we can do this in a way that is grounded in community and equitable and uses translation as a place to start not a place to stop.

Thank you. Clearly as we are becoming more diverse, racially, ethnically, and even politically, translation is also becoming more and more essential. In New Jersey alone, where the center for copper media is located. nearly 2 million Latinos reside in the state, an estimated 7% of them speak or read Spanish at home. And that's been the trend across the country. So Jesús, let's start with you. Tell us give us walk us through it. How did this collaboration and translation started? Among the three of you?

Well, yes, thank you. I can say that. collaborations between outlets is we have been discussing this all day long. But it's something that is relatively new, at least for many of the legacy outlets. Having half a century of working is part of that tradition, but the need for collaboration in our case it started when we realize I believe too Very important transformation. So we're experiencing. One is the general transformation of the other outlet because of course, we have reduced revenues because advertising is going down that LaRussa is a free newspaper. They also we have a website, but we realized in advertisers that sold to sustain ourselves, then the declining revenues meant unfortunately that our newsrooms shrank dramatically. There's something that happened to many outlets, some of them are really close. Now, unfortunately, and that happens a lot, unfortunately, tooth here in Chicago among Spanish publications, or you watch a daily, then three days a week, then weekly, and then comfortably close. We rasa has been always a weekly, but we also reduce part our content operation because revenues are to continue to be honest, at the same time, the rise of many phenomenon indicates that you mentioned diversity interaction, openness to other points of view, are now critical for journalism, the balancing of those who say, well, we need to start collaboration open ourselves to to have content from others in our pages, and to offer our content to other outlets. And being a Spanish newspaper that inevitably, but we do some collaborations with other Spanish consumer. But here in Chicago, the thing means inevitably translate. At the same time that rationality was originally happening in the minds of many, and the CNN, with the AMPLIFi project, starting a devoting resources to promote translations. In fact, in our case, we started in direct interacting with with many outlets with a different a unemployed lens of life, which was a private, several six, six neutral Community College, seven nuclear energy cavalry, to cover the first year of Lorelei to the mayor, administration. And part of that included that some of LaRussa Spanish content was going to was translated into English in order to be available for other outlets. And also some English attracts were translated into Spanish to wherever for one second or two, for all of us to collaborate, then the AMPLIFi projects continue with this effort. And any content that any of the Chicago members of Ireland wanted to be translated into Spanish, electro city spaniel good could be translated if, of course, is submitted the submitted to dispense that in its website, when you can upload the content and images and that was available to editors that then interact with translators, in order to have this trunk borderless magazine as a political job in this in this process, because they were the arranging, that takes two days to get content, the English content that was to be translated and then managed to work with the translators, in order to have this work done, not just in terms of having them put in a different language, which is important, but also to ensure that the content is spirited, that things that are in each of those texts were respected, because any translations imply some sort of distortion in some way. There is this Italian phase a sense that it's unitary tolerated of each other thought it retorted, which is that translation is tracery Seon. As far as you know that I texted him, but in fact that happened, and then a borderless magazine provided this editing expertise I and also the expertise feeling, because this is also something that is very important for a translation to work. In our gateway Spanish outlet, Spanish newspaper, we report in Spanish directly with the communities here the Latino communities in the Latino neighborhoods in Chicago.

And that provides Of course, the feeling that they have be part of the same community that we are reporting about that allows a cultural understanding or cultural competence that is very important. And when you just start late mechanically, you may lost lose a lot of that important part which makes a text of new feature or whatever, alive, not your stuff as teacher something that is Technically transferring to another language that that that is something very important and borderless offers that that part of the process today. And we are proud to say that some of our content, we was publishing to English, we, of course, republish more English content relating to Spanish. And also we do up vision days, we keep collaborating with several outlets, republishing English content translated into Spanish, for example, injustice watch, city will roll the Borderlands magazine. And it's very good to have now a lot of growing interest in Kevin Morris Spanish content. Because as you mentioned, the Spanish speaking community here in Chicago and in many parts of the country is growing. Many of them are also bilingual, but they want the need for the Spanish and the interest in keeping reading in Spanish is not diminishing, that is something that of course, we will need to study better, but some said about while the English you know, competence grow, that means, like at some zero that the Spanish is going to decline, that no, in fact, both are, you know, going up, at least as we are seeing it here. Well, that is something that we are doing. And I think that has been prolific because we were able to translate a lot of content thanks to clap Aryan in the offer us because they pay the translators, which we select among journalists, bilingual journalists, because also, it's important to have the content translated into Spanish indeed, case by somebody that not just know, both languages, but also they got this artistry or the artisanship, of writing this piece is not. And we hope that we will keep doing this more independently, together, or in a broader effort, like, amplify West. And it's something that they can talk about a lot more to come collaborators.

Now, before I go to John, let me ask you the basic question, what is the most challenging terms of the translation process?

Well, I think the most challenging is, in fact to keep that spirit of the text alive, because you can know the English language and translate it. But if you don't know the meaning of the words, the feeling of that those those a thesis, you will lose a lot. And of course, you need to know the basic components of any good journalist piece, and reflect that in the text now, but I believe that the more important thing is to have this cultural value cultural competence, preserve No, and not ignore order to make this like an ascetic, generic piece that now is another language, which is okay. But for a reader, that is a learner to have an article or a new feature, or an integral, whatever that really communicates more than the literal word, what the feeling, tend to take, of course, to interact a lot with the actual people with individuals in our community, with the activists, and their wording, how they talk is important for us to this is complicated in sometimes sometimes when you need to translate something, but it's very important to preserve it. And also as a lead, of course, we want a lot of more Spanish content to go out there. But also, we want to keep ourselves significant because if everybody had a lot of Spanish content for these displays for our just Spanish outlet, work, we will of course, we will include we are including content coming from English outlets translating into Spanish, but also I believe everyone has their very important position to, to play in this ecosystem. And we understand that key we collaborate, we enrich each other that will be at the end beneficial, of course to all so that the infant our community, does, we want to serve the need for more content, at least in the community here is huge. We cannot fulfill that even if we have a museum, you know, upon the people that are willing to serve more. And that is the at the end. The aim of

I'll go back to you in a second now, Jon, with this collaboration. How do you foresee this moving forward? What's the future looks

like? Yeah, thanks, Odie. And who's thank you so much for describing it so well. You know, I think where we're headed is is trying to use translation as a starting point to really encourage deeper understanding and connection with Spanish speaking communities. And that's why having, hey, Zeus and Nisa with their, with their just terrific cultural competency and knowledge of their community. Part of this is really important. Because as his You said so articulately, it's not enough just to translate, you have to be doing reporting for and with these communities, it's not enough just to take some coverage and slap it into Spanish and say, I'm done. You know, that does a disservice to everyone involved. So as we move forward, we're looking at ways to regularize this, we're looking at ways to how do we build a financial model that makes this way more accessible, but you know, still ensures that everyone's getting paid fairly for their work, we had just to go back in history a little bit from what his you said, you know, when we started partnering with Spanish language media, as part of amplify on our collaborations lens on Lightfoot, various other ones, a lot of times, the Spanish language outlets would just add doing the translation as part of their jobs. And that didn't seem equitable to me that it's just okay, you have to do your job in the second job. And so as we, as we built beyond that first couple were like, is this going to work, we wanted to build in a translation infrastructure where that's paid work that is recognized as paid work. And so we're able to partner with several local journalist translators who could, who could be the bridge between these organizations. And as you said, they were really pleased to get some content published in English. And one thing we heard from the Spanish language media was often the decision makers in this community may not necessarily be fluent in Spanish. And so that coverage wasn't being accessed by decision makers, and it was therefore marginalizing the Spanish language, community. So we were really excited to be able to provide benefits in both directions, where many features in those directions, and not just a road, you know, let's push the content around. And so as we go forward, you know, we're we are seeking additional funding. And the idea being that we can build a model where everyone pays it a little bit, it's subsidized a little bit. And we can keep this going on an ongoing basis. Because for this to really work, it has to be something that is ongoing, and is part of an organic strategy. You know, one of the outlets that he's just mentioned was injustice watch. And one of the things I really love about injustice watch is the way they're really committed to reaching bipoc communities in Chicago, including Spanish language communities. And so they use translation and these partnerships as a way to start building their organic audience development strategy with Spanish language communities not to replace any of these traditional Spanish, terrific Spanish language outlets, but just to be more a part of those communities and serve them and be with them and not just to be assuming that everything they produce in English will be relevant to another audience, because you have to really center the community when we're

Talking about funding, I have a very important question from the audience participation. Yes, right off the bat, yay. Talk more about how the translations were financed. And then for how much remember, this model can be replicated,

then perfect it Yeah.

So INN unsecured credit file funding initially from the McCormick Foundation, and then additional support from unnamed funder and then a little bit more from field foundation. So all terrific funders to get this started. And we negotiated preset rates with translators in this community where we committed to pay them a certain amount every month, and I'm sorry, I don't have the exact nickels and dimes in my head. But we pre purchased a block of words every month and guaranteed that we would pay them in exchange for sort of pre paying a guaranteed amount, we got a little bit reduced rate over what they would have just charged if someone came in off the street and said, Hey, translate this for me. And that model worked pretty well. I think you know, where this could go in a funding sense is where you where you all work together to just outright hire someone in this role. And they have a certain capacity where they can just take up take a certain amount of words. And we can use that together. And I think this is going to talk about some of the ways for organization has been kind of optimizing how you leverage what technology can do, but without ever forgetting the need for human expertise. I think that gives a lot of potential.

Just jump in. Just explaining the structure might be helpful for those who want to redo this what worked was we had a part timer on our staff, Claudia Hernandez, who is an amazing journalist and a photojournalist, and also dual Mexican American citizen. So, you know, it's really important to have that the translators, you know, be have Spanish as their first language or whatever language they're turning into. So she was the one managing the two or three translators who were doing the first pass. And then Claudia was also doing an edit on it. So it's, you know, just like we do in English is really important to have a second or third set of eyes on the story and not just take take it for granted that the translator is doing it correctly. It also helps you know, Spanish is different from each country, you know, Claudia is Mexican, we have a large Mexican population here. So that was very helpful to have, you know, the right kind of idioms and phrases in in Mexican Spanish. And, you know, it really worked that was about a dozen us rooms in Chicago, they would send us I think they had, you know, a certain number of stories, they were allowed to send us each month, and they would send them to Claudia in a Google Doc for him, she would pass them on to a translator, and it would be about 24 to 48 hour turnaround for that story. And then that would make it back after she does her edits on the Spanish to the outlet. And then would also be up on the INS website for any other news outlet to republish for free. So there was, you know, the benefit of, you know, if I'm justice watch or whatever, I'm getting my story published in Spanish, but also other people can now use that story for free putting it back in the ecosystem. So I think, you know, if you're thinking about money in Juni, to fund the translators, but also thinking about that manager position, who can edit this manage and oversee and it is a lot of like, work managing a dozen partners. So thinking that through, you know, someone's very organized. And yeah, I think you know, now borderless is, is we launched a new website earlier this year with support from sunlight foundation money, and we started incorporating an AI plugin. To do a first pass, it's called week lots, W E, G, l o t, it's a European product. And now that's really cut the cost and time of our translations. Because we do every story, everything on our website is English, Spanish. And Claudia goes through and like, again, corrects the AI because we don't want to exactly as he's saying, never want to just trust the robot, you don't even want to trust one person translating, you know, you got to have this second eyes on it and correcting things. So there's a lot of different ways to do it. But um, having that editor I think, is really important. It

Now that editor, at the Center, we've done this over the last four years, and editing processes really laborious, but it's very interesting, what you all said about the translator is also a journalist himself or herself how important that is.

I think it's very important because

we want to be

faithful to the spirit of the of the materials as reported because they are the end is the reason another reason another thing is a war of ideas reporter know that you know, the whatever they wanted to do and and we need to have that truth and if you're a journalist you know the mechanics you know, the format's you know, the you have the same vision of everything, the same perspective which is useful you sometimes they do something that could be also studied a lot more than it is but the narrative in journalism is not the same as the narrative in other words, I know but also I believe, because at the end it thinking about thinking about Sophie the future if we have more and more bilingual students in Spanish and English, but also in any other languages, too, we have more and more bilingual competent cultural, competent, talented students as we are seeing coming from from colleges and convene incorporated into the the current outlets that will enrich a lot, the perspective and maybe at some point, of course, we have the resources, we may not need to rely necessarily in in freelance translators, because our own newsrooms will be proficient. And we will be able to experiment more with these kinds of integrals because we do Got the manpower to control them to really have translations that are what we want them to be at the end, because translations are expensive. And these resources maybe will be better use and you know if who is not an isolated see that works in your periphery and then coming out with something that is integrate the process and help other areas of process.

Translation is expensive, you know, money. It's getting more interesting here. So, Lisa, I have a question for you. When we talk about the future of translation, we think of translation units, like hundreds of words. How do you see this like an automated translation I beyond Google Translate or Skype translate? What are the impact? What were the impacts of that if we're not using anymore? Journalists, translators, and then we resort technology based translator?

I mean, I think there's different ways to look at it. So like borderless magazine, we cover immigration and immigrant communities in the Chicagoland area. Last year, 99% of our stories were reported or photographed by people from immigrant communities. So immigrants are the children of immigrants. So the people already have these language skills, they already reporting it. And we have a very small team small but mighty, but our small team, we speak seven different languages. And, you know, it's, it's, that is the future, I think, you know, what hazes is saying, you know, this is doesn't have to be that something that you lop on at the end, and you have an all English newsroom who can't do anything until the very end. You know, when we do stories, the story we published this morning, half the interviews, you know, were done by a reporter in Spanish. And it was a very, you know, back and forth process like this, the reporter gave us an edit and we did the edits in English, and then ultimately back checking in Spanish going back and used to double checking things, quote, reviews in Spanish, and then publishing in English and Spanish. And so it is not a kind of, like straight line, I think is the future. I think the future is much more integrated much more what borderless is looking like where you have those resources in your newsroom already, you're using them. And then an afterthought. So you know, right now, I mentioned, you know, we're using this AI tool, mostly to help lighten the load of our translators and make things a little quicker and cheaper for us, because we are so small, but it's also allowing us you know, this year, we're going to add two more languages to our websites. And that will that will be really, you know, possible because we're leaning on some of the technology. And, you know, we're talking a lot about Spanish. And one of my things, like my takeaways for you all is really don't just think about Spanish because there's especially you know, there's so many different communities that are not being served today, because of all the news outlets that are shutting down you Porter listed. It's a research piece last year, and we found half of the news outlets serving ethnic or immigrant communities in Chicago have shut down in the last decade, and even more have done so since then. So think about Arabic think about Filipino think about version or languages of refugees coming here. And you know, those people are part of our audiences too. So we need to, you know, like us leveraging the technology and our, you know, network of reporters and community. It's just all part of like, how do we serve the

live here? Question from

the audience again? What's their focus on certain story topics for translation? Or just anything? Before you answer that? Let's give a shout out to Martin's doing an awesome job interpreting.

Yeah, so it a different times. It was different. I mean, we can see this project before there was a pandemic. Then we got walloped in the face with the pandemic. And so that caused us to change gears a little bit. We did do spend a lot of time trying to make sure that information related to COVID-19 was available. You know, one of the things we've heard from our Spanish media partners was that the city wasn't doing a great job of making all of their COVID-19 information available in Spanish, and so we prioritize getting information related to the pandemic available in Spanish. We also, you know, I think if there was another focus beyond that, it was just making sure that they were stories that were for and with the Spanish language community, and not just, here's our big story of the day, let's translate it, you know, it was trying to make sure that it was going to be relevant and competent for the audience we're trying to reach. In your case, um,

I mean, we publish every story in English and Spanish, and I'm just going to push back. Because I do think some people approach translations as, okay, we need to translate the COVID numbers or that were to get a vaccine and that's it, like it's resources, or it's like, only stories that have a Hispanic person will translate into Spanish. And I think that's really, I mean, that's the starting point. But I think it's short sighted, you know, like, I lived in Seoul for a number of years, I was, you know, an immigrant there. And I didn't want to just learn about, you know, people like me, I wanted to learn about art shows, I wanted to learn about, you know, what was going on in the government, I wanted to learn, you know, just normal people stuff. So I think, you know, serving serving immigrant or non English speaking communities, like you should think beyond just the resource list and beyond just like the story that features someone from that community and think, you know, it's rich communities, who are looking for all kinds of different stories.

When we talk about translation, first thing that comes to mind, it's Spanish to English, or Korean or whatever language, you know, ethnic, or in language, right. What about the other way around, you know, to English, have you come across with that? That question is probably an answered in mitigating this information. You mentioned earlier about, you know, when you transmit government information that could actually help the community, what can you say about it is

important, because, for example, in our case that we are in Spanish, we want also our content to be in English, because we will reach another audience, as mentioned, we will get additional influence, because, of course, if the government officials or the businesses or wherever he doesn't read Spanish, or know anything about what I'm saying. And because our content tends to be very community oriented, we take cover a lot of the fights of God communities during independent the writer all the issues are FFP. And the solutions are they are offering to themselves to overcome what they are fighting against. Our our stories are important. And will be more if the other constituents can greet them. And then for us, English translations are are important. We don't do that too often, mostly because resources may try maybe the AI in the reverse mode, from English to English president has promised Spanish to English. But we do, we did in the past several translation projects. The larger one that we have was a book that we publish a one year a year ago, and most of them was reported in Spanish of this is the book the whole thing. Because this book covers what the Latino community did, during 2020. To fight against COVID, and also another issues too, but we have the benefit of having support from the film foundation to do the translations. But also some of those stories are also a con from the lines of litefoot project. Also, some of them also from other collaborations solving for kava that has also a Spanish tradition of going components, two key components in Spanien. The firmware parts are dependent on citrus, to try to do it more as mentioned it not just as the last part of the chain, but to do it more in a more sustainable way. Because that will be at the end easier. The quality will be better. And we'll have another benefits now. As a media outlet. We don't want to be transformed necessarily into a bilingual publication. But we don't know about the future then we want to add more in order to be able to serve better our Community

Foundation's love metrics, right? How do you measure your success?

Is everybody looking at me? So we measured a few things, we measured the number of stories translated, he measured the research, like the pickup, because we did spend a fair amount of time, Claudia, in particular, reaching out to other publishers encouraging them to republish it. And then we also monitor for qualitative feedback just about people who maybe learn something from the story that they otherwise wouldn't have.

Yeah, those pickups meaning on your site?

No pickups on across the internet, you know, because as his is pointed out, once the story was translated, it was open, open to the world to your use. So we're looking at where that story travel, using, like a tracker pixel, but also using Google search. And just like looking for where that story traveled to see who else was using that story.

I was doing some research and consulting. And I found one of our stories to English, but the citation includes the URL from bottom up, because of the Republic. And and that is good, because you know, that is also everything is intermingled already, which is part of the of the aim of this collaboration. So in

In other words, not only La Raza can actually accomplish it, but other publicly Yeah,

I mean, we we work with university on, on some of the stories, we wanted to work with Telemundo, but couldn't ever make that work. And then there are other Spanish language media beyond border Levine, you know, Cicero and and others that I don't even know, in this community that we wanted to make the story, the content available as widely as possible.

Nissa, in your case? Oh, five minutes.

Um, I think, you know, obviously, as a news outlet, internally, we're looking at, you know, pageviews, and that kind of thing. We're also this year, we're trying something new and taking a page from the political organizing book. And we have two field canvassers going out to Fort primarily Hispanic neighborhoods in Chicago, going out every weekend talking to folks, and really trying to get an understanding of their information needs and where borderless can go next, because we have this amazing audience online already, just so organically. And you know, we want to think about next steps and who who's being left out still, because, you know, as he, as you said, you know, the the Spanish language media, news outlets are shrinking in Chicago, even as the Latino population is growing. So we need we all need to do better as an ecosystem. And I think, you know, one of the joys of this collaboration was just seeing our fellow news outlets who don't do Spanish translations realize, aha, like, this is something we need to do, and we should figure it out. And I think that kind of like, you know, we can't do it alone. As Hayes's rightly pointed out, like we can't do it alone. So it's going to take an ecosystem approach. And hopefully, more and more news outlets will be, you know, trying to serve people who don't speak English.

I love that. I'm a big proponent of that. Can you imagine the hits of losses or unionization, you combine all of that, that's millions of viewers? Let's open it to the audience.

Hi everybody, this is great. I wonder if you guys might speak to the full lifecycle of a story. So something that I think some publishers run into if they don't have the luxury of having a staff with seven different languages spoken on that staff? What's the translation happens? How do you work together to make sure that feedback or shares or community reaction online, that's back in the language that's not the native language of for the primary language of that organization is handled in an appropriate way? I just wonder if that if those collaborations extend into those moments where it's like social spaces, where you're wanting to have a good dialogue with the community that you've just served by translating translate your story,

I think, I mean, if I could jump in, but I think that was one of my other points, which we've already said. But translation alone is not enough. You know, even people think are like, they forget about translating photo captions or social media posts or whatever. Like, once you open this can of worms, like you need to actually be there. And, you know, we are like I said, a very small we have five people on staff only three full time. And that, you know, we're making it work through a mix of contractors and part time and freelancers. And you know, I think it is possible to do this. On a very small budget. I do think you need to lean on people who do speak this language. Those languages, especially for that like the feedback part or like, you know, people calling us like asking questions and needing help. If you don't speak those languages, like you can't do anything it ends. So you need to go beyond just translation. It's really thinking about bringing those people on, even if they're just freelancers or whatever. And they're out there. There's so many people out there. There is no shortage of people who, who just speak other languages and are extremely talented. So it might involve training them or seeking them out. But I do think it's, it's completely possible to do it on a shoestring budget, because we've been doing it

Thanks for addressing that.

Yes, please. I think we have one more or two more questions. Let's go to you first.

About foundation funding. I'm not sure how much. But were you commissioned a number of stories for a certain amount? Or was it more general operating?

It was, it was project funding. So it was not general operating support. But it was pretty open ended? You know, we basically, we showed them the rates and saw the amount and we said, you know, we have to pay borderless and Claudia. And then you know, we had some other things we wanted to try in the realm of social media engagement to get to your point, Chelsea, but the Facebook then they just said, Okay, that sounds good. And you know, it, there wasn't some, you know, a deep line item report where it's like, how many words did you produce? And what was the rate, there was a big picture, but it was very much project funding.

And in the case of this book, for example, we have a brand from the Pew Foundation to do it. And the grand project included money for translations, but because we didn't know at the moment we send the grant application, how many wars historical Have you read what how many stories we will do at the end? We need to have some sort of flexibility and they understood 10. And yeah, transaction is expensive, then you need to be handling very carefully to plan because you're not can go Go program.

At the Center, we started with one story a week, one story for Spanish, one story for Korean that was funded by Dodge Foundation and Democracy Fund and and we've got one now, NJ Civic Info Consortium, so we're increasing the number of stories, hopefully, up to five

per week.

One last question.

Thanks Oni. I have a question about what impact looks like for this kind of really collaborative approach, given that there are different audiences that now have access to some of the segmentation. So you're talking about decision makers versus like people directly affected, and if you've got this translation, then you've got those different audiences seeing

[SPANISH INTERPRETER SPEAKING] worked on it. But we in our case is important because we want to serve our bilingual or some English only. Hispanics, we will want to serve them a little bit to also to reach or to have increased reach among government officials, people that don't read in Spanish, but if they read our stories, that will be more significant for us and as our relevance the community and and because if we want to, you know, to take steps into the future, then maybe it's not something that is going to have a big, big large impact right now. But it's something that we are building tomorrow. And, and that is our case,

Parting shots.

I will just say, to riff on that question, one of my big hopes and dreams for that this collaboration and all the collaborations that I've worked on in Chicago, is to help build the cross outlet awareness for because Chicago is just this wonderful petri dish of startup news organizations, many nonprofit but not all. And I really love to see those the community that supports those organizations become more aware of each other so that we strengthen all the boats, you know, the tide rises for everyone.

Yeah, I will say that I see translation and these issues of language access access to information as a racial justice issue, and you can see, you know, the damage that when people don't have access to information and their language, you know, look at what happened at Facebook and all these different countries where they weren't, you know, translating things and monitoring things, is really important that you know, people in our communities have have access to information and to not only information but seeing themselves in the news and presented respectfully. And you know, one of the first reasons we started doing all these translations was because we did all these interviews in other languages. And it's really bad if you do an interview with reporter and another language, and then you can't read the story. That is that is like terrible to terrible feeling. So I think, you know, just having that kind of, you know, representation and access is, is an impact in itself. And we need to be talking more about how this is really critical to our goal, our shared goal of serving our communities.

Thank you and thank you all.