In Clark County, 15.6 percent of residents speak a language other than English at home, and 7.3 percent speak Spanish there, according to 2023 U.S. Census Bureau data. About 61,200 Clark County residents, or 12.6 percent of the population, are Hispanic or Latino, census data shows. So it seemed like a good idea to hire a translator to make a version of that story about translators in Spanish.
By 1 p.m. on the day we published, we had 77 readers viewing the Spanish version of the story online. (That doesn’t count those reading the print and ePaper editions.) One reader wrote to me: “Fascinating. Thanks for doing this!” The English version of the story online had almost 970 readers by that time. The story was gaining traction, reaching about 6,000 people on Facebook by 4 p.m.
It was a bit of a chore for The Columbian’s Web Editor Amy Libby to post the article on our website, because our system had difficulty with the diacritics, including tilde (virgulilla in Spanish) — the squiggly line above the letter ñ that creates a phonetic sound of “-ny.” Our print designer, Romana Wood, also finagled the page to run the Spanish version alongside the English.
“It just goes to show,” Wood said while holding up the paper, looking at the Spanish story, “when people read something and they have no idea what it says, it’s like that for the kids.”
This isn’t the only way to read our stories in another language. There’s also a feature in many web browsers that will automatically translate any of our stories. On Google Chrome, you can set the browser to 144 languages, according to my count.
So why did we publish our own version in Spanish? Mainly to bring awareness to the issue and make it more accessible.
Our websites also have an option to have a story read aloud by an artificial intelligence bot. Above each story is a button that reads “Listen to this article” with a blue circle and a triangle.
I asked our human resources director, Sam Hall, if we’ve ever hired a translator for a story. She’s worked at The Columbian for 20 years, and she couldn’t recall an instance when we had. She said in the past, we hired sign-language interpreters when we had a group of deaf workers at The Columbian for internal training.
Two of my fiancée’s grandparents are deaf, and one of them worked as a delivery driver at The Columbian about 20 years ago. I’ve been picking up more sign language as I interact with them, and it feels good to be able to communicate across a language barrier in whatever way.
