Reporting & Publishing in English & Spanish
What does it take to produce articles, radio programs & books in multiple languages?
This week, I published a story with Civil Eats about how immigrant poultry processing workers experience on-site healthcare at Tyson Foods. The story will be published in Spanish by the Mexican magazine Gatopardo. What kind of work is required to publish in English and Spanish? The process I describe below, from start to finish, took a little over a year to complete.
Apply for funding: Most publications don’t have a budget for translation. Although I am fluent in Spanish and work as a translator, I translate from Spanish into my native language (English). Translators generally charge $0.12- 0.20 cents/ per word. For example, translating a 5,000-word article at 0.13 cents per word costs $650. In 2021, I applied for and received funding from the Pulitzer Center.
Hire a Spanish-speaking photographer: Out of respect for the people I’m interviewing, I try, whenever possible, to hire a Spanish-speaking photographer. For Civil Eats, I worked with Mexican photographer Jacky Muniello.
Record interviews: Most of my reporting is conducted in Spanish. I record interviews with my iPhone unless I am working on a radio/audio project, in which case I use an H4NPro.
Transcribe interviews: I use the transcription service Trint to transcribe Spanish interviews. It is the best service I’ve found for Spanish and costs me $700/year for unlimited use. Because I have hundreds of hours of interviews per year in Spanish, I don’t have the time to transcribe them myself or the funds to pay a human to transcribe them. I then review the transcripts, highlight the sentences I want to quote, and listen to the audio of those parts to make corrections. AI transcription technology is far from perfect, so I must review the transcriptions.
Translate all quotes: I only translate the passages I will use for an article because I don’t have time to translate entire transcripts.
Prepare a folder of fact-check materials: I include all audio files of interviews, all transcripts, photos, screenshots of text messages, and copies of documents like medical files. I make an annotated version of the article that includes the time stamps for all quotes so that the fact-checker can listen to the exact quote in the audio file.
Hire a Spanish-speaking fact-checker. Once I submit the article to the publication, I request a fact-checker who speaks Spanish because almost all my interviews are in Spanish. If the fact-checker has any questions, they communicate with me to resolve them.
Legal review: for the work I’m doing investigating the meatpacking and poultry industry, publications send my work to a legal team to review it before publication.
Translation: I prepare all the original Spanish quotes to send to the Spanish translator so that she will have their exact quotes. I enjoy discussing how to translate complex parts of the text with the translator. Spanish to English translators & fact-checkers who I’ve worked with & do stellar work: Maria Itaka & Julie Schwietert Collazo.
Publication: Many US publications don’t publish in Spanish. Therefore, I often have to find a publication in Spanish to partner with me. In the case of Civil Eats, I reached out to Gatopardo, a Mexican magazine that publishes incredible investigative work and photography.
Audio/radio: I used my H4NPro to record an audio version of the article for Civil Eats. The article was 15 pages and took me about two hours to record. I was interrupted by a man weed-eating outside my apartment, an ambulance, and an upstairs roommate doing laundry.
It is important to me to publish in Spanish and to make my work accessible to poultry workers.
If you can support this kind of work, subscribe to my newsletter. I appreciate everyone who reads and shares my work. When I started writing full-time a decade ago, I never imagined that I would last more than three months.
If you want more, you can follow me on Twitter (currently imploding) & Instagram. I’m not sure I have the energy to join Mastadon or Tiktok.
Abrazos fuertes,
Alice
Excellent! Your passion for helping our Immigrants is amazing. Alice, you are sincerely a blessing!