The Huffington Post announced that it is launching a French language edition of the leading Internet newspaper in partnership with French newspaper Le Monde and calling it Le Huffington Post. The new publication will be headed by Anne Sinclair, wife of the former International Monetary Fund (IMF) Chairman Dominique Strauss Kahn. This announcement comes shortly after the Wall Street Journal launched a German language edition.
The Journal has not said how much of the Wall Street Journal Deutschland will be exclusive and how much will be translated stories from the paper’s main edition. But it has a dedicated team based in Frankfurt working alongside reporters and editors from sister company Dow Jones.
It is unclear how much of an impact Ms. Sinclair will have on the editorial content of the new French publication or how much influence she will have in setting its journalistic policies. Some critics were quick to point out that Ms. Sinclair has not been an active journalist for years and that perhaps she was chosen for name recognition, while the DSK scandal in New York is still fresh on people’s minds. But it is clear that the WSJ, the Huffington Post and other major newspapers see the need to take their content into new markets, either by translating it or by creating unique content specifically targeted to the local readership. These newspapers are spending millions to set up operations in other countries which includes hiring high profile figures (like Ms. Sinclair) to head up operations, hiring local journalists, renting large offices, buying expensive equipment, setting up hosting servers. Smaller publications can’t afford these types of expenses and moreover will be facing new competition from the heavyweights.
The good news for the small and medium size publishers is that they can use inexpensive translation tools and machine translation to test the waters and see if a market exists for their content. Depending on the results of the tests, newspapers can decide whether it is worthwhile to take it to the next level.
Case in point: The GTS translation plugin allows any publisher that uses WordPress to publish in another language, using post-edited machine translation for high language quality. Another WordPress plugin which allows multilingual publishing is WPML. It is estimated that about 15% of the world’s websites are powered by WordPress. Which means that multilingual publishing is a feasible option for many newspapers and that we can expect to see other newspapers follow the WSJ and the Huffington Post in their overseas travels.
Related posts:
Comments