marjon - 11 February 2009 10:18 AM

As a city hall reporter, I take a lot of governmental jargon and translating it for Peorians to digest. The first thing I do when I cover a new city is read. I read so much I could cry text. I read the general plan, the city code, the budget and then I go to department heads and review, just to make sure I understand.

Hey guys, Good Topic for Discussion Question #2: (stealing from Marjon, above):

Give us an example or two of either stuff you have translated into strong real-people language, or an example or two of something you are having trouble translating.... Why is translating garble-bong so tough? What dangers does it present? How do you do it well? Tricks? Examples?

Deadline: Sunday Feb 15. DON"T FORGET THE KALEIDOSCOPE DISCUSSION, with examples!

Don’t forget to activate the NOTIFY ME WHEN SOMEONE POSTS IN THIS THREAD box, below.

because i’m also the diversity reporter (and ostensibly have always been, regardless of the paper for which i’m working), i’ve had to do a lot of lgbt issues. memorably, i covered the drag ball at my college—it was the largest event next to graduation. it was so large, i had a fellow reporter help me with it. we realized that we couldn’t just throw words like “natural drag king” and “lgbtq” without confusing the straightness out of our midwest audience. so we decided to pull out a glossary in a box in order to help our readers out. i thought it was pretty well done and avoided clunky definitions in-story.

lcbanes - 13 February 2009 03:21 PM

. so we decided to pull out a glossary in a box in order to help our readers out. i thought it was pretty well done and avoided clunky definitions in-story.

I love the idea of glossaries… ‘specially in a case like this, or any other cultural thing, where there is specialized jargon. GOOD TOOL! But also, if you’re doing, say government or something, and the jargon is running rampant, maybe making YOUR OWN glossary of all those windbag terms just to keep as a reference, so you can challenege yourself to not use windbagisms in a story, but to use something real, like, real people, real words, instead of institutional bs.... keep those puppies comin’

I can’t think of a story I had to do where there was a lot of jargon in it that needed to be translated. There isn’t a whole lot of confusing or hard-to-translate terms in public safety.

J-Coe - 18 February 2009 02:12 PM

There isn’t a whole lot of confusing or hard-to-translate terms in public safety.

JC—wow! lucky you! We would love to see example ... seems to me that cop-talk (investigations reports, arrests, etc.) are crawling with language specific to that discipline. Maybe in Ariz they have a clear-speak policy???? again, nice story on the Special K guy ...Anthony? Karen? you guys coming across anything that needs translating into real-people talk?

Well, it’s really just little things, like instead of saying “conducted a felony stop” or “contacted,” I’ll say “talked to” or “stopped” or “pulled over” or whatever. There really aren’t any big, confusing public safety terms, at least that I’ve encountered, that are difficult to explain. If I come across any, I’ll post them.

I haven’t had much trouble with city jargon yet, but I think my time reporting on the science beat in college helped out a lot with that.
Almost every story I covered, I talked to someone for maybe 30 minutes, then tried to sum up what they just told me in about 2-3 sentences. I worked it out with them until I had something I could explain to readers without dumbing it down too much.

The most trouble I had was in covering the utility company’s legal fight with 13 cities and private land owners. More than two weeks of hearings in December that I missed because I wasn’t on the beat yet added to my lack of understanding. But after hours of interviews with all the parties involved, I finally got it and I was able to sit through three days of hearings and know what was going on!

In its simplest form: The cities didn’t want a power line to scar their view of the mountains.

I had to draw out the line for myself, and change the language from utility company language to English. TS-5, TS-9, Alt. 3, Alt. 3N, blah blah blah.

Before each hearing, I’d get the agenda and highlight the utility jargon and write over it the proper English form. Lucky for me, all parties involved were very patient with me as I called them back and checked my facts over again. I felt it was important to do that for such a big story, especially since I had to repurpose the story for three different community sections and ROP. I didn’t want anything to get lost in translation.

marjon - 16 March 2009 05:24 PM

In its simplest form: The cities didn’t want a power line to scar their view of the mountains.

I had to draw out the line for myself, and change the language from utility company language to English. TS-5, TS-9, Alt. 3, Alt. 3N, blah blah blah.
.

this is a fabulous description of what we’re talking about here.... BLAH BLAH BLAH ! question becomes, how do you translate the blah blah blah? MR does great job above (don’t mess up my view of the mountains, blah blah blah) .... cool.