How Do You Say ‘The New York Times’ in Spanish?

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One of the most frequently asked questions we get at The New York Times en Español is how we choose the articles that we translate. This has been a constant query — both from readers and from people at The Times — since the project began in February 2016. It’s a polite discussion editors of the Español site hold daily — one that is inextricably linked to a more heated, less polite discussion: How do we translate it?

From Los Angeles to Buenos Aires and from the Galápagos to Barcelona, the Spanish our readers speak varies widely. Latin Americans alone have more than 15 different words for popcorn, at least 13 terms for drinking straws and 10 ways of naming a humble ladybug — as many as there are for soccer cleats. Soccer, in fact, may or may not carry an accent mark (fútbol or futbol) depending on where you live. There are different names for the same fruits, cuts of meat and the universal heartache. The exact word (however colloquial) that Venezuelans use to describe their anger is, in Peru, an expression of a prurient desire. And of course, all readers are adamant that their way of using the language is the right one.

The team of editors at The Times en Español are all native speakers of Spanish (from Mexico, Argentina and Venezuela), and some of us have studied or worked in Peru, Spain, Paraguay and the United States.

Every week, we publish 40 to 50 translations on top of opinion pieces and features originally produced in Spanish. With every piece that crosses over from English to Spanish, we are also translating a journalistic tradition of accuracy, quality and objectivity to new readers.

Being the Spanish voice of The Times meant we had to create a new standard for the use of the language. We quickly realized that translating to a neutral Spanish — a language absolutely no one speaks — was not an option. We had to find ways to reflect the richness and diversity of our native tongue and still be entirely readable.

Most of the articles we decide to publish in Spanish (if they are not breaking news) are sent to a translation agency that has worked for us since the beginning of the project. They have tailored their work to our style. English words that end in -ing, for example, tend not to sound natural if literally translated to Spanish as gerunds, and they can cause sentences to be confusing or unnecessarily intricate. As a general rule, once an article has been translated, it goes through two layers of editing. In an ideal situation, the two Spanish editors must have different language backgrounds.

One recurring question in our Mexico City office is: “Would readers in Peru (or Argentina or Mexico or Venezuela) understand this?”

Many times, solving our differences and answering these questions — there is a private Slack channel for that: #nerdómetro — means we have to do some research or go to academic books or ask specialized institutions. Two of our most trusted sources are the Real Academia Española, the most recognized governing institution for the language, or the newer Fundéu, which is particularly interested in raising the standard for good Spanish in the news media. Our guru (and sometimes sherpa) in style and language is Paulina Chavira, our editor specializing in rules and usage.

Paulina’s authority reaches far: In time for the men’s World Cup last summer, she lobbied the Mexican soccer team to change its official jerseys to carry accent marks, thus solving a historical omission that amounted to a spelling mistake.

Sometimes, we have created specific rules or even words to better convey The Times’s spirit or coverage or treatment of an issue. Such as when we decided to use elle, a gender-neutral adaptation to the Spanish gendered pronouns of él and ella to better translate a Lens article about gender-fluid/nonbinary identities. Or when we chose to allow for flexibility on whether to use an accent mark on words like cartel or futbol, depending on what the usage is in the country or region we are writing about. (Which explains why articles about Pablo Escobar refer to his organization as “el Cartel de Medellín” and those about El Chapo use “el Cártel de Sinaloa”).

Some of these discussions (and the resulting agreements) have become sources for content, either as a regular section of our newsletter El Times (you might want to subscribe here) or on our site, where we share with our readers some of our style guidelines and Paulina answers questions about Spanish rules and language updates.

There are no foolproof algorithms or dictionaries or artificial intelligence tools to solve our day-to-day translation efforts. That means we rely on listening to each other — and to our readers: acknowledging and valuing our different accents and backgrounds and the plurality of the language that we share.

The bridge we’ve built to reach our audience (the bridge we cross when we choose what to translate and how to better translate it) rests on four key pillars: We do not underestimate the interests or the curiosity of our readers; we offer a global journalism to better understand local realities; we protect the richness of language and its nuances; and we trust our own instincts as readers.

Eliezer Budasoff is the editorial director of NYT en Español. He is from Argentina.

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